Theory and Criticism Commons^™

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Windows On The World: The Aesthetics Of Difference In Neoliberal New York, Nicholas Gamso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to refine critical methods for interpreting global cities and their cultures, charting an aesthetic history of neoliberal New York — from the 1929 regional plan to the present. Surveying a range of literature, art criticism, and planning discourse, I argue that the global has served as the dominant motif of spatial production and political power during this watershed era. I trace this argument through analyses of midcentury planning’s global spatial imaginings, gentrification and imperial metaphor, transnational encounter in World literature, and the city’s contemporary waste and recourse imaginaries. While I follow the Marxist account of the New …

The Queer Child And Haut Bourgeois Domesticity : Berthe Morisot And Mary Cassatt., Jessica Cresseveur

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1970s, feminist art historians have extensively treated Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. In particular, focusing on class-bound womanhood and domesticity, Griselda Pollock, Linda Nochlin, and Anne Higonnet have provided compelling psychoanalytic, Marxist, and semiotic analyses, seemingly exhausting all potentials for any further historical exploration of these artists. Yet, to date, investigations into the significance of the queer (deviations from normative sociocultural codes of gender identity, sexuality, and reproduction) in the works of Cassatt and Morisot have not been conducted. In this dissertation, queer theory complements the existing scholarship that has focused on the significance of women as mothers …

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 …

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, …

Old Masterpieces, New Mistress-Pieces: Cindy Sherman's Reinterpretations Of Renaissance Portraits Of Women, Caitlyn D. Marianacci

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines a selection of eight photographs in the History Portraits series by American photographer, Cindy Sherman, produced from 1989 to 1990. The photographs are based on Renaissance paintings of biblical and secular women painted by old master artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Raphael. Sherman focused on the female types of Biblical mother and femme fatale, as well as wives and models. These types are defined in their relation to men and are depicted by men. In Sherman’s reinterpretations of their portraits, she retells the stories of these women in ways that reaffirm their independence …

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.

The Misconception Of Knowing, The Invention Of Time; Curiosities & Introspections Of Vernacular Photography, Patricia D. Drummond

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Misconception of Knowing, the Invention of Time; Curiosities & Introspections of Vernacular Photography is a body of work that combines photography, artist books, and alternative processes in a series of pieces that explore the synergy between the act of creating vernacular or common photography, the photograph in its many forms, and the interaction with the photographic image at all the stages of its existence. It also exists in conjunction with this written monograph, which supports and gives insight into the work. Through the use of poems, sketchbook musings, the history of photography, critical theory and social norms within photography, …

Encounters With The American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, And The Search For The Authentic Plains In The Nineteenth Century, Jacob L. Vines

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the …

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, …

Ken Jacobs, Alchemist, Ara C. Osterweil

Criticism

Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 312; 48 photographs. $99.00 cloth, $39.95 paper, 26.99 E-book.

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …

Constructions Of Black Identity In The Work Of Glenn Ligon And Kara Walker, Shadé R. Ayorinde

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

In this thesis I reference artworks and installations by Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, as well as contemporary mass media images, to offer a reading of various constructions of black identity in the 1990s and into the 21^st century. I specifically note the continuation of social biases against black bodies, which in large part stems from historical conditions of 19^th century America and the lingering legacy of slavery. I also address how the absence or implied absence of the black male body, as referenced in works by both Ligon and Walker, relates to contemporary social conditions in which …

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, By Tevor Schoonmaker, Kristine Stiles, And Greg Tate. Nasher Museum Of Art, Duke University: Durham, 2013 (Book Review), Vittorio Colaizzi

Art Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph] The exhibition for which this book is the catalogue opened at the Nasher Museum at Duke University before travelling to Brooklyn, Miami, and Evanston, Illinois. The show and book feature Wangechi Mutu's (b. 1972) signature collages, in which she places imagery from fashion, porn, mechanics, and "ethnography" alongside drawn and painted elements in order to deconstruct colonialist fantasies of the black female body as a site of exotic sexuality. By juxtaposing accepted signs for nature versus technology (tall grass and motorcycle parts, for example) and performing in her videos the ritualized actions of eating, cleaning, and destruction (most …

Garry Winogrand: The Art Of Street Photography, Micayla Beuley

Honors Projects

This exhibition proposal, designed for the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery located in the Fine Arts Center at Bowling Green State University, is designed to enhance gallery patrons’ understanding of and appreciation for street photography through a biographical analysis of the works of Garry Winogrand. In addition to presenting 30 photographs by this esteemed photographer, patrons are invited to actively participate in the creation of street photographs and provides a unique opportunity to display them alongside that of a professional in a gallery setting. This exhibition proposal includes a curator’s statement, formal exhibition catalog essay, list of works proposed, detailed floor …

Science Fictional Transcendentalism In The Work Of Robert Smithson, Eric Saxon

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

In studies of American artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973), scholars often set the artist’s early abstract expressionist and Christian iconographical paintings apart from the rest of his body of work, characterizing this early phase as a youthful encounter with the enduring legacy of abstract expressionism in the late 1950s to early 1960s as well as a temporary preoccupation with ritualized Catholic imagery. This thesis argues for the inclusion of this early phase into Smithson’s career as a foundational period in which he established the set of problems that artistically engaged him throughout his life: issues of temporality, materiality, and universal entropy. …

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

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

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …

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 …

A Model House And A House's Model: Reexamining Frank Lloyd Wright's House On The Mesa Project, Robert Wojitowicz

Art Faculty Publications

Examines Frank Lloyd Wright's House on the Mesa project, which, despite its familiarity to most historians of 20th-century architecture, has never been thoroughly studied within the general context of Wright's expansive oeuvre and the specific circumstances of the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 'Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.' Numerous drawings for the project survive in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, although only photographic evidence survives of the original model. Scattered references to the project appear in Wright's writings, most notably his correspondence with wealthy Denver businessman George Cranmer, whose family served as a kind of …

The Photograph And Superrealism, Christopher Stokes

Masters Theses

In 1968 an exhibition entitled "Realism Now" was held at Vassar College under the direction of Linda Nochlin, a noted art historian and professor at the school. The exhibition sought to present a cross-view of recent American painting in the realistic mode. Included in the catalog were twenty-five artists including Jack Beal, Robert Bechtle, Richard Estes, Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, Malcom Morely and Philip Pearlstein, as well as many other artists who, at the time, were relatively unknown. The exhibition generated a great deal of attention, not only because of its recognition of contemporary representational painting as an influential movement, …

Building Inscriptions From The Aspect Of Art, Dana Dodge Corrough

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

This study will comprise a very limited portion of the general field of building inscriptions, the artistic aspect. This will be done by a presentation of the means and make up of inscription, the critical study of many examples, and the formulation of rules for study and design of inscriptions.

An Evaluation Of The Twentieth Century British And American Criticism Of Sir Walter Scott's Major Narrative Poems, Roseanna Burke

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Critical Estimate Of Alliance Between The Art Theory And The Art Practice Of Willa Cather, Betty Bohannon Forsyth

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.