Contemporary Art Commons^™

41.82379°N, 71.38497°W, Xiaotong Cai

Masters Theses

I, Xiaotong Cai, have known an abandoned bridge was lifted and stuck at 64-degree from 1976. I have walked and bent down towards it for over 60 times, each paralleling a journal entry. The visits and 27,351 words (up until May 5th) are the living proof: observation, encounters, correspondence, collectively and personally. It’s been nine months since it emerged in flux. Two flesh. A moving outsider and a still bridge. How can an Unused giant activate a human body? Who is the attractor and intervener?

Here, my solution is to conduct a series of small gestures. I say, interpreting without …

Surface Gestures: Contemporary Sculpture, Material, And The Possibilities Of Finish, June Kitahara

Theses and Dissertations

Through the work of Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Patty Chang, and Jes Fan, alongside performance, cinema, cultural figures, and twentieth-century sculpture, the thesis argues that the surface of contemporary works reveals the inextricability of aesthetics from technologies of gendered racialization, sexuality, and sensation.

Apocalypse As Utopia: The Exorcisms And Memorials Of Las Yeguas Del Apocalipsis And Queer Liberation In Chile, 1987-1997, Nicolas Poblete

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a comprehensive history of the queer activist-art collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1987-1997) and their performance-based resistance to the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990), cultural homophobia, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Through art actions blending ritual, protest, and queer poetics, the collective redefined public space and national identity, envisioning a utopian queer apocalypse rooted in memory.

Flamboyant Abundance: Performing Queer Maximalism, 1960–1990, Jack Owen Crawford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation theorizes “queer maximalism” as an aesthetic of unmitigated flamboyance and voracious drag that appears in a constellation of performance-based artistic practices in the postwar United States. Queer maximalism brings together a historically grounded group of performers primarily based in New York City who have been variously described as theatrical, baroque, and Ridiculous and repositions them within an art-historical frame. Identifying drag and pastiche as central to queer maximalism, I show how artists salvage, assemble, and re-signify pop-cultural imagery, inflecting it with camp in order to fashion intimate community and openly flout societal norms of gender, race, and sexuality. …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

New Music For A New World: Robert Ashley’S Television Operas, Nicole Kaack

Theses and Dissertations

Robert Ashley defined the majority of his works as “television operas”—spoken narrative music for television broadcast. Analyzing Ashley’s works through their cross-disciplinarity, this thesis addresses the development of Ashley’s chosen medium; assesses his use of visual, linguistic, and musical structures; and interprets their basis in American cultural identity.

Sana Sana: Unlearning Generational Expectation Through Performance, Jalen R. Ash

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work is an exploration of identity as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) body traversing through the generational histories of my family and the struggle of cultural loss to our assimilation of Whiteness. Through the multi-faceted medium of performance, my work uses physical and mental spaces of self and technology to understand how the body functions as a screen. Our bodies house projections of generational expectations that have trickled down from the past into the present. These projections shape our own unique identities along with the personal experiences we gather as we move through the various spaces of …

An Epic (Fail): Humor, Play, And Politics In Chilean Contemporary Art From The Early 1980s, Paula Solimano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis foregrounds the methodology of humor and play employed by Chilean artists during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I argue that, through comic relief, collaborative practice, and melodrama, artists from different fields worked together in Santiago to reimagine the relationship between intellectuals and the public sphere and criticize the Pinochet regime.

Art And Environmental Racism In The United States: Through The Works Of Latoya Ruby Frazier, Pope.L, And Mel Chin, Veronika Anna Molnár

Theses and Dissertations

Through the works of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Pope.L, and Mel Chin, this thesis examines the ways in which artists address environmental racism in the United States. Focusing on three locations with majority Black populations and significant toxic hazards, this paper demonstrates artists’ agency to alleviate crises caused by environmental injustice.

Pepón Osorio And Merián Soto: Multidisciplinary Collaborations, From 1985 To 1995, Zuna Maza

Theses and Dissertations

This paper assesses Pepón Osorio and Merián Soto’s collaborative multidisciplinary works created from 1985 to 1995. Underdiscussed in their individual scholarships, these joint works are reexamined through their collaborative approach, multidisciplinary framework, and their thematic explorations of the nuances of culturally specific subject matter.

Art After Dark: Economies Of Performance, New York City 1978–1988, Meredith Mowder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Art After Dark: Economies of Performance, New York City 1978-1988 examines the interwoven social and economic histories of New York City and performance in the late 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation traces the growth and visibility of performance art, moving from the recession of the 1970s and early years of public funding for the arts, to the downtown nightclub scene of the 1980s, the history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and artistic experiments with television in the 1980s.Looking closely at the economic conditions under which performance occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dissertation …

Accomplices In Art: The Expansion Of Authorship In The 1970s And '80s, Sydney Stutterheim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation introduces the “accomplice,” a new figure in histories of performance and appropriation art in the United States and Western Europe during the 1970s and '80s that allows us to completely revise the relations of property, agency, and authorship that have been assumed in these fields. The accomplice is defined here as a type of agent who shares in the responsibility of artworks that are often centered on tactics of legal or ethical disobedience while the recognition of her or his authorial position in the artistic production is deliberately obscured, diminished, or overlooked. Focusing on the work …

Imperial Myths, Abject Devotion: Mapping Affect In New Mexican Visual Culture And Discourse, N. C. Lira-Pérez

American Studies ETDs

New Mexican visual art and culture, as molded by state-sanctioned endeavors, is often casted in order to conceal the tension, conflict, and violence of settler colonialism and imperialism. Widely known myths of empire, such as the Tricultural myth, create a visualizing enterprise through which settler colonial logics transit and create political material reality. This thesis explores the following questions: How do New Mexican Hispanos and queer Chicanxs position themselves in relation to the logics of settler colonialism and empire? How are they positioned in relation to settler colonialism and empire? On the one hand, I argue that the state of …

Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work Of Charlotte Moorman, Saisha Grayson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) moved to New York City in 1957, she swiftly positioned herself at the intersection of experimental music, performance, video, and the visual arts. She interpreted works by composers like John Cage, collaborated with artists such as Nam June Paik, and founded and organized the New York Avant Garde Festival from 1963 to 1980. This dissertation argues that Moorman’s career sheds new light on what it meant to be an artist in this post-medium-specific moment and proposes that Moorman’s deterritorialization of authorship exerts pressure on traditional art histories. The generative dynamics of her collaborations …

Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. Öyvind Fahlström And Billy Klüver: The Swedish Neo-Avant-Garde In New York, Per Bäckström

Artl@s Bulletin

The Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström moved to New York in 1961, where he meet the Swedish engineer Billy Klüver, and became part of the international neo-avant-garde movement. Fahlström’s performance, New York 1966, part of Klüver’s performance series 9 Evenings, is my point of departure for an analysis of the role of migration for the neo-avant-gardes in the 1960s. As intermediaries, Fahlström and Klüver brought new ideas both to New York and Stockholm, thus challenging the established view that American art was exported to the periphery. In reality, the New York art scene grew out of ideas and experiences arriving …

Dance In The Museum, Claire Bishop

Publications and Research

This paper argues that the art world’s current fascination for dance follows on from a previous high point of interaction in the late 1960s and 1970s, and before that, a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It traces these first, second and third waves of dance in the museum at three institutions: the Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Three institutional histories are sketched, drawing out the differences between their approaches. The conclusion presents the four most pressing possibilities/problems of presenting dance in the museum: …

Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity, Claire Bishop

Publications and Research

An essay is presented on delegated performance in which nonprofessionals are hired to perform at a particular time on behalf of the artist on his or her instructions. The author stated that this social turn started since 1990s in contemporary art against the tradition of 1960s and 1970s where artists like Chris Burden, Vito Acconci and Gina Pane performed themselves. The author referred to the trend of live installation started in Europe in 1990s in which guards for exhibition were hired. The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan assembled a soccer club of foreigners to play local matches in 1991.

Lani Montreal Interview, Thi Navi Thach

Asian American Art Oral History Project

2010 interview with Filipina teacher, writer, performer Lani T. Montreal by Thi Navi Thach

Rominna Villasenor Interview, Jamelle Apolinar

Asian American Art Oral History Project

2010 interview with writer, performer, visual artist Rominna Villasenor by Jamelle Apolinar

The Art Of The Pink Nun: Evangelical Christianity And The Performance Of Capitalism, Sonia M. Hazard

Religious Studies Honors Projects

The Pink Nun is an underground feminist performance artist, chastity advocate and pious evangelical Christian. In her artwork, the Pink Nun ironically deploys the methodologies and visual vocabulary of late American consumer capitalism, such that the evangelical Christian values of chastity and sexual purity become products to be bought and sold. In this unorthodox appropriation of capitalism, the Pink Nun finds an alternative way to preach her message, engage a self-announcing secular culture, and perhaps ultimately “harvest souls.” I argue that religion here does not perform in a conventionally “religious” way; it may be manifest more subtly, entwined with and …