Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Fighting The Illicit Antiquities "Artworld": A Critical Approach To The Heritage Laws Of Guatemala, Irene Marti Gil

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the suitability of the legal framework for the protection of cultural heritage in Guatemala, which is the country of origin for over thirty percent of the Maya objects traded in the antiquities market, and proposes strategies that improve the effectiveness of the law. To examine the heritage laws enforced by the Republic of Guatemala, I implement linguistic anthropological methods of qualitative research.

Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Conceptual Analysis on the national heritage policies of Guatemala reveal the existence of ontological problems regarding the conceptualization of heritage as a monolithic entity reflecting a State-led narrative with …

Indigenous Performances In Contemporary Indian Urban Public Theatres: Coloniality, Globalization, And The State, Mayurakshi Sen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indigenous Performances in Contemporary Indian Urban Public Theatres: Coloniality, Globalization, and the State examines the aesthetic and political dimensions of contemporary public theatres in the major Indian cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi, with a special focus on the utilization of India’s indigenous precolonial (or extra-colonial) classical, regional, and folk performance forms, elements, and repertoires in such urban practice. Through dramaturgical, ethnographic, and archival analyses, this dissertation studies significant contemporary productions from representative urban Indian theatre groups, including Nandikar, Rangakarmee, and Padatik in Kolkata; the Indian People’s Theatre Association, Mumbai, Ekjute, and Rangshila in Mumbai; and Circle Theatre Company and …

(Un)Orthodox Orient, Su Ergeneli

MA Projects

The term Orient was born from a Western-created body of knowledge, or rather discourse, with the authority of the West over the East. This paper, through historical and political analysis of the Orient, questions the reasoning and accuracy of the institutionalized Western knowledge of classical cultural archetypes of the East. Orientalism is a product of the West discovering the Orient and dominating and restructuring the Orient. Hence, it is represented by the dominating
frameworks. By taking the Orient out of the ideological discourse, this paper emphasizes Orient as an individual and evaluates the Near Eastern art market’s transformation as its …

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 …

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 …

The Artist As Surveillant: The Use Of Surveillance Technology In Contemporary Art, Claire O'Neill

MA Theses

Artists have long been called observers, voyeurs, and watchers, and with a
/="/">particular interest in human behavior and society, they frequently use unknowing
/="/">passersby as their subjects for works. Curators and scholars explored how artists put citizens under surveillance with photography and videography, which dates back to the early 1900s, years before governments deployed surveillance systems. Since the 1980s, artists have explicitly explored surveillance technology and theory to alert viewers to the rise of surveillance. Today, this genre is called artveillance, a term coined by Andrea Mubi Brighenti in 2010 to categorize art that explicitly deals with surveillance. …

Laying Out A Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions Of The Soul, Erin D. Yerby

Theses and Dissertations

Laying out a Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions of the Soul, arises out of my artistic practice, and thoughts behind my current project and MFA exhibition, Spectral Geographies.

Linking the problem of the world ‘out there’ or external space, to inner experience through painting as both medium and practice, my work expresses what I call inner geographies, spaces where intimate immensities, folding inside and outside, find expression. I think of my paintings as beginning with this gesture of laying out a between-space where the intimacies of waking dreams and visions are opened by, and grow into, actual places, …

Critical Exhibition Methods In Museums, Jaimie Davis Ms

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Art and anthropology are intimately intertwined as art is an extension of culture which falls under the purview of anthropology. Utilizing interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates both anthropology's considerations for culture and art's consideration of aesthetic creates the best possible methodology for exhibition in museums. Art museums have enough aesthetic and could benefit from the considerations an anthropology's school of thought.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

Art History

No abstract provided.

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.

Death Spaces And Distant Skies (Every Day We Say Goodbye), Renee Estee

Theses and Dissertations

Linking ideas and imagery of the Australian Outback, Hauntology and Orphism, my practice highlights myth-making and rituals surrounding mourning, celebration and commemoration. Operating as visual love letters and epitaphs, my paintings coalesce figuration and abstraction to conjure spaces where I can commune with the deceased and contend with future loss.

Challenges And Prospects For The Rock Art Of Mumba Rock-Shelter, Pastory M. Bushozi

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The Mumba rock-shelter and its surrounding landscape are places where evidences for the evolution of human cognitive behaviour and other cultural practices have been uncovered. Deep and stratified archaeological deposits recorded at Mumba have shown unique distinctive technological and behavioural traits with possible connections between Middle Stone Age (MSA), Later Stone Age (LSA), Neolithic, and Iron Age cultures. Archaeological records were found associated with symbolic-revealing objects such as ochre pigments, beads, and stone rubber stained with red ochre, which express the cognitive ability of ancestors who inhabited Mumba rock-shelter and the surrounding landscape from the MSA to the present. Ochre …

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 …

Primitivism, Performance Studies, And Modernist Time: Tracing An Alternative Genealogy Of Performance Studies Through Case Studies In Modernist Cultural Appropriation, Stephanie Vella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces a genealogy of research methodologies for documenting, transmitting, and analyzing embodied, non-textual performance practices from the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries. I uncover intersections between these methods and the conflations of race and temporality that are ubiquitously threaded through modernist cultural practices during this time in the form of primitivism. The researchers whose work I analyze all saw European modernity as fundamentally detached from physical culture, while viewing other cultures—especially those of the people most directly threatened by colonial and capitalist expansion during this time—as having access to a “lost” corporeal knowledge. I argue that primitivism is not …

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 …

“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 …