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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Joy As Contestation: Frida Kahlo, "The Dream", Silvia Márquez Pease Jul 2022

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 Jul 2022

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 Jul 2022

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 …


The Subject And Object Of Art: Lacan, Rose, And Levinas., Silvia Márquez Pease Jul 2022

The Subject And Object Of Art: Lacan, Rose, And Levinas., Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This article introduces the different approaches between the western metaphysical thought and the scholars Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, and Emmanuel Levinas – particularly the contributions to the notion of the ‘becoming’. Lacan expands on Freud’s discovery of the primacy of the unconscious (the id) and concentrates on how the unconscious is structured as a language. He argues that human subjectivity is formed by three realms: The mirror stage which initiates the child into the imaginary, the language which initiates the child into the symbolic and the realm of the real which is always veiled and out of reach.


Lastesis: Mass-Collaboration + Mass-Contaminated Language = Changing The Story, Silvia Márquez Pease Jul 2022

Lastesis: Mass-Collaboration + Mass-Contaminated Language = Changing The Story, Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

LasTesis, a Chilean performance group that choreographed a feminist dance and chant titled Un violador en tu camino (2019) (A rapist in your path) gathers women of all ages and backgropunds. Their bodies dance and chant in unison echoing the tethered notions of collaboration and contamination as thinking, as a massive contamination. This article explores how contamination affects identity and how it also enables the trace of a traumatic past while imagining different futures that are imminent and important. I argue that this knowledge and assertive action exemplified in the performance Un violador en tu camino involves a physical reclaiming …


The Beautiful Is Unveiled, Silvia Márquez Pease Jul 2022

The Beautiful Is Unveiled, Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

The beautiful is unveiled and resides in the goodness that is within human beings. Beings emanate the goodness within; thus, whoever possesses goodness is able to unveil beauty.


Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics And The Absence Of Emergency By Santiago Zabala., Silvia Márquez Pease Jul 2022

Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics And The Absence Of Emergency By Santiago Zabala., Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

Throughout history, we find ourselves searching for ways to nurture empathy and justice to cope with the political world crisis and improve our lives. The book, Why Only Art Can Save Us, written by a contemporary philosopher and author, Santiago Zabala, questions how the creation of art can shift the reasoning and existential being of humanity; and how art could be the only salvation to the political world crisis. Thus, Why Only Art Can Saves Us, is a philosophical, political, and existential reflection on the appeal and aesthetic qualities of art in the 21st century.


A Dialogue On Marta Minujin's Happening: Leyendo Las Noticias (Reading The News), Silvia Márquez Pease Jul 2022

A Dialogue On Marta Minujin's Happening: Leyendo Las Noticias (Reading The News), Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

Marta Minujín’s Leyendo las noticias is a happening that combines feminine subjectivity with the socio-political, creating a dialogue around notions of trace, the feminine, text, meaning, and impermanence. Specifically, how these notions affect the women living in an unstable and pluralistic world. It depicts a woman as a ‘participatory woman’ talking about women, in a conflicted patriarchal society. I would argue that the popular Marta Minujín’s Leyendo las noticias, represents a ‘slippage,’ for women (Cixoux 1976) amid a repressive culture, and a historical context of a Dirty War, violence, and fear. Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Jane Bennett, and …


Belkis Ayón: Fear, Confusion, Trance, Dignity, And The Sublime., Silvia Márquez Pease Jun 2022

Belkis Ayón: Fear, Confusion, Trance, Dignity, And The Sublime., Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

Belkis Ayón, a cuban artist, takes it upon herself to reveal a secret, to be a transgressor. She believes to be the alter ego of the legendary Sikán, a princess who was punished because she shared the secrets of the Abakuá knowledge that were reserved only for men. I argue that the work of Belkis Ayón caters to the possibility of attainable sublimity through paradoxes of confusion and fear; a state of unsettling discomfort and a sensing of something greater than oneself. And yet, this state of paradoxical affects, predicated by confusion, fear, and trance, result in obsolete boundaries and …


Growth Theory, Samantha Leon Mar 2020

Growth Theory, Samantha Leon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GROWTH THEORY reckons with a natural world in distress and imagines what attributes and learnings are needed for the individual to become a more beneficial part of the natural world. What does a person’s interaction with their surroundings say about them, and say about the surroundings? Violence, art, relationships, community are all examined along with the mediums through which we record our reality: speaking, writing, singing, taking photos. Despite covering a breadth of physical places and topics, a central tension that takes place between fear and curiosity colors the manuscript throughout. Poems are ordered by subject or temporal consideration, but …