Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Aesthetics Of Frank Lloyd Wright’S Organic Architecture: Hegel, Japanese Art, And Modernism, Kenneth Charles Dahlin

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

THE AESTHETICS OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE: HEGEL, JAPANESE ART, AND MODERNISM

by

Kenneth C Dahlin

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2018

Under the Supervision of Professor Robert Greenstreet, PhD

The goal of this dissertation is to write the theory of organic architecture which Wright himself did not write. This is done through a comparison with GWF Hegel’s philosophy of art to help position Wright’s theory of organic architecture and clarify his architectural aesthetic. Contemporary theories of organicism do not address the aesthetic basis of organic architecture as theorized and practiced by Wright, and the focus of this dissertation …

Humor And Quiet Resistance: The Graphic Work Of Wilhelm Höpfner, Kelsey Jean Mccarey Soya

Theses and Dissertations

Humor and Quiet Resistance: The Graphic Work of Wilhelm Höpfner is an exhibition that was on display at the Emile Mathis II Art Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee November 15–December 20, 2018. The works consist of fine art prints produced Wilhelm Höpfner between 1921 and 1939 in Berlin and the smaller city of Magdeburg. The exhibition and this accompanying catalogue seek to introduce the reader to his work and to provide the cultural context for its interpretation. When discussing the artistic movements of Europe in the early twentieth century, there is a tendency to discuss them as discrete, contained …

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 good …

Women Of The Future: The Performative Personhood Of Elizabeth Robins, Djuna Barnes, And The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Michelle Feda

Theses and Dissertations

The New Woman is the term used to describe the changing social norms around women's involvement in public life during the fin-de-siècle. New Women were bold and brash, educated and independent, and, importantly young; the term encapsulated any particular woman who stepped outside of her mother's Victorian social norms. The New Woman was as much a construct of the time as it was a description. The playwright and suffragette Elizabeth Robins performs "new womanhood" on the stage, and her play Votes for Women! enacts this struggle between New Women and the older generation. Djuna Barnes started her career as a …

Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang

Theses and Dissertations

I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Bladelet Polish: A Lithic Analysis Of Spracklen ( 33 Gr 1585 ), An Upland Hopewell Campsite, Tyler R. E. Heneghan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis builds upon recent investigations at Spracklen (33GR1585), a small upland site in Greene County, Ohio. The presence of non-local cherts, bladelets, and bladelet cores indicates a Middle Woodland Ohio Hopewell occupation. Raw material sourcing, debitage analyses, and a use-wear analysis uncovered that Spracklen functioned as a logistical hunting campsite. Its people utilized bladelets for butchery and hide-working processes. This information provides new insights into Hopewellian life in the uplands and its place within Hopewell community organization.

Painting, Geography, And The Body: Charting The First Two Decades Of Mary Corse’S Art, Sarah A. Meller

Theses and Dissertations

Mary Corse has always maintained her position on the periphery, and her work has generally been excluded from art historical scholarship. This study illuminates the ways in which the first two decades of Corse’s practice were in fact in dynamic dialogue with broader impulses and concurrent trends operating at the time.

The Romance Novel Cover, Jessica D. Spears

Theses and Dissertations

Romance novel covers dating from the 1980s and 1990s reflect complex and contradictory ideas about gender, power, and sexuality. The covers overflow with stereotypes of what women are attracted to such as enormous pink roses, lush folds of silk, and hair long enough for Rapunzel. To this socially acceptable women’s imagery, the covers add two less reputable aspects: sexual imagery and, occasionally, suggestions of female submission. Since the association of romance and conventional femininity is so strong, the covers make a visual argument that submission and sexuality are things that a conventional woman wants. Readers have to deal with what …

Representing Struggle: Raquel Forner’S Social And Political Engagement In The 1930s And 1940s, Diana Flatto

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Raquel Forner’s engagement with current events in her paintings from the 1930s and 1940s. Uncovering her realist style, each chapter focuses on a thematic area of her work over these years: the female figure and representation, religious iconography, and wartime.

Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.

An Enigmatic Bodegón: Discovering A Possible Identity Of Murillo's Two Women At A Window, April Lynne Bina

Theses and Dissertations

For decades, the identity of the two women depicted in Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Two Women at a Window has been unknown. Theories range from innocent flirtatious girls, to domestic servants, to prostitutes; I argue for the latter. Little has been done by scholars to prove that the two women are in fact representations of amorous women. In this thesis, I examine a plethora of sources including early modern moralist texts, current scholarship, and contemporaneous seventeenth century visuals. I argue that these two women are representations of Spanish prostitutes, sexually charged literary characters, or both, based largely on patronage, Netherlandish connections, …

Fluid Lines: Tracing Ryakuga-Shiki In Japan And France, Selena Erdman

Theses and Dissertations

Rykuga-shiki, or ‘abbreviated picture style,’ woodblock prints were first published and circulated widely in Edo period Japan (1615-1868). The style, created and popularized by Kitao Keisai Masayoshi (1764-1824) was not only admired and studied in its own time, but these Japanese ukiyo-e prints continued to influence style in the West. The work of artists in Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and Henri-Gabriel Ibels (1867-1936) present undeniable similarities (both in style and subject matter) with the ryakuga-shiki. Rarely studied and exhibited, the ryakuga-shiki are a part of the story of japonisme in France. This exhibition presents these prints in the context …

Displaying Legitimacy: Monjas Coronadas Portraits And The New Spanish Family, Kelsey Rozema

Theses and Dissertations

Monjas coronadas (crowned nun) portraits are a uniquely New Spanish genre of painting that depicts a young woman on the eve of her profession as a cloistered nun. Situating the sitter as a Bride of Christ, she is adorned in a number of ornate and symbolic religious trappings, the most important of which is a large floral crown. The portraits are highly formulaic and feature New Spanish iconography that amplified these sitters’ elite status as nuns. Modern scholars, when discussing this genre of portraiture, focus on how the iconography of the images reflected the budding Creole culture. However, scholarship has …

Pit Features: A View From Grand Island, Michigan, Emily R. Bartz

Theses and Dissertations

Serving a multitude of functions from subterrestrial cavities of storage, basins for cooking, to vessels that securely hold pounds of rice allowing the grains to be danced upon to thresh, pit features are one of North Americas most common archaeological feature. These constructions are dug to fit a diversity of needs based on the people who manufacture them. By understanding the distinct function(s) a pit or group of pit features played at a site-level, the needs of the people who inhabited that landscape are better understood. The nature of a pit feature is to store something or process a food …

Time Does Not Heal All Wounds: Temporal Differences In Spinal Pathology Among Pre-Columbian Sites In West-Central Illinois, Abigail Peeples

Theses and Dissertations

This research sought to examine a co-occurrence of three spinal pathologies, Schmorl’s nodes, osteophytosis, and osteoarthritis, within three temporally contiguous pre-Columbian sites in west-central Illinois. Albany Mounds (200 BCE – CE 400), Kuhlman Mounds (CE 600 - 900), and Dickson Mounds (CE 900 - ~1300), acted as proxies for their respective time periods in order to determine if there were any patterns among the three spinal pathologies present. Individuals with vertebrae present were examined and joints were scored based on criteria listed for each pathology. Overall, highest frequency of individuals affected by Schmorl’s nodes, osteophytosis, and osteoarthritis were located in …

Mortuary Patterns In West-Central Tennessee: Contextualizing Historic Field Data From Nine Mississippian Period Sites, Brooke Adele Wamsley

Theses and Dissertations

Middle Mississippian is a both a cultural and temporal (1200 CE – 1400 CE) archaeological context of Midwestern North America. This cultural tradition is associated with mound building, specific art motifs, arguably stratified societies, intensive agriculture, and specific ritual/mortuary practices. Burial sites can be very valuable to archaeologists because of the purposeful interaction between the living and the deceased and reconstruct cultural elements such as social identity and group membership. While American archaeology continues to be fieldwork-focused, there are a considerable amount of cultural resources housed in museum collections that could provide data for research into pre-Columbian lifeways in North …

Working Women: Agricultural Intensification, Osteoarthritis In Females, And Subadult Health In Illinois Woodland And Mississippian Mortuary Contexts, Paige M. Dobbins

Theses and Dissertations

Temporal variation was examined in female labor associated with subsistence modifications in pre-Columbian human osteological samples from the Mississippi River valley of west-central Illinois related to weaning patterns, diet, and overall health status of subadults. This study was performed on a sample of 173 burials constituting 98 subadults and 75 adult females from temporally sequential Illinois mortuary contexts (Albany [11WT1], Kuhlman [11A163], Schroeder [11HE177], and Dickson [11F10] Mounds) that represent the transition from Middle Woodland hunter gatherers to Mississippian maize agriculturalists. This was accomplished by (1) scoring pattern and degree of dental attrition and dental caries in subadults, (2) identification …

The Role Of Dogs In Prehistoric Illinois: A Study Of Dog Paleopathology At The Range Site In The American Bottom, Allison L. Huber

Theses and Dissertations

Archaeological investigations at the Range site (11S47) in the American Bottom region of Illinois resulted in the recovery of over 3,300 domestic dog (Canis familiaris) remains. Fifty-two dog burials associated with the Late Woodland Patrick phase (A.D. 650-900) and Terminal Late Woodland Period (A.D. 900-1050) were identified in the assemblage. The well-preserved nature of these remains allowed for the examination and interpretation of pathology and trauma, providing insight into the role and treatment of dogs at the site. The data obtained from the Range assemblage indicate the most common pathologies present are antemortem tooth absence, periodontal disease, cranial trauma, rib …

Contesting Representations Of Gender And Womanhood In Mexico The Photomontages Of Lola Álvarez Bravo, 1935–1958, Alana Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993), a Mexican photographer, photojournalist, portraitist, and teacher created approximately thirty photomontages during the span of her fifty-year career. This thesis argues that Álvarez Bravo turned to photomontage during targeted periods of her career in order to contest and challenge prevailing discourses on motherhood and femininity. A close analysis of eight photomontages produced between 1935 to the last printed in 1958 make evident the manifold ways Álvarez Bravo represented gender as a contested, political, and personal concern.

Sofonisba Anguissola And Her Early Teachers, Lily Chin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the career of the Cremonese-born Italian Renaissance woman artist Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532-1625) and her training under her teachers Bernardino Campi (c. 1522-1591) and Bernardino Gatti (c. 1495-1576) during the years c. 1546-1549 (Campi) and c. 1549-1552 (Gatti).

Xu Zhen & Madein Company: The Phenomenon Of Artist-Company, Qianfan Gu

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis is about the phenomenon of "artist-company" -- commercial methodologies employed by contemporary artists are determining their artworks. Taking XuZhen as a case study, it attempts to understand the phenomenon through aspects including art autonomy and institutional theories. It argues that "artist-company" is a continuation of institutional critique.

Jack Goldstein In Los Angeles, Kirby Michelle Woo

Theses and Dissertations

This paper reexamines Jack Goldstein as one of the key but under recognized figures of what came to be known as the postmodern period in American art. Often described as bridging the gap between conceptualism and pop art, his work explores visual strategies of representation through the lens of art and mass media and how they inform our understanding of the world around us. Goldstein's interest in representation is outlined by the cultural practices and aesthetic priorities of Los Angeles (where he began making art) of the late 1960s and 1970s and by extension, Hollywood.

Women In Music: Letting A Long Story Be Long Contemplating Women’S Sonic, Musical, And Spiritual Experiences In Prehistory, Deborah J. Saidel

Theses and Dissertations

Situated within deep history, this study explores the auditory and spiritual lives of Paleolithic women. It considers their personal agency in mediating the spiritual power of sound and how doing so contributes to a multifaceted musicality. The theoretical framework involves a wide spectrum of topics, from ways of rethinking the writing of history and reckoning with time, to sound studies and the study of acoustics in ancient sites, to a critical examination through a feminist lens of normative disciplinary scholarship in anthropology and archaeology, religious studies, and musicology. I explore potential audio-visual-lithic relationships for their implications for deepening an understanding …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

Through My Window, Haiyin Liang

Theses and Dissertations

I convey my thoughts through art jewelry; making jewelry is my language of communication and commemoration. Inspired by historical Chinese art and contemporary jewelry, my practice pays attention to bring classical Chinese aesthetics of hazy poetic and ideal arrangement into the contemporary jewelry field. The attention to detail refers to the quiet contemplation and emotional experiences encouraged by each of my works. Through my research, I use metalsmithing language to communicate with non-precious materials finding my own way of expression and meditation. Meanwhile, I build environments that display jewelry off the body in order to construct a picturesque landscape. The …

Nam June Paik As A Pioneer Of Interactive Art, Byeongwon Ha

Theses and Dissertations

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) is well known as the father of video art. However, this study demonstrates the importance of his earlier interactive art (1961-63), which historically has been overshadowed by his video art. At the climax of his career in interactive art, Paik introduced his two-way art to the public at his first solo exhibition in Wuppertal, West Germany, in 1963. Interactive art itself has been a peripheral area in the history of art, and it has plural pioneers across disciplinary boundaries. Among the several origins of interactive art, Nam June Paik utilized music as a fundamental approach to …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.