Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …

The Visual Poetry Of Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion, Janis Stair

Theses and Dissertations

Marc Chagall (1887-1985), was a Russian-Jewish artist who created a prolific body of work during the tumultuous era of the twentieth-century. While his artwork came under the influence of modernist trends, Chagall developed his own unique style that has often been described in terms of its "visual poetry." This paper examines how this term applies to one of his most important works of art, the 1938 painting White Crucifixion. Four key ways in which the various forms of art and poetry intersect in this painting are discussed in the context of the historical and cultural conditions that had a profound …

The Sketcher: Reverend John Eagles, His Poetical Shelter From The World And The 1812 Collection, Ashley C. Schalk

Graduate Thesis Collection

...Since identifying Eagles as at least one of the artists of the 1812 Collection, I have discovered that his specific tour of the Lakes, the route he followed and the scenery conveyed in his images, deviated from the conventional tours in that Eagles was in search of what he regarded as a poetical landscape rather than a traditionally picturesque one. In other words, Eagles sought to capture more than an aesthetically pleasing scene as a picturesque image would, he endeavored to capture the soul of the scene and the 1812 Collection is evidence that Eagles practiced the artistic principles he …

A Poetic Poioumenon: Coterie And Ekphrasis In David Lehman's "The Breeders' Cup", Anna Beth Rowe

Master's Theses

David Lehman’s poem “The Breeders’ Cup” uses cross-generational coterie and ekphrasis to create a poetic poioumenon. When read in terms of art criticism, Lehman’s “The Breeders’ Cup” models creative processes from the past and calls for a rehabilitative ethic in postmodern poetics. Lehman follows the ekphrastic form, which associates a poem with a work of visual art, from his New York School predecessor Frank O’Hara. “The Breeders’ Cup” addresses Édouard Manet’s 1865 painting Olympia through ekphrasis, and the painting of a prostitute becomes a patron saint of parody for postmodern poetics. The poem introduces lust as a metaphor for creative …

Neoplastic Therapy : On Violence And Aesthetics, Mengyu Chen

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to create a new theoretical framework to examine and understand the meaning of an art object and its relational social existence. This thesis serves as a critique on contemporary media culture and hierarchical social oppression. At the same time, it adopts a pseudoscientific way to introduce notions of art’s autonomy and its opposition to social functionality. By merging political theories on individualism, capitalism, and metaphysics with foundational structures of art creation, I am attempting to construct a new system of thinking that challenges traditional ways of understanding mediums, functions and the viewer’s relationship with …

Professionalism And The Market In 19th-Century Europe, Robert Jensen

Art and Visual Studies Presentations

This paper explores the changing identity of artistic professionalism, especially in late 19th-century France. It ties artistic self-fashioning to the collapse of the Salon system and casts professionalism as a marketing strategy.

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 …

Between Historical Truth And Story-Telling: The Twentieth-Century Fabrication Of “Artemisia”, Britiany Daugherty

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

This research focuses on the twentieth century rediscovery of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi by scholars, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, and artists. I argue that the various authors who told her story constructed two distinct “Artemisias,” what I identify as the “Academic Artemisia” and the “Celebrity Artemisia.” The “Academic Artemisia” results from writings by scholars focused on her 1610 Susanna and the Elders, who used approaches from formalism and connoisseurship, to feminism and iconography. The “Celebrity Artemisia” stems from popular fictions that refashioned the life and art of Artemisia according to pop culture tastes. Studying what has been said about …

Place Reimagined, Michelle Unger

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This book shows the creative process and final product of my Independent Study Project, conducted in Prague as part of a semester study abroad program. The project started with interviewing four Czech graphic designers who described places in Prague that are especially meaningful to them. After collecting and transcribing their stories related to their places of inspiration, I visited the locations myself and photographed the locations with sensitivity to the details the artists had emphasized as unique to their experience of the place. While at each site, I also photographed elements of the locations that I personally found interesting and …

Considering Triple Self-Portraiture In The Work Of María Izquierdo, Brooke Lashley

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper looks to María Izquierdo’s paintings, Prisioneras (Prisoners) of 1936 and Sueño y presentimiento (Dream and Premonition) of 1947, as case studies for activating a theory of triple self-portraiture. The theory reflects how plurality arises in the singular or in single significations of the self and disrupts homogeneity in thinking about identities for the self and others within the genre of self-portraiture. In activating a theory of triple self-portraiture, I found three forms of the self in Izquierdo's works: the self as oppressed (the past); the self as oppressing (the current); and the self as an emancipator (future). Although …

Scars Of War, Corinna Martell, Camille Hanna, Brandon Bauer

Student Creative and Scholarly Works

Scars of War: The Psychological and Physical Traumas of War Depicted through Art.

War is shattering, leaving behind gaping wounds in need of healing. Some require bandages, other wounds are psychological and not visible. Both leave a scar. These scars are an inevitable part of the human experience. The psychological and physical ramifications of war exist as long as strife pervades. This collection of works, depicting war from the French Revolution to present day Iraq, illustrates the scarring impact war has on the people and places within its grasp. New technology and art styles have transformed the way we see …

Images Of Suffering: An Investigation Of Francisco Goya's 'Disasters Of War' And William Blake's 'Illustrations For The Book Of Job', Chris Christenson

Library Research Prize Student Works

Francisco de Goya and William Blake, who we regard today as two of the greatest artists of the Romantic era, each produced a provocative set of engravings towards the end of his life. Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra [The Disasters of War] and Blake's Illustrations for the Book of Job are both contemplations on human suffering, specifically unjust suffering, and our response to it. When placed in dialogue with one another, these sets of engravings unearth new dimensions in their interpretation and consequently in our own thinking about suffering. This paper will explore suffering and response through four themes …

Vectors Or Constellations? Curatorial Narratives Of Latin American Art, Camila Maroja, Abigail Winograd

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper examines the curatorial visions guiding the Mercosul Biennial (1997), curated by Frederico Morais, and Inverted Utopias (2004), co-curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea. Both strove to shift the association of Latin American art with the fantastic that had dominated the region’s historiography. The structural metaphors used to frame these shows demonstrated differing aims: Morais’s desire to create an autochthonous historiography versus Ramírez and Olea’s wish to revise constructions of global modernism. Nonetheless, both exhibitions showcased similar works and helped to consolidate a revised vision of Latin American art.

Contrabienal: Latin American Art, Politics And Identity In New York, 1969-1971, Aimé Iglesias Lukin

Artl@s Bulletin

This article focuses on a community of Latin American artists living in New York and the influence of regionalism and politics in their identification as a group, taking up the case of the Contrabienal, an art book published in 1971 as a call to boycott the XI São Paulo Biennial in protest of censorship and torture in dictatorial Brazil. The book was aesthetically eclectic and included artists from different generations. Still, its organizers were all part of the strong shift towards Conceptualism then taking place. In light of the current revision of the Latin American Conceptualism canon, this article …

The Face Of Our Wartime, Sharon Sliwinski

Data and Test Instruments

This paper considers a turn toward portraiture amongst contemporary photojournalists who have covered the War on Terror. A series of wartime faces is examined in order to consider the way prolonged conflict flattens our visual landscape.

On The Hallelujah Efect: Priming Consumers, Recording Music, And The Spirit Of Tragedy, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

An overview of The Hallelujah Effect concentrating on priming or sonic branding, media, online porn as well as marketing and media programming, with a special excursus on the space of music --and radio in Adorno's Current of Music, and a detailed discussion on Nietzsche and music in antiquity as he explores this with reference ot Beethoven in The Birth of Tragedy.

Statecraft: Vandalism And Iconoclasm In The Digital Age, Connell Vaughan

Conference papers

Not only is vandalism increasingly subject to digital documentation, but the aesthetic nature of vandalism itself is different as a result of the digital. No longer is vandalism a local destructive act, it has become an act performed primarily for broadcast to global markets. This paper uses the example of Islamic State (IS) iconoclasm to explore the way in which digital media is strategically used by vandals and considers the responses of the heritage industry to respond to such destruction. It illustrates how the deliberate digital documentation and subsequent global broadcasting of the destruction of cultural heritage by Islamic State …

‘Fuchsia Lipstick’: The Domestication Of Lee Krasner In Post-War Criticism, Aleisha E. Barton

Richard A. Harrison Symposium

After the Second World War, the art world shifted from Europe to New York and a new form of painting that defined itself as distinctly American demanded attention from the public. This style, abstract expressionism, created an inability to survey clear subject matter allowed critics to imply gendered metaphorical resonances within works, as meanings were fluid and inconclusive to the viewer. Coupled with instability in the social sphere, artistic abstraction served as motivation for critics to seek out gendered aspects within an artwork, identifying and constructing difference to preserve order and control in a society that had dramatically changed from …

Historicity, Achronicity, And The Materiality Of Cultures In Colonial Brazil, Amy J. Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"In this essay, I use three nontraditional forms from the visual culture of colonial Brazil—Tupinambá featherwork, Portuguese Atlantic mandinga pouches, and azulejos (tilework)— in order to meditate upon materiality and temporality as methodological problems with which our discipline should engage. Each of these art forms has historical trajectories that span cultures, continents, and centuries, a circumstance that raises questions as to how such diverse and stubbornly nonhistoricizable genres can be melded into a coherent historical narrative of the visual and material cultures specific to 'Brazil,' especially when two of them — the mandinga bags and azulejos — are not intrinsically …

Making History: How Art Museums In The French Revolution Crafted A National Identity, 1789-1799, Anna E. Sido

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper compares two art museums, both created during the French Revolution, that fostered national unity by promoting a cultural identity. By analyzing the use of preexisting architecture from the ancien régime, innovative displays of art and redefinitions of the museum visitor as an Enlightened citizen, this thesis explores the application of eighteenth-century philosophy to the formation of two museums. The first is the Musée Central des Arts in the Louvre and the second is the Musée des Monuments Français, both housed in buildings taken over by the Revolutionary government and present the seized property of the royal family and …

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

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, …

The Domestication And Migration Of Zea Mays L. In Association With Holocene Climatic Variance, Kelsey L. Salmon Schreck

Senior Independent Study Theses

Maize is known to have originated in Mesoamerica from which it spread north and south, adapting to many varied climatic and environmental conditions. This study details the origin of the species Zea mays L. The teosinte hypothesis and the concepts of seasonality and scheduling are employed to discuss the domestication of maize by means of human selection. This information is used to highlight the basic circumstances necessary for maize agriculture to be adopted by a human population. Furthermore, climate is examined through the minimum and ideal environmental conditions needed for the successful growth of maize. Environmental cues play a profound …

Armed With An Easel: Understanding Artistic Political Praxis Through The Works Of Theodor Adorno And Chantal Mouffe, Evelyn Yu Yu Swe

Senior Independent Study Theses

This Independent Study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter examines the role of capitalism in the formation of our culture. The argument presented here is that culture plays an important role in reinforcing modern neoliberal capitalism and that neoliberal capitalism has massive control over the dissemination of culture and the arts. The chapter concludes that it is necessary to utilize socio-cultural means in combating the influence of capitalism, and there does indeed exist emancipatory potential in artistic political praxis.

The second chapter focuses on Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory in articulating his conception of the emancipatory potential of art. …

Psychotic Diagnosis And Artist Pathology: Schizophrenic Art’S Influence On The Identification Of The Disorder, Danielle Watson

Honors Projects

The use of artwork created by schizophrenic individuals is unique in its contextual elements, including bizarre imagery, strong border lines, and desexualized features. The uniqueness of schizophrenic art lends itself to the possibility of being identified as such, therefore, opening the possibility for it to be used as a diagnostic tool in the clinical setting. Presently, schizophrenic art is used in art therapy, but is not widely employed in diagnostic practices. The current study aimed to test the possible identification of schizophrenic art in contrast to normal art and no art. Three questionnaires were created and randomly distributed to participants. …

Interpretative Ingredients: Formulating Art And Natural History In Early Modern Brazil, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"In this article I look at two early modern texts that pertain to the natural history of Brazil and its usage for medicinal purposes. These texts present an informative contrast in terms of information density and organization, raising important methodological considerations about the ways that inventories and catalogues become sources for colonial scholarship in general and art history in particular."

Jack Kerouac's Artistic Apprenticeship And The Discovery Of His Authentic Voice, Nathaniel Botsis

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Few novels so clearly dramatize an artist's discovery of his authentic voice as does Kerouac's On the Road. The publication of the writing that Kerouac did before On the Road, and particularly the writing he did before The Town and the City, offers almost unprecedented opportunity to study his artistic apprenticeship and trace his development as an artist. To study Kerouac's apprenticeship is to witness him learning how to liberate himself in order to be that which he would become. In addition to shedding light on this unexamined aspect of Kerouac's career, I hope this study might inspire similar breakthroughs …

Thomas Waterman Wood's Portrayal Of Black Citizens During The Early Reconstruction Era, Tessa Lynn Davidson

Theses and Dissertations

During his lifetime, Thomas Waterman Wood (1823-1903) was one of America's most beloved genre painters. Since his death, very little has been published to document his career and great achievements. Although the exemplary production of his rural genre subjects is enough to demand further attention, an additional oversight is Wood's unique treatment of African American subjects. Painting during the Reconstruction era when the discourse concerning black citizenship was at its height, Wood created a series of works which portrayed African Americans in a positive light, silently advocating for their rights as U. S. citizens. It is the intent of this …