Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Stasi Brainwashing In The Gdr 1957 - 1990, Jacob H. Solbrig, Jacob Hagen Solbrig

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the methods used by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), more commonly known as the Stasi, or East German secret police, for extraction of information from citizens of the German Democratic Republic for the purpose of espionage and covert operations inside East Germany, as it pertains to the deliberate brainwashing of East German citizens. As one of the most efficient intelligence agencies to ever exist, the Stasi’s main purpose was to monitor the population, gather intelligence, and collect or turn informants. They used brainwashing techniques to control the people of the GDR, keeping the populace paralyzed with fear …

Franz Roh And Visual Juxtaposition In Foto-Auge, Irini Zervas

Theses and Dissertations

This study of Foto-Auge (1929) is grounded on the approach of Franz Roh and aims to unlock the book’s meaning through an analysis of layout and visual sequence. This thesis also demonstrates how Foto-Auge proclaims photography’s ability not merely to record, but to disrupt any sense of reality in images.

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

An Investigation Of Principal Leadership Behaviors And Implementation Of Adult Learning Strategies On The Professional Learning Environment Of A K-12 School, Christina Larson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the influence of principal leadership behaviors and potential of utilizing adult learning strategies on the development of a school’s professional learning environment (PLE). The intention was also to determine if principals considered themselves prepared to develop and sustain such an environment. Research shows that principals and teachers perceive professional development needs and results differently. To obtain perspective from both groups, two separate surveys were administered. The results from this dissertation came from 262 principals and 433 teachers employed in K-12 public schools in Indiana. With the survey completed by principals, the …

Offside, Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

OFFSIDE highlights the parallels between artists and athletes, as well as the professional communities in which both operate. Through the use of sports related imagery, the artwork explores notions of ethnicity, gender, and politics. While much of the work is autobiographical, OFFSIDE is able to consider the political and personal views surrounding a young Muslim woman while lives with constant uncertainty in the United States and trying to start a career in one of the most competitive cultural fields.

Keeping Our Eyes Open: Visualizing Networks And Art History, Stephanie Porras

Artl@s Bulletin

Network visualizations have the potential to translate messy archival work into clouds of connection, powerful maps of relations that can reveal hidden agents or nodes of production. But network visualizations must also be understood as artifacts of our own visual culture, laden with the biases and limits of both past and present knowledge systems. Rather than seeing networks as uniform webs of connection, social network analysis must productively interrogate how biopolitical, cultural and social power are manifested within these visualizations, reinforcing the biases and lacunae of the archive.

Between Nodes And Edges: Possibilities And Limits Of Network Analysis In Art History, Miriam Kienle

Artl@s Bulletin

This article examines a number of prominent network analysis projects in the field of art history and explores the unique promises and problems that this increasingly significant mode of analysis presents to the discipline. By bringing together projects that conceptualize art historical networks in different ways, it demonstrates how established theories and methods of art history—such as feminist and postcolonial theory—may be productively used in conjunction with quantitative/computational approaches to art historical analysis. It argues that quantitative analysis of art and its networks can expand the qualitative approaches that have traditionally defined the field, particularly if theorizing is not positioned …

Why Munch?, Robert Jensen

Art and Visual Studies Presentations

Why Munch? was a keynote lecture for the conference "Marketing the North," sponsored by the society Munch, Markets and Modernism, in November 2017. In asking the question, the paper explores Munch's canonical status, especially vis-a-vis other Scandinavian artists of his time. In particular, the essay addresses the evolving nature of artistic professionalism at the end of the 19th century, and how Munch's personal and artistic behavior evoked a new definition of bohemianism that resonated deeply with the rise of European modernism and the post-1900 avant-gardes.

Caitlin Keogh: Feminine Feminism, Madeline Beck

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The painter Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982) is a rising star in the Contemporary Art scene in the United States. Currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Keogh is one of countless emerging painters in the trendy arts hub, but her work is already receiving international attention and critical acclaim. Her refined use of flat figuration and bold but pastel colors combined with her striking subject matter has situated Keogh distinctly in the massive contemporary art scene today. Keogh’s insertion of feminist discourse, personal identity, and appropriated imagery into her paintings begs a thorough analysis of her work. She implements …

Sukima: Vertical Views Of The Floating World (2017), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"Sukima is a Japanese word for a crack in a door, a narrow space that opens up when the panels of the sliding doors are pushed to the sides. ... You’ve seen enough to electrify your imagination and let it complete the picture. This is what happens when you look at a long and narrow ukiyo-e print in a pillar format – hashira-e. Or perhaps this partial sight only unleashes your curiosity and, craving a fuller view, you expand the narrow slit and can now enjoy broader vistas replete with details. For such cases ukiyo-e designers came up with …

Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation directly challenges the critical and commercial primacy of success attached to Hollywood films and their filmmakers, especially when one argues for or against their quality and/or importance within cinematic history. Through a process of shifting and multiplying perspectives within a broader narrative that is critical of what separates success and failure, certain films and filmmakers that were judged as failures or disappointments under impossible prerequisites of creating a successful film––commercially, aesthetically, or both–– are, instead, reconsidered as constructive counterpoints to the expectations of the Hollywood economic field of production as well as to the inevitable disappointment of the …

Posthumanist Animals In Art: France And Belgium, 1972-87, Arnaud Gerspacher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the changing role and increased importance of nonhuman animals in art of the 1970s and 80s. Focused largely on artists in France and Belgium, this period stands at the head of a wide-ranging re-conceptualization of animality that continues to unfold today. Pivotal moments in ecology (beginning with the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm), animal ethics and ethology (such as the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights proclaimed in 1978), and philosophy (specifically the biopolitical and deconstructive currents critiquing the centrality of the humanist subject), all converge as stress points along long held anthropocentric …

Políticas De Lo Estético En La Ilustración De Ciencia Ficción. El Caso De “Think Blue, Count Two” De Cordwainer Smith, Silvia Gabriela Kurlat Ares

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Desde el período del Dadá se han ido borrando los límites entre las formas artísticas y sus soportes, entre las estéticas de uso y las estéticas formales, entre los espacios altos y bajos de producción cultural, y también, entre la percepción de centros y periferias que parecen haberse astillado y reproducido a la interioridad de espacios hasta hacer de la hegemonía misma, al decir the Beasley Murray, un concepto no sólo inestable sino casi inexistente. En el caso de la ciencia ficción, esa porosidad hace a la constitución misma de una estética que opera desde la factura del naturalismo pero …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

Heavy Ink: A Documentary On The Comicbook Revolution, Renzo Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heavy Ink is a documentary short focusing on the comic anthology magazine, Heavy Metal, examining its history as both a standout comic magazine, and how it fits into the larger tradition of comic books. What started off in 1977 as a sci-fi offshoot of National Lampoon ushered in a new era of comics by bridging the gap between American and European comic sensibilities with a talent pool from all over the world.

Heavy Metal would go on to have reverberations beyond comics into music, movies, and the global entertainment landscape of today. Heavy Metal introduced the world to artists such …

Something Old, Something New: An Examination Of Visual Interpretations Of John Keats’ Isabella, Or The Pot Of Basil And Eve Of St. Agnes, And Alfred, Lord Tennyson’S Mariana And Lady Of Shalott By Pre-Raphaelite Artists, Jeannie M. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

When they came together in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelites sought to revolutionize art in England. They tried for a “truth to nature” in their aesthetic rather than the idealized pictures seen in the Royal Academy. These artists found inspiration in the poetry of John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, taking ideas found in their poems and turning them into visual stories that also addressed social issues in Victorian England. These subjects often appealed to a number of artists working in their style who took characteristics they liked from fellow artists and expanded on them, creating an ever-evolving foundation of images from …

Review Of Peruvian Featherworks: Art Of The Precolumbian Era, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Peruvian Featherworks: Art of the Precolumbian Era, edited by Heidi King.

Object Language/On Defining Sculpture, Thaddeus Barak Moore Celia-Zoellner

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Object Language

In the current era we in the Western, developed world, have almost universal free and uninhibited access to almost every piece of information in existence. Increasingly, regardless of the source, material presented to us as fact has become increasingly suspect. Together, these two things mean this endless stream of data is useless. The question is how to combat this decline, how to reverse the process of a meaningless, constant data-dump. The answer lies in the language used to communicate information. Language is the means by which we communicate complex ideas and knowledge from person to person. Language is …

The Narcissistic Gaze In Pipilotti Rist’S Video Work Mutaflor (1996), Yanlin Li

Art and Art History Summer Fellows

The project focuses on the research of the visual culture in the context of western societies from the 1970s to the 1990s and the art criticism on video art during that time. The final product of this project is an art criticism on the video artwork Mutaflor, made by Pipilotti Rist, an internationally renowned contemporary video and installation artist.

Photo Synthesis: The Expatriate Family Album As Historiography, Kamayani Sharma Ms

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I want to look at the expatriate family album as a site of history-writing.

Through an examination of three photographs from my childhood in West Asia, I try to think about the idea of historical space and time through the visual narratives available to me of my own family.

This essay will be an exploration of the way in which nostalgia for a personal past gets imbricated within the shared experience of a bygone cultural moment.

I am interested in how an encounter with visual material from private archives initiates memory work and how these traces from the past can …

Au-Delà De La Nature : The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories De Julian Charrière, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou

The Goose

In this short article - case study, I explore the question of how art may help us reflect on the new conception of nature that the Anthropocene confronts us with. I focus on the photographic series The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I,II,III (2013) by Swiss artist Julian Charrière and its reassessment of an idea of nature inherited from the romantic period. I analyse the way in which these pictures reinterpret romantic landscape painting in order to suggest an equal relation of human and nature, where human and non-human entities hold equal sway. My theoretical framework is based on Timothy Morton’s …

Art History And The Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective, Paula Barreiro López

Artl@s Bulletin

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with …

Theory For A Starving Obese, Ishai Shapira Kalter

Theses and Dissertations

Theory for a Starving Obese (2017) is both a book and an installation. During the years 2015-2017 I began writing Theory for a Starving Obese; a collection of essays and art criticism about exhibitions that took place in white cubes in New York. I was following my dissatisfaction, and hoped to delve deeper into the question “What is Contemporary Art?” At the end of a process, I sent seventeen envelopes to artists who exhibited solo shows in New York and whose works I have criticized. Each envelope consists of one digital drawing (שרבוט, pronounced Shirbut), DVD with the …

Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art distills my relationship to spirituality, digital culture, and the practices and side-effects therein, into a simplified visual language. The work manifests in the form of paintings, drawings, and light sculptures. Meditation and mindfulness training are a large part of my influence and interests. I often wonder how mindfulness practice can be mirrored in my artwork, not only in my process for creating the work, but also with what the resulting imagery does for the viewer. My intention is to provide an art form that invites one to look and experience one’s own capacity to observe, without the need …

Horizon Of Possibilities: Artists And The City In Postwar Beirut, Tatiana Mouarbes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis narrates a history of postwar cultural production framed by urban redevelopment in Beirut, Lebanon (1989-Present). Focusing on artists engagements with the city, this thesis demonstrates how artists thought through the legacies of war inflicted upon the beleaguered city of Beirut in order to construct livable futures.

Towards Telepathic Ecologies: A Presentation Of Sources For Image Production Within Information, Lewis A. Longino

Theses and Dissertations

Telepathy through information systems, Yutaka Matsuzawa,with Ilya Prigogine, Roger Caillois, Susan Howe, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Aase Berg, images and artists today form telepathic ecologies through information,Aaron Flint Jamison, Dora Budor, Sb Fuller, Andrea Crespo.

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Dinner, Daniel Reuben Baskin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dinner is an interactive exhibition which presents appropriated works of art collected and hung in a clustered salon style, as well as a fully realized recreation based on a 16th century Dutch banquet still-life, which presents guests with meats, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, breads, and wine to share and imbibe. Dining ware is provided for guests at the entrance to the exhibit, as are suggested topics of conversation, which are presented on slips of paper for guests to carry with them throughout their time in the space. Within the collection of wall-mounted works are references to ancient Greek and Roman marble …

The Possibilities Of The Video Game Exhibition, Elizabeth Legere 2762328

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an examination of video games as an artistic medium, and of their current presentation in art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as an attempt to come up with better modes of presentation for them within a museum space. Using a general understanding of video game theory and aesthetics, it might be possible to begin to look at solutions to the issues posed by current methods of presentation and interpretation, and to examine whether video games’ complicated aesthetic and artistic importance can be better highlighted by a new mode of display …

Art And The Ordinary: Literary And Visual Constructs Of The Mundane, Jenessa Kenway

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My research has shown that it is typical of the mundane to be overlooked. The mundane spools out continuously before us unheeded in the form of tasks accomplished almost without our notice. In moment of pause, we look and are overwhelmed with a level of detail and experience which, relieved of the typical haze of inattention, is practically foreign to us. As a student of literature, I’ve discovered the rich exchange between the depiction and the description of mundane objects even though the two are more often treated separately. My observations and arguments below seek to bridge that division by …