Theory and Criticism Commons^™

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.

On The Origin And Future Of Poetry: Notes Towards An Investigation, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

An exploration on the historical and material conditions that allowed the emergence of metaphors and poetry alongside language. This article analyzes the historical relation between poetry and technology across history. It discusses the so-called ontological crisis of poetry and opens the conversation on its future.

Wish You Were Here, Hiroshige (2014), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"As if responding to the call of the exhibition title ...(someone in the class sensed the artist’s personal invitation), a group of RISD students undertook a virtual journey through space and time to Edo period Japan. For a duration of a semester the entire class plunged directly into the midst of the Tokaido world, mixing with all kinds of travelers and local residents, learning their customs and manners, trying out various travel modes and road-side services, exploring every bend of the road, in winter and summer, at dawn and dusk, in sunshine and violent storm. ...

“Wish you were here,” …

Utopias Misplaced: The Cost Of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics To North Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I'm sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the "uncanny body politic," the uncanny valley, "dystopian poetics," what it means to outsource dystopian poetics, the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Authors/artists mentioned include: Thomas Hobbes, Mary Shelley, David Mitchell, Marjane Satrapi, Song Byeok, Sun Mu, Masahiro Mori, Andy Warhol. The talk also discusses the James Bond film Die Another Day.

If You See Something, Say Something: A Look At Experimental Writing On Art, Charlotte Lucy Latham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Signs all over New York City state, "If you see something, say something," but museum studies repeatedly find viewers do not attend to pictures, just as eye witness testimony is invariably skewed. Ways of seeing have been limited to known ways of discussing. Alternative approaches offer new insights. The first section, "Experiments in Art Writing," examines two texts: T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death, a journal of his daily visits looking at two Poussin paintings, for which he maintains the ambiguity of exploration and argues to keep visual images from their dissolution into political symbols; and, Charles Simic's Dime Store …

Mona Hatoum And The Biographical Influence On Cross-Cultural Exchange, Nicole Shelton

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Artist Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian born in Beirut and educated in London, has experienced the boundaries and displacement of exile. These have become influential in her work and are implied within some of her statements. Compared are the external experiences of a double-exile directly to her subjectivity, culminating in a discussion of works of art such as Light Sentence (Fig. 3) and Homebound (Fig. 7), and highlighting the issue of cross-cultural exchange. This artist is one of many exhibiting cultural exchange within art as a manifestation of hybridization of different cultures, even if the artist does not acknowledge this multiplicity. …

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

Modernism, Seen From Prague, March 1937, Derek Sayer

Artl@s Bulletin

Focusing on the period 1890-1939, this paper explores exchanges between three generations of Prague artists and international—especially Parisian—avant-gardes. Documenting the extraordinary receptiveness of Prague to modernism, particularly in the applied arts, it argues for a thorough rethink of the conceptual geographies of art history.

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 …

Dreamcatcher From Mao's Last Revolution: My Venture Into Creative Social Documentary Video, Christopher Shea Howard

Student Publications

Dreamcatcher From Mao’s Last Revolution is a filmmaking venture into creative social documentary production undertaken by this filmmaker as his own experimental departure from narrative feature film production and the fiction genre. This thesis report not only describes aspects of this film production that are specific to the methodology of documentary film production, but also describes the film’s cinematic expression of memory and the filmmaker’s telling of the story. Some cinematic and conceptual aspects of the story are related to the film’s influences, specifically to those theoretical concepts and techniques employed by documentary filmmaker, Werner Herzog.

The documentary story is …

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 …

Tapestry Of Space: Domestic Architecture And Underground Communities In Margaret Morton’S Photography Of A Forgotten New York, Irina Nersessova

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This article addresses the impact urban space has on individuals through the use of Situationist International theory and psychogeography. Representations of homelessness in New York in Margaret Morton's photography are used to demonstrate the interconnectedness among space, people, and social issues. Social issues manifest themselves in urban decay, and the inhabitants react to this phenomenon emotionally and artistically. Some inhabitants demonstrate their relationship with space by responding with material production of housing and art, which they accomplish by building without exploiting the environment the way the manufacturing of commodities often does.

All Systems Go, Harry William Sidebotham

Theses and Dissertations

Just like nature and life, my work is made up of many smaller parts working synergeticly in order to function properly. The systems I use are increasingly more complex, involving layers of interacting information competing for attention, giving rise to emergent qualities that could not

exist without the interaction. Paraxial imaging and emergent shapes could not exist without the systems or the chromophobic choices.

The Proto-Pixel Art Of Malevich And Kandinsky: Black Square, Its Digital Descendant And Neo- Vitalist Impulse, Irina Lyubchenko

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

In the beginning of the 20th century Kazimir Malevich, an important Russian avant-garde artist and thinker, created his iconic painting Black Square, which represented what he believed to be the basic unit of visual reality. Around the same time Wassily Kandinsky, another important Russian artist renown for his experiments in purely abstract art, discovered his own unit of representation – the point. This paper examines how the visual and philosophical aspects of contemporary digital reality, reflected in the aesthetic of the pixel, could have sprung from the early 20th century experiments in assembling the visible world from its basic units, …

Feelings Sustaining Text: Aphorisms And Inspiration, Mikhail Pozdniakov

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

There are genres of reflection, one of which is constituted by the aphorism. These reflections are an art of ponderance, of pensiveness. Philosophy is not necessarily the best example, nor is it identical with the genre of reflection as such; it has had a hard time breaking with its derivative moments, and its history is of a catalogue of dogmas as well as progressive critiques. In logic, one of philosophy’s products, the continuous or infinite form of knowledge is condensed into the axiom or principle or formula, which carries the appearance of a statement of fact. Contrary to the latter, …

Michael Craig Martin: Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Alanna O'Kelly, Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Jaki Irvine, Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Daphne Wright, Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Maurice O'Connell, Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Grace Weir, Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Finola Jones, Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Frances Hegarty, Biographical Entry, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

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 …

Fluxus, Dore Bowen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Man’S Best Friend? Dogs And Pigs In Early Modern Germany, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

When Jacob Seisenegger and Titian painted individual portraits of Emperor Charles V around 1532, a dog replaced such traditional accouterments of imperial power as crown, scepter, and orb.3 Charles placed one hand on the dog’s collar, a gesture indicating his companion’s noble qualities including faithfulness.4 At the same time, another more down-to-earth meaning for the dog had become prominent in the decades before the imperial portraits: the interest in and ability to eat anything in sight. This pig-like ability resulted in dogs, alongside pigs, becoming emblems of indiscriminate and gluttonous eating and drinking during the early sixteenth century when humanists, …

Decollations, Joseph Mcbirnie

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The following presents the critical preface to the unpublished manuscript, Decollations. Through the tapestry metaphor, the author describes the process of creating the collection through the lenses of aesthetics, psychology and mythology.

The Blackness Of Black (W)Holes, Eric M. Anderson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Blackness of Black (W)holes analyzes Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's Sanctuary, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as against establishing the illusion of a coherent, recognizable self through relational identities and subservience to denotative language and categories of identity. These novel’s feature characters packing knives, I claim, because they advocate for what I term stylistic self–extrication: a rupture with prevailing forms of identity and cliché ways of speaking through rhythmic, sonorous, experimental language use. Characters who succeed at the task, I argue, are associated with a blackness in excess of racial markings, because they become unclassifiable as a result. In …

Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Living Torrents: Hokusai's "Journey Around The Waterfalls Of Various Provinces" (2014), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"This book invites its readers to join RISD WS 2014 Japanese Prints class for an edifying expedition to Japan’s eight waterfalls portrayed by Katsushika Hokusai, an ukiyo-e preeminent artist, in his masterpiece print series “A Journey to the Waterfalls of Various Provinces.” In fact, this expedition is an academic endeavor undertaken by a collective of students who tried their hand at curating a museum exhibition as their art history course project. ..." -- Foreword, The Living Torrents: Hokusai's " Journey Around the Waterfalls of Various Provinces"

Contributing Authors

Jane Bak, Graham Bessellieu, Amy Chen, Julie Chon, Sofia Diaz de la …