Contemporary Art Commons^™

Restoration, Shannon M. Slaight-Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The marks I make in clay have different characteristics, and the physical mark of one’s fingertips or visual record of the hand is personal and intimate. This visible activity is the evidence of my constant presence and control within each object. Its repetitive meditation produces a private relief from my persistent anxieties. This exploration for me is not only visual, but also physical. This is the start of my infatuation with the idea of pattern. It has its own discrete visual language and modes of communication; and through my research I am developing a method of intercommunication.

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Alone In The Crowd: Appropriated Text And Subjectivity In The Work Of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liz Linden

Faculty Publications

The practice of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is perhaps the best-known exemplar of relational aesthetics, a distinction first made by Nicholas Bourriaud and affirmed in the writings of many subsequent art critics; but the critical focus on the interactive aspect of his works has tended to rely on utopian modes of community engagement, which ignore Tiravanija's strategic deployment of relational, interactive structures to implicate the viewer, publicly, in problematic political positions. Tiravanija commonly uses appropriation in his artworks as a way of exposing viewer's biases and this paper focuses specifically on his use of appropriated text to explore divided subjectivities …

Shadows And Light. Ernie Gehr Exhibitions At The Museum Of Modern Art, Sean M. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines exhibitions and media installations of Ernie Gehr’s work at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), beginning with the pivotal 1970 show Information, which presented four films by Gehr. Wait (1968), Transparency (1969), Reverberation (1969), and History (1970) were screened alongside work by other avant-garde filmmakers and video artists in a circular viewing booth in the gallery space, in a show featuring works now considered masterpieces of conceptual art. It also considers the two site-specific video works, MoMA on Wheels (2002) and Navigation (2002), which Gehr created for the lobby space at MoMA QNS, …

Export / Import: The Promotion Of Contemporary Italian Art In The United States, 1935–1969, Raffaele Bedarida

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Export / Import examines the exportation of contemporary Italian art to the United States from 1935 to 1969 and how it refashioned Italian national identity in the process. I do not concentrate on the Italian art scene per se, or on the American reception of Italian shows. Through a transnational perspective, instead, I examine the role of art exhibitions, publications, and critical discourse aimed at American audiences. Inaugurated by the Fascist regime as a form of political propaganda, this form of cultural outreach to the United States continued after WWII as Italian museums, dealers, and critics aimed to vaunt the …

Antithetical Commentaries On X, Y And The Disruption Of Being, Eva Rocha

Theses and Dissertations

Through discursive essays and poetic narrative, Antithetical Commentaries on X, Y and the Disruption of Being explores the tenuous relationship between modes of measurement and the struggle for human relevance in the post-contemporary digital age. In the introductory essay, “Not the Feather, but the Bird”, I give an overview of the inherent problems of object-oriented ontology, and how it relates to aesthetics and social issues of our times. In the Developmental Overview, I detail how I developed my installation approach and techniques, particularly with regard to the three-way dynamic of the artist:work:viewer relationship and how it can encourage …

Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press And Fluxus, Meghan A. Dellacrosse

Theses and Dissertations

"Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press and Fluxus," positions Knowles’ Big Book (1966) as a case study of historical methodology and interdisciplinary artistic practice in the post-war period. This comprehensive analysis of Big Book, a work of art no longer extant, contextualizes its publisher, Something Else Press through Dick Higgins’ concept of “intermedia,” and important lesser-known junctures relevant to Fluxus and the group’s leader George Maciunas are illuminated. Knowles' early and lesser-known silkscreen paintings are also examined.

Pigs Feet, Jesse W. Standlea

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

My sculpture “Pigs Feet” has literal foundations upon casts of live pig’s feet. I locally sourced the pig’s feet before casting them. My sculpture makes use of a once cutting edge casting technology, alginate. Alginate molds were once the standard in dentistry. Alginate is an appealing casting material as it is refined from brown seaweeds, is both food and skin safe, it is suitable for educators, for artists and engineers alike.

Into The Fold: Deleuze, Desire, And Art, Madeline Wells

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

The purpose of this essay is to understand how I, as a visual artist, understand and utilize the fold. I will trace the many ways in which a fold functions, oscillating between my own practice and those of other contemporary artists, including Orlan and Shana Moulton. From twentieth century baroque to spiritual cleansing, theatrical staging to suggestive metonymy, the fold invites the desire to transform—for something more than what the everyday offers. Through photography, video, or sculpture, we have the ability to express an expanded, more accurate understanding of the real and the virtual, the human and the nonhuman. For …

Presence-At-Hand, Eric Lyle Schultz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

The writing that follows is intended to provide a theoretical framework for the motives behind my practice. The primary concerns addressed are the reception, transmission, and physical shape of knowledge. I will discuss a human condition that exists as a byproduct of both the legacy of representation as well as the innate biology of the brain. I will argue that as a society we are governed by the residue of an extreme logic, and that this condition places severe margins on our potential for creative solutions. I will propose that our ability to create meaning is stifled by the …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

The Logic Of Objects, David B. Eichelberger

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

The human mind assimilates information and experiences quickly and constantly, and is aided by mental systems that we rely on to function. We classify the input of our lives with extreme efficiency. Our notions about the things we encounter in the world are learned from past experiences, and these expectations help us file the data of our lives. My work is composed to create pause. I am interested in slowing down the processes of assimilation by manipulating our expectations, and extending events measured in microseconds into saturated and engaging experiences. Functional qualities, visual rhythms, and exaggerated proportions are some of …

Art Without Cultural Borders: Reflections On Qin Feng's Art, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Getting At The Rapture Of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly And Visual Experience, Leo J. O'Donovan Sj

Research Resources

Leo J. O'Donovan offers an art-critical account of the American artist Ellsworth Kelly including a comprehensive overview of his career and his attention to color and to vision. O'Donovan explores context and situation to raise questions of painterly color and atmosphere:

Citation:

Leo J. Donovan, "Getting at the Rapture of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly and Visual Experience." In: Babette Babich, ed., Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Hermeneutic Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 295—300.

The Appropriation Of Nietzschean Thought By Donald Kuspit In The Critic Is Artist: The Intentionality Of Art And The Existential Activist Painter: The Example Of Leon Golub, Frederic S. Bayersdorfer

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The prolific scholar and art critic, Donald Kuspit has frequently cited the works of Friedrich Nietzsche as a means to elucidate his art critical theories. This paper is an investigation of these citations in two of his most important works, The Critic is Artist: The Intentionality of Art, published in 1984, and The Existential Activist Painter: The Example of Leon Golub, published in 1986. In each of these two works many citations revolve around two Nietzschean concepts, the will to power and ressentiment. This paper first explores the relevance of using the philosophical work of Nietzsche as a point of …

Gadamer, Habermas And The Death Of Art, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Since the appearance of Jurgen Habermas's critical review of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode], there has been talk of the ‘Gadamer-Habermas debate' among those who are interested in the nature of historical understanding and social rationality. More recently a number of philosophers have come to see that the issues involved are of wider scope, and that the opposition of the two can be seen as emblematic of two very general styles or approaches to philosophy, which are at the centre of contemporary discussion. As one might expect, differences at fundamental levels concerning truth and understanding …

A Course Of Study In The Contemporary Novel Planned For Secondary Schools, Margaret Jane Adamson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.