Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Intertextuality And Iconography In Sergei Iukhimov's Illustrations For The Lord Of The Rings: Five Case Studies, Joel Merriner

Journal of Tolkien Research

Intertextuality and Iconography in Sergei Iukhimov’s Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings: Five Case Studies

Abstract

J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked in a letter to his publisher that his friends had been so impressed by Pauline Baynes’ illustrations for Farmer Giles of Ham that they labelled his text a “commentary on the drawings”. This apparently light-hearted anecdote conceals an interesting truth: the relationship between text and image can be problematic and the reading of an illustration depends largely on the culturally acquired discursive precedents which an individual viewer brings to the act of looking. This situation may ...

Futurism In Fashion: What Does That Mean?, Jonathan Orozco

Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

In fashion, the term ‘futuristic’ is often used to describe avant-garde clothing designs. It could refer to several things, such as the clothing’s method of production, the materials used, or the garment’s design. Futurism can even refer to the 20^th century Italian art movement, and indeed, this movement addressed the problem of designing fashion for the 20^th century. We would learn much by examining Futurist fashions in order to understand its legacy in relation to contemporary fashion designers viewed as futuristic today. This paper will review this legacy by looking at five specific examples—Italian Futurists ...

Deconstructing The Image Of Woman: Video Portraiture And Women’S Performance For The Camera 1972-1980, Olivia Gauthier

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

This thesis examines key examples of video portraiture, a subgenre of 1970s video art in the United States. Through the examples three aesthetic categories are defined: mirroring, masquerade, and disrupting the male gaze. Video portrait works are framed by goals of the Women’s Liberation Movement and Second Wave Feminism.

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Expanding Experimentalism: Art And Popular Music At The Kitchen In New York City, 1971-1985, Sarah A. Cooper

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

This paper explores artists' engagement with popular music at the interdisciplinary alternative space, the Kitchen, from 1971 to 1985. It seeks a critical language to challenge institutional frameworks to account for the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between parallel and hybrid popular music and avant-garde performance practices.

Capitalism As Readymade: 5.5 Case Studies, Nathan S. Rayman

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Rayman makes an argument to repurpose capitalist systems as readymade artworks to shift the existing flow of capital from speculator to art producer.

The Case Of New Institutionalism: Maria Lind At The Kunstverein München, 2002–2004., Olga Tykhonova

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

The thesis focuses on a particular moment in the history of Kunstverein München - the directorship and curatorial practice of Maria Lind from 2002 to 2004, referred to as exemplary of the New Institutionalism. I analyze Lind’s directorship through the lens of the director-curator concept and institution as an “agonistic space.”

Pubic Hair Untamed: Viewership, Body Hair, And Primitivism In Modigliani's Female Nudes, Mary Thompson

Summer Research

Pubic Hair Untamed looks at the series of female nudes painted by early twentieth-century avant-garde artist Amedeo Modigliani, focusing primarily on Female Nude from 1916. Modigliani’s nudes are unique in that they depict women with pubic (and armpit) hair, which is a detail omitted almost entirely from women’s bodies throughout the canon of art history. Within the canon, pubic hair has been acceptable on the bodies of nude men but otherwise only seen on women’s bodies in erotic or pornographic art, or on the bodies of women of color. Therefore, in the context of Modigliani’s nudes ...

Masks: A New Face For The Theatre, Alexi Michael Siegel

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

This study seeks to reimagine and reinvigorate modern theatre’s relationship with mask work through text-based historical research and practice-based artistic research. It focuses on three ancient mask traditions: pre- and early Hellenistic Greek theatre, Japanese Noh theatre, and Nigerian Egungun masquerades. Research on these mask traditions and recent masked productions informed the development and staging of a masked performance of Charles Mee’s Life is a Dream. The production featured sections for each of the ancient masking styles and a final section that explored masks in a contemporary theatrical style. As a whole, this creative project pulls masks out ...

Community, Preservation, And Street Art: A Proposal For San Francisco’S Mission District, Marissa Nadeau

Master's Projects and Capstones

The Latinx community is an integral part of San Francisco’s rich history. From Mexican missions in the late 1700s to an influx of immigrants from various Latin countries starting in the early 1900s, the Mission District (‘the Mission’) of San Francisco has served as a hub for this mix of residents, fondly called “Raza,” emphasizing the people of a community rather than the country they have come from. Wars and issues dealt in their homelands were close to the hearts of the entirety of the Latinx population of the Mission, and their voices and opinions were heard through a ...

Institutions, Audience And Classification As Art: Considerations Of The Obscene In The 1980s, Susan M. Ryan

Senior Theses

In the realm of contemporary art, social concerns and political debate can often impact the public response to art. Determining the cultural value of these works is not an easy task. It is built from a combination of institutional validation and audience response which work together to classify art works as ‘Art,’ and determine the degree to which they impact the art world and society at large. By investigating the specific cases of Robert Mapplethorpe and Jo Spence, the author will analyze how these groups have previously interacted, and argue for a balance between these groups in the classification of ...

Sensing The City: Legibility In The Context Of Mediated Spatial Terrains, Sharon Wohl

Architecture Publications

Smartphones, with their “pervasive presence” in contact with our bodies, have come to act as sensory prosthetics that mediate our experience of the city. They activate new possibilities of navigating the urban, such that we can find exactly what we want, rather than what has been placed before us. This article argues that smartphone technologies produce a more fluid engagement with urban space: where space is not so much “given” as “enacted.” In this context, notions of “legibility” take on new algorithmic and virtual forms. Thus, according to Hamilton and colleagues, where “the legible city waited to be read, the ...

Construction Of Reality: Symbolic And Social Practice Of Michael Kurzwelly’S Słubfurt And Nowa Amerika, Olga Kostyrko

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is concerned with the analysis of two long-term community-based socially engaged art projects of German artist Michal Kurzwelly: “Słubfurt” (1999-2018) and “Nowa Amerika” (2010-2018). The research methodology for the analysis is drawn from the fields of art theory and criticism, and sociology. More specifically, in order to evaluate the social impact of long-term social art practices on the local community I borrow the criteria from the sociological discourse of bottom-up community development, while simultaneously, combining it with the insights from art criticism to discuss aesthetic dimensions of the work. I am arguing that Michael Kurzwelly’s projects are ...

Face To Face, Carl Beam And Andy Warhol, Keira B. Koch

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Keira Koch ’19 examines representations of indigenous cultures in prints and photographs by American artist Andy Warhol and First Nations artist Carl Beam. In this comparative study, Koch considers the topic of appropriation and re-appropriation of Native imagery. Warhol, as a non-Indigenous artist, is using this imagery to highlight the dominant narrative of the American West. Beam, however, incorporates photographs of Native subjects and traditional narratives by re-appropriating those images to tell a distinctly Native narrative. This exhibition invites discussion about the role of contemporary indigenous artists and how indigenous identities are expressed in contemporary art. This exhibition intersects with ...

1981: One Or Several Aesthetics?, Jacob Norris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Gilles Deleuze’s monograph on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation (1981), proposes a theory of aesthetic experience that prioritizes the material depths of sensation over stable, identifiable forms. Deleuze’s key references in The Logic of Sensation to playwright Antonin Artaud arouse the suspicion that Artaud’s schizophrenic experience of language, wherein words are reduced to phonetic ramblings, illuminates how Deleuze interprets this chaos of sensation in Bacon’s art. My work therefore calls back to The Logic of Sense (1969) and the first section of his book on Masochism (1967) to explore the waves of consistency between Deleuze ...

Returning The Radiant Gaze: Visual Art And Embodiment In A World Of Subjects, Beth Carruthers

The Goose

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises ...

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the ...

The Larger Conversation: Contemplation And Place By Tim Lilburn, Emory Shaw

The Goose

Review of Tim Lilburn's The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place.

A Documentary-Material Approach For Performance, Marc Kosciejew

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article begins a conceptual discussion about the relationship between documentation, performance, and materiality. It argues that a documentary approach helps show the roles played by documents and practices with them in performance’s materialization and constitution. It presents the start of a documentary approach for analyzing performance by discussing some ways in which documentation helps provide a material basis for performance beyond its enactment whilst simultaneously materializing and constituting it in and for other diverse contexts.

Enacting The Glastonbury Pilgrimage Through Communitas And Aural/Visual Culture, Kathryn R. Barush

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

The sacred sites of Glastonbury in Somerset, England have long been places of pilgrimage, connected to the legend of the journey of Joseph of Arimathea to the British Isles, and have fired the imagination from the Middle Ages to today - inspiring the Arthurian legends, folk-stories and song, and visual representations. In response to the question ‘What is Pilgrimage,’ this essay seeks to explore the conjunction of artistic representations and geographic journeys to and among the ancient topography and mysterious structures of Glastonbury, with a particular focus on how sacred travel, and especially an experience of communitas, can be engendered through ...