Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Wilde Bühne: An Exploration Into The Revolutionary Potential Of Art, Antonia Salathe

Senior Projects Spring 2023

You will often hear it said that art does not belong in the space of the political.

Politics is practical, and yet we cry over legislative losses and march in the streets when we are seared by flames of indignation. We paint murals over boarded-up windows, film history as it happens, and go to the club after a long day at work. We sketch lovingly the faces of those lost senselessly, we sing to the rooftops when all hope seems lost, and we speak poems like pounding hammers when no one is willing to listen. We scratch verses into foam …

On Curation: A Hermeneutical Approach, Elisabeth Yumin Kröber

MA Theses

Starting point of this paper is the philosophical field of hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics was established to account for different conditions of understanding
and how they shape our interpretative processes. As different times constitute
different conditions, the goal of the discipline essentially is to bridge the temporal
gap between the creation of a work and its perception at a given point in time.
Whereas traditionally, understanding was a matter of analyzing the historical
tradition of author/artist and reader/viewer, nowadays, the perception and
interpretation of art is shaped by another instance, the curator. Under the premise
that selection and arrangement, i.e. curating, cannot …

Spirituality And Abstract Art, Hao Zheng

MA Theses

Through a close analysis of abstract art and metaphysics (ontological and psychical), the paper examines how metaphysics might be related to abstract art, as well as the early emergence of abstract art in diverse cultures around the world, and its development from the 19th to the 20th century in the modern art world. The paper conducts an examination of some modern abstract art pioneers, as perceived by general public, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Agnes Pilton, who
experimented with the art form in the 19th and 20th centuries, and their intentions based on metaphysics: spirituality and mythology are included in …

The Project Of Hope: Middle Eastern Feminism In Controversy, Alla Myzelev

Art History

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Contemporary Art Across Political Divides, Alla Myzelev, Tijen Tunali

Art History

This book addresses the need for a more sustained knowledge and multidisciplinary understanding of what art and artists can do to create democratic spaces, forms and languages in a world devastated by multiple crises. The book’s main inquiry is whether contemporary art can or cannot cultivate an “agonistic” way of togetherness and facilitate difficult conversations through a multitude of contradictions, diverging views and conflicting visions. With Marxist, feminist and ecologist perspectives, the contributors analyze contemporary art worlds across the globe in relation to memory, conflict, trauma, transitional justice, social engagement, social resistance and activism.

In this volume artists, activists, art …

From Marginal To Modern Culture: A Case Study On Hélio Oiticica And His Aesthetic Contributions To Brazilian National Identity, Jamesia R. Griffin

Senior Projects Spring 2023

In this essay, I follow the historical trajectory of Helio Oiticica, a visual artist from Brazil’s 1960s modern art scene, to explore how attitudes towards his artistic interventions during Brazil's most transformative era affected the social view of “the artist” as a political character. I argue that the historical effectiveness of interventionist art relies on the shifting localized and national social and political identities of the artist. In order to help my reader understand how artists gain historical relevance through interventionist arts, I emphasize contextual and relational modes of analysis to better capture the complex and complicated interactions between historical …

21st Century Exhibition Rhetorics, Sabina Eastman

Pitzer Senior Theses

The desire to create a language through which reading artwork can be attainable to an inclusive audience is a relatively modern aspiration. Painting and sculpture have been longstanding ideals of elite aesthetic ambition, which are held in containers of cultural and social tradition, removed from the ebb and flow of mundane existence. These containers were initially created to encapsulate historic moments, providing insight into a creator and their ideas which were inaccessible to the audience of that era. Since the early 19th century, the conversation in art theory has turned toward the meaning, purpose, and justification for the design and …

Artistic Representation And Self Esteem, Brianna Davis

Honors College Theses

Dependent upon the constructs of the perception of self and the viewpoint of others, humans base the value of their self esteem on outer perspectives rather than internal ones. For this thesis in particular, the outer perspective to be examined is representation in the field of the arts. This thesis project explores the process of self esteem, artistic representation in the arts, how one affects the other, a history of the correlation between the two, and ways to inform and educate the masses with the tools necessary to advance representation in the arts thus raising the self esteem of its …

Kitchen Rag: Spaces Of Food, Memory And Conviviality In Modern And Contemporary Art, Emma Deutsch

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Feminization Of Mexico City In The Late Twentieth Century: Polvo De Gallina Negra, Pola Weiss, And Lourdes Grobet, Alexis N. Corral

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis centers on select artworks in public intervention, photography and video as an exploration of female's relationship to Mexico City's social landscape and urban space during the late 1970s into the early 1990s. In three case studies, I explore historical urban planning, gender relations, and the effects of modernization.

Art, Work: Subsumption, Posthumanism And Artistic Responses To Surveillance Capitalism, Anna Mirzayan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation brings together multiple discourses, including surveillance studies, autonomist Marxism and posthumanism, as the groundwork for a novel discussion of contemporary visual art— in particular surveillance art, that is, art that addresses and problematizes the omnipresent digital monitoring now part of everyday life. Because in this dissertation contemporary art is defined as necessarily political, aesthetic (in the Kantian sense) and responsive to conditions of current history and society, I use Marxist theory to identify the particular features of contemporary capitalism that this art is responding to. I first characterize post-Fordist capitalism, focusing on the increasing reliance on extracting network …

Harmony Of Difference: Theorizing Rashid Johnson's New Universalism In The Grids Of Antoine's Organ, Mark Fredricks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My reading of Antoine’s Organ, a sculptural installation created by the artist Rashid Johnson in 2016, explores the artwork as a richly textured response to the limited universalism of modernism. I argue that Antoine’s Organ is a multimodal expression which crafts a harmony of difference using the aesthetic language and forms of both visual art and music. The term “harmony of difference” is taken from and inspired by a composition of the same name by jazz musician Kamasi Washington, and is used within to describe Rashid Johnson’s counterpoint strategy to work differences with and against each other, mobilizing the grid’s …

Wings Of Change: A Visual And Cultural Analysis Of Mujer Angel, Taylor Carrico

The Compass

In the middle of the twentieth century, Mexico sought to reestablish its national identity. Following on the heels of the Mexican Revolution, an extended period of social upheaval and regional conflicts that transformed the country, artists and visionaries alike struggled to determine how the reborn nation would distinguish itself. While many movements in this period looked towards the future and sought utopia, there was one which concentrated instead on exploring the precolonial past and distilling the essence of “Mexicanity'' from there. This movement was known as the Mexicanidad in Spanish; or, in the precolonial Nahuatl language, the Mexicayotl. In …

The Body Articulated: Gender Violence And The Performative Turn In Mexico, Kylee Aragon

Museum Studies Theses

The Body Articulated: Gender Violence and the Performative Turn in Mexico explores the role of performance art in raising awareness for gender-based crimes. My thesis investigates the performative response to gender-based violence in contemporary art in Mexico during the 1970’s and then again in the post-NAFTA era, with the aim of examining the use of the artists body, the voices of women as substitution for the body, and the bodies of others as means of creating a greater awareness to the feminicidal epidemic. Artists like Mónica Mayer and Lorena Wolffer use their body and the voices of woman, as opposed …

Joy As Contestation: Frida Kahlo, "The Dream", Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This essay analyzes the pictorial representation of Frida Khalo’s “The Dream,” to unfold the nature and reflect upon the notions of joy and innocence as forms of a subtle contestation. How are they represented? By examining the visible and the non-visible as conditions of critical possibility for joy, innocence and contestation, we can reevaluate the interrelation between the notions of life and death in the Mexican culture, and Frida’s personal history. I argue that innocent joy is a quality that articulates a subtle contestation or clandestine activity of freedom

Hema Upadhyay: Disrupting The Hegemony Of The Slums, A Negative Social Spiral., Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This essay presents the theoretical framework that informs my reflections on the hegemony of the slums’ poverty and human conditions, and whether art can disrupt the hegemony and also become a conduit to question our Being, hence Dasein, as per Martin Heidegger. The following pages investigate the work of Hema Upadhyay, in India, and specially, her inspiring protest work offering insights on India’s overpopulation in urban areas such as, Dharavi. She depicts slums becoming a continuum circle of human misery and wealth, politically called a negative social spiral. I argue that the slums, not only destroy the harmony and promise …

The Unpresentable And The Aesthetics Of The Sublime In The Art Of Alfredo Jaar, Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

I argue that in Postmodernism, as per Lyotard’s writings, art “…caters to the impossibility for an attainable wholeness or sense of presence” (1131). And yet, this state of ‘unattainable wholeness’, does not deny to postmodern art the role of the experience that can carry emancipatory power. Yet, it may not be a ‘unity of experience’ as per Habermas, but still constitute a space of experience and presentations of the unpresentable that is predicated by difference. I propose that Lyotard’s theory of the presentation of the unpresentable, which sees presentation of artworks oriented towards formless art language games and communication, are …

In-Between Spaces: Atmospheres, Movement And New Narratives For The City, Paul Alexander Stoicheff

Masters Theses

We often think of architecture as distinct buildings, yet as we move through the city we continuously pass through a built environment that is a collage of buildings. These spaces between buildings are underestimated as influences on our experience of everyday life in the city. Considering architecture as linked existential experiences through spaces rather than confined to individual buildings is more in line with our experience of the city as a series of interconnected spaces and places. Rather than describing a single, static architecture through words, how can we express this linked experience of spaces dynamically through narratives? Can writing …

“A Sick Eagle” And “I Am”: Hymns To Sculpture By Keats And Rilke, Ya-Feng Wu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

At the turn of eighteenth and nineteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sculpture came to serve as an emblem of humanity’s response to the challenges of the times. John Keats and Rainer Maria Rilke, felt compelled at their encounters with ancient Greek sculpture in the museum to reflect upon their vocation in an age disrupted by political upheaval and rampant commercialization respectively. Keats’s sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817), registers an intimation of his latent grandeur in the form of a “sick eagle,” confronting “a shadow of a magnitude.” To overcome this experience, Keats made attempts at epic on the …

How Can Biomimicry Inform A Sustainable, Ethical Future In Architecture And Design?, Chloe Hanf

University Honors Theses

This publication traces effects of systems theory and assemblage thinking on American architecture and design since the 1960's in relation to contemporary ecological thought and biological discoveries. Building upon these observations, the author concludes that biomimicry belongs at the forefront of contemporary theory and praxis in architecture and design.