Artmaking, Orderliness, and Organisational Procedure; Sense-making Adjacent to Art Commissioning in the Public Realm

This thesis examines Artmaking, Orderliness & Organisational Procedures; Sense-making Adjacent to Art Commissioning Processes in the Public Realm. It employs an ethnomethodological approach to this through the analysis of a case study, an art project I was engaged in, entitled Mulhuddart Satellite, which was commissioned by Draíocht Arts Centre and took place between 2017 and 2019. My research focus was on the methods through which I conduct sociological research through artmaking and the multi-assemblage sociological construction of the commission I undertook. In doing do I analysis how galleries and art organisation create orderliness in their adjustment to a sense-making that includes the participants of art commissions. And in addition, how participants make sense of their encounters with art commissions and arts organisations, how they ‘create orderliness’ in their adjustment to the inclusion of this new encounter in their sense-making (Garfinkel 1967). I discuss how this local decision-making occurs and indeed how it is received are dependent on the actions, sense-making, decision-making and creation of orderliness by actors throughout multiple assemblages that make up the commission’s art world. Throughout the thesis I examine the assemblage structures of the Visual Art Ecology in Ireland, the assemblage structure of the multi-agency art projects I undertake and in turn the assemblages of local conversation intersubjective groups either part of art projects such as Mulhuddart Satellite, or part of the art infrastructures that are implicated in such a project taking place.