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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design

Biopolitical Masochism In Marina Abramović’S The Artist Is Present, Jaime Brunton Oct 2017

Biopolitical Masochism In Marina Abramović’S The Artist Is Present, Jaime Brunton

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay analyzes The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović’s heavily mediatized 2010 performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, through the lenses of Freudian and Deleuzean concepts of masochism, specifically with respect to how the masochistic tendencies of this performance may be read in the current context of biopolitics. The essay seeks answers to questions of political import that many critical analyses of Abramović’s performance, which focus on details of the performer’s personal history, have not adequately addressed. Drawing on the documentary film Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) that follows Abramović through the conceptualization and enactment …


Two-Faced And Vulnerable, Stephanie Wright May 2017

Two-Faced And Vulnerable, Stephanie Wright

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

A helpless calf suspended by a balloon. A dog attempting to focus through a set of blinders. Vultures circling over an abandoned bed. The situations in which these animals find themselves might seem, at first glance, quirky or ambiguous. But we can easily empathize with their perceivable state. Through fables, myths, religion, everyday interaction, and animal husbandry, we have made animals and emotions recognizable metaphors for humankind. These animals address broader human experience; certainly the notions of “human nature” and culture are themselves human constructs. We self-consciously work to define our existence through the separation of the concept of “society” …


Whitetail, Michael Steven Villarreal Apr 2017

Whitetail, Michael Steven Villarreal

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

When I was growing up, both my parents worked at a U-Haul from which they brought home discarded objects to the house my dad built with his own hands. This home, interior and exterior, was not designed to fit an explicit aesthetic, but all aspects of the house were in harmony and completed by the objects brought into each space. The house became a repository for abandoned domestic American culture— beds, window blinds, couches, appliances, and other products made it into the home in irregular but frequent intervals. For me, each item was an opportunity to have something new to …


Domestic Curiosities, Larry D. Buller Apr 2017

Domestic Curiosities, Larry D. Buller

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

My art at first glance suggests the domestic, ornamental nature of ceramic objects, but upon closer inspection one discovers a showy, transgressive content that is conceptualized around issues of gay sexuality, the phallus and fetish objects. I create decorative sculptures that resonate with my varied experiences as a gay man. Clay with its endless possibilities for form and surface, is the ideal medium for my subversive intentions. It allows me to blend the rich historical language of ceramic art with the low-brow, and in my case, kitsch nature of craft that one might find in second hand stores. I invite …