Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Esthétique Environnementale : Art, Écologie Et Politique, Alexandre Melay

The Goose

Loin de « l’idée » romantique de la nature, l’artiste Olafur Eliasson produit des « environnements environnés » à grande échelle mettant en scène les éléments naturels. L’être humain et l’expérience humaine sont au centre de ses installations, invitant le visiteur à expérimenter la spatialité et la temporalité. Eliasson utilise son art pour sensibiliser l’homme avec l’environnement et interroger sa position en tant que sujet phénoménologique. À l’activisme traditionnel, Eliasson propose une autre vision en rapport avec les mutations contemporaines et les enjeux écologiques liés au réchauffement de la planète, tout en préconisant un retour à la nature comme une …

Masks: A New Face For The Theatre, Alexi Michael Siegel

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

This study seeks to reimagine and reinvigorate modern theatre’s relationship with mask work through text-based historical research and practice-based artistic research. It focuses on three ancient mask traditions: pre- and early Hellenistic Greek theatre, Japanese Noh theatre, and Nigerian Egungun masquerades. Research on these mask traditions and recent masked productions informed the development and staging of a masked performance of Charles Mee’s Life is a Dream. The production featured sections for each of the ancient masking styles and a final section that explored masks in a contemporary theatrical style. As a whole, this creative project pulls masks out of …

Community, Preservation, And Street Art: A Proposal For San Francisco’S Mission District, Marissa Nadeau

Master's Projects and Capstones

The Latinx community is an integral part of San Francisco’s rich history. From Mexican missions in the late 1700s to an influx of immigrants from various Latin countries starting in the early 1900s, the Mission District (‘the Mission’) of San Francisco has served as a hub for this mix of residents, fondly called “Raza,” emphasizing the people of a community rather than the country they have come from. Wars and issues dealt in their homelands were close to the hearts of the entirety of the Latinx population of the Mission, and their voices and opinions were heard through a type …

Construction Of Reality: Symbolic And Social Practice Of Michael Kurzwelly’S Słubfurt And Nowa Amerika, Olga Kostyrko

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is concerned with the analysis of two long-term community-based socially engaged art projects of German artist Michal Kurzwelly: “Słubfurt” (1999-2018) and “Nowa Amerika” (2010-2018). The research methodology for the analysis is drawn from the fields of art theory and criticism, and sociology. More specifically, in order to evaluate the social impact of long-term social art practices on the local community I borrow the criteria from the sociological discourse of bottom-up community development, while simultaneously, combining it with the insights from art criticism to discuss aesthetic dimensions of the work. I am arguing that Michael Kurzwelly’s projects are good …

Face To Face, Carl Beam And Andy Warhol, Keira B. Koch

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Keira Koch ’19 examines representations of indigenous cultures in prints and photographs by American artist Andy Warhol and First Nations artist Carl Beam. In this comparative study, Koch considers the topic of appropriation and re-appropriation of Native imagery. Warhol, as a non-Indigenous artist, is using this imagery to highlight the dominant narrative of the American West. Beam, however, incorporates photographs of Native subjects and traditional narratives by re-appropriating those images to tell a distinctly Native narrative. This exhibition invites discussion about the role of contemporary indigenous artists and how indigenous identities are expressed in contemporary art. This exhibition intersects with …

Boating In The Floating World: Ukiyo-E Prints (2018), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"The student-curated exhibition “Boating in the Floating World” focuses on images of boats in ukiyo-e prints as represented in some works from the collection of the RISD Museum. Boats were occasionally depicted in the 18th century celebrity-focused figurative genres. Fairly often they appeared in bijinga – images of beauties, rarely in yakusha-e – portraits of kabuki theater actors, sometimes in compositions derived from literature, history or lore. Nautical motifs became much more pronounced from 1830s with the powerful upsurge of the landscape genre that is believed to have been triggered by the increasingly available Berlin blue – a non-fugitive artificial …

Returning The Radiant Gaze: Visual Art And Embodiment In A World Of Subjects, Beth Carruthers

The Goose

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no …

The South Korean “Meta-Avant-Garde,” 1961–1993: Subterfuge As Radical Agency, Sooran Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation examines South Korean performance and conceptual art from 1961 to 1993 during the Cold War military dictatorship, and focuses on the dynamics of socio-political tension between the military dictatorship and the opposition of political dissidents comprised mostly of artists, students, and intellectuals, who defined themselves as “avant-garde artists.” Censored and suppressed by both the authoritarian government and the complacent art establishment, these art movements were omitted from conventional South Korean art history, and oftentimes dismissed as derivatives of Western art. My dissertation offers a critical revision of these activities by framing them instead as forms of radical dissent. …

The Larger Conversation: Contemplation And Place By Tim Lilburn, Emory Shaw

The Goose

Review of Tim Lilburn's The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place.

A Documentary-Material Approach For Performance, Marc Kosciejew

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article begins a conceptual discussion about the relationship between documentation, performance, and materiality. It argues that a documentary approach helps show the roles played by documents and practices with them in performance’s materialization and constitution. It presents the start of a documentary approach for analyzing performance by discussing some ways in which documentation helps provide a material basis for performance beyond its enactment whilst simultaneously materializing and constituting it in and for other diverse contexts.

Enacting The Glastonbury Pilgrimage Through Communitas And Aural/Visual Culture, Kathryn R. Barush

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

The sacred sites of Glastonbury in Somerset, England have long been places of pilgrimage, connected to the legend of the journey of Joseph of Arimathea to the British Isles, and have fired the imagination from the Middle Ages to today - inspiring the Arthurian legends, folk-stories and song, and visual representations. In response to the question ‘What is Pilgrimage,’ this essay seeks to explore the conjunction of artistic representations and geographic journeys to and among the ancient topography and mysterious structures of Glastonbury, with a particular focus on how sacred travel, and especially an experience of communitas, can be engendered …

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Four Sights Of The Patient (Ophelia), Cecily Ann Fergeson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I make work in a variety of media, largely dealing with the imagery and material of the human body. My current work attempts to reckon with the following subjects: a reclamation of the notion of the so-called medical gaze and its historical record in photography; the idea that receiving the medical gaze transforms patients’ bodies; the idea of illness as an uncanny and intimate experience; and, finally, the act of metaphorically retracing the body’s material journey through the medical institution as it exists today. In this text, I discuss my practice in the context of critical theory, a recent observation …

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …

Strange Woods, Song Park

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am interested in searching for images of women that have not been adequately represented in visual art. As a visual artist, I am directed by my sense of sight to investigate and know something. I like to challenge myself to visualize things that do not already have a visual representation. It has been frustrating for me to create images of women, and I have experienced a deep ambivalence in response to the different images of women I have encountered. The socially and culturally constructed images of women that I have internalized and those that have developed from my own …

Envisioning Shadows In Romantic Ekphrasis And Early Photography, Joseph Kevin Tuvera Sebastian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis seeks to investigate ekphrasis as a mode of description and as a rhetorical strategy that produces literary affect. In particular, it considers the Romantic poet John Keats’s ekphrastic works to argue that he employs visual strategies of obscurity, which are rooted in

Edmund Burke’s concept of the Sublime, in order to register the formation of Poetic Consciousness. These visual strategies are observed in literal obscurity, which is expressed in shadows as a poetic conceit; they are also demonstrated in what this thesis terms notional or poetic obscurity, which involves mental abstractions that engage the imagination by challenging it …

Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.

The Work Of Living Art, Empathy, And The Creation Of An Aesthetics Of Perception In The Early Twentieth Century, Sarah Peil Winstead

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), theorist and pioneering voice of the New Stagecraft Movement in twentieth century theatre, was a transformative influence on the history of scenic design. This paper looks at the links between Appia’s theories in theatre scenic design and contemporaneous German aesthetic theory. At the time German theorists like Adolf Hildebrand and August Schmarsow developed an aesthetic theory, Einfülung or empathy theory, based on the connection between the human body and perception. I will argue this theory influenced not only Appia and his contemporaries it also shaped the landscape of mid-century theatre design. Appia’s own theories revolved around three …

The Disjointed Moment : Marking, Mapping, And Making The Real In William Eggleston's Election Eve (1976)., Joel Darland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the photographic book Election Eve (1976) produced by photographer William Eggleston. Eggleston’s photographs represent a complex network of connections between material objects and the potential truth of depiction. The often-nondescript locations that Eggleston photographed in Sumter County, GA in October 1976 appear specific at the outset, but quickly lose their adherence to the supposed realities that they depict. Since his first major exhibition in the mid 1970s, Eggleston’s photographs have presented difficulty because they from often-disparate material sources. Despite of the complexity of Eggleston’s engagement with both art and non-art photography, scholarship continues describe Eggleston’s “snapshot aesthetic” …

The Commodity Club: Commodity Fetishism In Modern Art And Tattoos, Shelby Maiden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The current culture of commodity fetishism that surrounds both modern art and tattoos are disproportionately a part of the perpetuation of an artificial sense of society and community. It promotes the notion that by simply by inking the deeper layers of their skin or by spending millions on a painting that somehow one becomes elevated and enters an elite space, or club, of people like them.

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 …

Lauretta Vinciarelli In Context: Transatlantic Dialogues In Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, And Theory, 1968-2007, Rebecca Siefert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation centers on the interdisciplinary work of Italian-born artist, architect, teacher, and theorist Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who occupies a historic place in the 1970s revival of architectural drawings, Columbia University’s housing studio, Peter Eisenman’s influential Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York, and architectonic trends in contemporary painting. She was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, in 1974), she was among the first women to teach architecture studio courses at Columbia University (hired in 1978), …

Think Natural ! Une Nécessité Qui Ne Se Cache Plus, Cedrick Nzolo Ngamobu

Artl@s Bulletin

This contribution raises questions regarding the search for mediation and transition found in pedagogy and the creative process. This can be posed as a response to an affirmation of identity, coupled with a search for philosophical autonomy. The need for mediation or transition is a necessity that we all seek in different ways and according to our respective contexts. In teaching in a school of art or fashion, it is a question with different variables that leaves the field open to all forms of questioning and brings to the fore the confrontation of modes of expression.

Au-Delà Des Rivalités Provinciales : Poétiques Visuelles Tropicalistes Et Autres Projets D’Art Étendu Depuis La Perspective Du Nord-Est Brésilien, Ayrson Heráclito

Artl@s Bulletin

This text is a compilation of writings published during the course of our research for the 3^rd Biennale of Bahia (2014), for which we worked in the curatorial team. These investigations reflect on the genealogy of Northeast Brazil’s contemporary art, seeing this region as unrestricted and non-essentialist. The production of certain artists is considered within an expanded context. To this end, we employed the idea of PEBA (Pernambuco-Bahia), while attempting to come to terms with the possibility of existence of a family, united by the desire for a poetic turn in the tropics.

The Lubumbashi Biennial: Towards New Protagonisms, Daniella Géo

Artl@s Bulletin

This article reflects on the role and relevance of the Lubumbashi Biennial (DR Congo), taking into account its specificities, context and modus operandi, as well as making brief parallels with other recurring art events in an attempt to situate the Congolese biennale within the histories of contemporary art biennales. The text provides first-hand commentary on the Lubumbashi Biennial, in particular its fourth edition in which the author formed part of the curatorial team.

Histoire Picturale De Laurent-Désiré Kabila (1997-2001), Donatien Dibwe Dia Mwembu

Artl@s Bulletin

This article considers the story of the late Laurent-Désiré Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as told by the popular painters of the city of Lubumbashi. Its shows how popular painting contributes to the knowledge of LD Kabila's reign, by serving as a support for oral history. Indeed, the commentaries of the paintings made by their authors or by critics unveil a chapter of history. Placed next to each other according to their theme and chronological order, popular paintings depict the highlights of the history of a given region in a specific area such as politics, economy, culture, …

Le Paradigme « Art Africain » : De L’Origine À Sa Physionomie Actuelle, Henri Kalama

Artl@s Bulletin

This study relooks at the problematic concept of "African Art". The conceptual evolution of "African Art" coincides with three realities: firstly, that the art discovered in Africa was described as uncivilized; secondly, that this art capitulated with the colonial past of Africa; finally, that this art of an underdeveloped continent. In such a context of emergence, this art has been or is still exploited by ambitious and interested promoters. Hence, there is an imperative need for contemporary artists to overcome all these influences to produce works whose ontological values and universality cannot be challenged.

Les Nouveaux Défis Du Métier D’Artiste En République Démocratique Du Congo, André Yoka Lye

Artl@s Bulletin

The history of art institutions in D.R. Congo is relatively old compared to the rest of Africa. This justifies the know-how of Congolese artists since 1930-40’s, even if the general trend was, for a long time, reliant on amateurism and mimetism of European production. With the integration of art institutes into university education level since 1971, the issues and challenges became precise and appeared to be possible to overcome: professionalization, rooted and applied research, community building and international competitiveness, with the urge of solidarity with countries and experiences from the South.

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.