Critical Positions in Recent South African Photography
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This work presents a history of South African photography through an account of critical practices undertaken by individual photographers. Rather than the history of photography in South Africa, this project offers a taxonomy of a variety of strategies and tactics pursued by practitioners of the medium before and after the fall of apartheid. Told through case studies, it probes how these photographers were influenced by their political commitments, their dreams about their country's future and their beliefs about the efficacy of art as an agent of social change. To consider both the practice of particular photographers and their personal investment in the making of images, this dissertation blends a theoretical framework with biography and social history. While bodies of theoretical inquiry, like critical white studies and creolization theory, help put South African photographs into an international dialogue with other contemporary art, biographies ground the work in the lives led by photographers who have experienced the vagaries of South African history. Drawing on interviews and on an analysis of the history of photography in South Africa, this dissertation inquires what these photographs tell South Africans about themselves and what they tell the world about South Africa.
Donald Judd's Furniture, From Do-It-Yourself to the Art of Lifestyle
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of Judd's furniture design from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. It sheds light on the artist's anarchistic political stance and on the do-it-yourself cultural phenomenon as a model for his intentionally naïve-looking furniture generated through his collaboration with local carpenters in Marfa, Texas during the 1970s. Judd's furniture production developed to a more sophisticated, skilled mode of fabrication in the 1980s, while his furniture and artwork became increasingly intertwined at many levels including the philosophical, the formal, and the realms of fabrication, installation, and marketing. This dissertation demonstrates how Judd's furniture design became integral to the permanent installations he orchestrated in Marfa and how he eventually shaped a certain way of living in his carefully organized environments. The ambiguity in the distinctions between functional objects and art pieces in the Minimalist ambit stimulated a rise of usable sculpture created by a succeeding generation of artists including Scott Burton. With respect to their emphasis on the role of the viewer or user, and on leading art into the everyday, Judd's and Burton's art-furniture both originated from aspects of individual presence and action in society rather than from a taste for good design.
European Symbolism Transformed: The Case of Poland
Author:
Lillian Orenduff-Bartos
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines the intersection of concepts of nationalism and identity in Polish Symbolist painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that characteristics of the Symbolist mode in painting, such as formal distortion and ambiguity, mysticism and pessimism, were ideally suited for the expression of complex ideas about nationhood and identity in Polish territory. These ideas related to the status of the Polish nation as a politically subjugate entity, as well as the newly contested status of the individual artist as spokesperson for the nation. The dissertation argues that Symbolist painters forged a compromise in their work between the demands of tradition and modernity by investing well-worn themes and motifs with new, more nuanced meanings. In so doing, they perfectly articulated the state of cultural and political suspension particular to the Polish situation.
John Ferren and the Development of Abstraction
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Katherine Manthorne
This dissertation presents the first comprehensive examination of the life and work of John Ferren. Compiled using extensive primary materials, this study argues for a reassessment of Ferren's position within the modernist canon. Born on the West Coast in 1905, Ferren was raised in Los Angeles and spent his formative artistic years in San Francisco in the mid- to late-1920s. He first visited Europe in 1929, making his way through France, Italy, and Germany. He returned two years later, intending to remain permanently. During this period Ferren became an integral part of the Parisian avant-garde, one of the few Americans to do so, and helped codify the burgeoning langauge of geometric abstraction. He quickly gained an impressive international career, exhibiting on both sides of the Atlantic, but coming to the U.S. at the dawn of the War for one of his exhibitions, he was unable to return to Europe.
Between Code and Message: Argentine Conceptual Art, 1966-1976
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation historicizes and theorizes the emergence and refinement of conceptual art in Argentina between the years 1966 and 1976. The conceptual turn, commonly understood as the shift from painting and sculpture to multimedia event- and language-based artistic practices in the 1960s and 1970s, took on an activist dimension in this context. A group of artists in Argentina collaboratively developed an educational role for art in the face of the dictatorship's control over a relatively new and increasingly powerful mass media. Argentine conceptual art as it is understood here can be traced back to one figure in particular, Oscar Masotta, a cultural theorist, pedagogue, and occasional artist who argued that artists such as Andy Warhol were engaged in a semiotic project of stripping away the content, or message, of the popular image to reveal the code, or underlying structure, that allowed the message to be delivered. Masotta and a circle of artists with whom he was working expanded this technique to include other systems that could be similarly analyzed: genres of art such as the happening, exhibition space, the art institution, the mass media, and the state. This process of extricating code and message has a crucial consequence: once analyzed, the system at hand can no longer deliver its message, either because its code has become too conspicuous or because it has been dissembled into parts. In 1968, Masotta's techniques were incorporated into a larger collaborative project titled Tucumán Arde, which staged protest exhibitions against the dictatorship's economic policies at union halls. For the artists involved in this project, it was not enough to merely analyze codes. A replacement message had to be substituted for the one that had been undermined. This dissertation traces the shared development of these conceptual strategies up to and after 1968, and the abandonment of art by most of the artists involved in Tucumán Arde. With worsening political conditions in Argentina in the 1970s, the conceptual strategies utilized by Masotta and Tucumán Arde were adapted to address political oppression from an increasingly powerless position.
From the Ground Up: Holger Cahill and the Promotion of American Art
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Katherine Manthorne
A biography of Holger Cahill, director of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) from 1935-1942, my dissertation chronicles his influence on American art as an art critic, curator, and administrator. An Icelandic immigrant, who was born in 1887 in Skogarstrand, Iceland near the Arctic Circle, Cahill grew up in the Midwest. Alienated from his family as a young man, he spent his adolescence as an itinerant worker, an experience that shaped his Populist artistic philosophies and his curatorial approach. Cahill, influenced by the Progressive theories of John Dewey, conceptualized art as an inclusive component of daily life with which everyone should have an opportunity to participate.
Painterly Representation in New York, 1945-1975
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Patricia Mainardi
Although the myth persists that figurative painting in New York did not exist after
Beyond "Meaningless Work": The Art of Walter De Maria, 1960-1977
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation investigates the work of the American artist Walter De Maria (b. 1935). De Maria is known predominately through photographs of his sculptural land work, The Lightning Field (1977), but the breadth and complexity of De Maria's practice has not received sustained critical scrutiny. I consider De Maria's writings, including his would-be manifesto "Meaningless Work" (1960), drawings, wood boxes, steel sculptures, installations, land works, music, film, and photography projects, as well as his connection to the development of minimal art, conceptual art, and land art, and his relationship to his collectors and patrons. By examining the many facets of De Maria's production and reception and by focusing on work from the 1960s and 1970s, this dissertation deepens the current understanding of his practice during the time of its development and articulation. Additionally, through detailed archival research, this study moves away from the personal and anecdotal treatments De Maria's work has received thus far and toward an understanding of his practice contextualized in its time.
Like Turtles, Islands Float Away: Emergent Distinctions in the Zoomorphic Iconography of Saladoid Ceramics of the Lesser Antilles, 250 BCE to 650 CE
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Eloise Quinones Keber
The late first millennium BCE to early first millennium CE saw the beginning of the Ceramic Age in the Caribbean islands. The ceramic culture that effected this transition was the Saladoid, members of which departed from northeastern Venezuela and the northwestern Guianas and settled the Antilles from Trinidad to Puerto Rico. As the hunting, gathering, fishing, and non-intensive horticulture of the older Caribbean peoples gave way to the intensive agriculture and full-fledged pottery industry of new migrants from South America, Caribbean culture was transformed. This study explores the ceramic indicators of cultural change, not for the obvious differences they trace between older "Archaic" peoples and newer Ceramic ones in the Caribbean, but for the differences they evince between the Ceramic peoples that settled the islands and the ones they departed in South America. This study demonstrates the emergence of a new regional identity.
The Golden Age of French Academic Painting in America, 1867-1893
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Patricia Mainardi
The aim of this dissertation is to present a more accurate assessment of nineteenth-century French academic art and its place not only in European art history but also in the history of American culture in the early Gilded Age. I focus on the phenomenally successful American careers of its four leading artists: William Bouguereau (1825-1905), Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), and Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891).