Photography as Process: A Study of the Japanese Photography Journal Provoke
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation evaluates the significance of a series of four critical Japanese photography publications, referred to here as Provoke. First published in 1968, Provoke consisted of a run of three quarterly journal issues, each bearing the same title as the series: Provoke. The series ceased publication in 1970 with the fourth Provoke publication, entitled Mazu tashika rashisa no sekai o sutero: Shashin to gengo no shisô [First, abandon the world of pseudo-certainty: Thought on photography and language].
Sunappu: A Genre of Japanese Photography, 1930-1980
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation discusses the development of sunappu photography from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, demonstrating its importance to the history of Japanese photography and art. Sunappu is a Japanese photographic term that began to be used in the mid-1930s, derived from the English word "snapshot." In the broader meaning of the term, it signifies instantaneous photography taken with a hand-held camera. Sunappu, however, often took on narrower connotations, referring specifically to candid photographs of people unaware of the presence of the camera. First and foremost, sunappu describes a photographic technique. However, it also constitutes a genre of Japanese photography with historical roots stretching back to the mid-1930s.
THE VISUAL LANGUAGE OF SOVIET ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES IN THE 1930S: RABOTNITSA, KRESTIANKA, AND USSR IN CONSTRUCTION
Author:
Katerina Romanenko
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Rose-Carol Washton Long
The Soviet mass media's essential role in the mobilization of the masses for the construction of the new Socialist world during the 1920s and 1930s is well known. The regime needed to develop a universal means of communication that could easily reach its poorly literate population spread across an enormous geographic area. The Soviet printed press played a crucial role in shaping of the cultural and political discourse of the nation, and, as such, has attracted serious scholarly scrutiny. Yet, little attention has been paid to the actual distribution and consumption of art during Stalin's regime, and, so far, no study has explicitly focused on the printed media as an agent delivering art to the masses.
Francis Picabia and the Problem of Nihilism
Year of Dissertation:
2012
“Francis Picabia and the Problem of Nihilism ” offers an interpretation of Francis Picabia based on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Building on already established art-historical material, and on the tradition of Nietzschian interpretation in continental aesthetics, the dissertation offers a new reading of Picabia's hugely variegated, apparently contradictory career. The central claim is that Picabia's art was generated by the same problem that Nietzsche wrestled with in philosophy: nihilism, the devaluation of all transcendent values in modernity. The strategies Picabia developed to overcome nihilism often match those developed by Nietzsche. Each of the five chapters defines such a strategy and tracks the way it unfolded in Picabia's oeuvre, analyzing specific paintings and texts formally and contextually by way of contemporary criticism and intellectual currents.
Weighing the Body: Female Body Image in Contemporary Art
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have at key moments in their careers chosen to examine the issue of female body image. The preoccupation with weight is preeminently visual, so artistic interventions can be particularly powerful. Yet no comprehensive study exists of artwork concerned with pandemic issues such as obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, or female body image broadly. In this dissertation, I examine significant examples of such projects by locating works by key artists in social and historical context, including that of evolving feminist discourses on the body: Laura Aguilar (b. 1959), Eleanor Antin (b. 1935), Vanessa Beecroft (b. 1969), Maureen Connor (b. 1947), Lauren Greenfield (b. 1966), Ariane Lopez-Huici (b. 1945), Leonard Nimoy (b. 1931), L.A. Raeven (twins Liesbeth and Angelique Raeven, who work as a singular artist, b. 1971), Faith Ringgold (b. 1930), Rachel Rosenthal (b. 1926), Barbara Smith (1931), and Jana Sterbak (b. 1955).
Passive Fascism? The Politics of Austrian Heimat Photography
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation focuses on Austrian Heimat [homeland] photography during the 1930s. Seemingly apolitical, this regional and popular photography of bucolic landscapes, quaint villages, peasants in traditional dress, skiers, and mountaineers was fundamental in shaping Austrian identity. Both the pre-war fascist and the postwar democratic governments easily appropriated and encouraged its dissemination. It fully fit within the vision of building a new Austrian nation comprised of distinct regional identities.
The Museum of Modern Art's What Is Modern? Series, 1938-1969
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Rosemarie Bletter
Between 1938 and 1969, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) poses the question of What Is Modern? (WIM) in a series of books, traveling exhibitions, and a symposium. This dissertation argues for the WIM project as a sustained if minimally effective effort to influence popular American perceptions of modern art, architecture, and design, at the same time embodying tensions inherent to the museum and its notions of that modernism.
Enconchados: Political, Cultural, and Social Implications of a New Art in Seventeenth-Century New Spain
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Eloise Quiñones-Keber
Seventeenth-century New Spain (Mexico) saw the rise of an art form that melded traditions from pre-Hispanic, Asian, and European styles. Enconchado paintings, so called because mother-of-pearl is inlaid mostly on canvas stretched on a panel, were produced in workshops in Mexico City and sent to the metropolis as gifts to the monarch or to noblemen. Around 300 of these unique works exist in museums in Europe and in the Americas today. Not surprisingly, the most common subject matter is religious; however, about one hundred of them depict the historical events that lead to the conquest of Mexico by Hernando Cortés. Most scholarship has centered on the Asian and European influences on these works. This project investigates the three-pronged influences in a more egalitarian way, positing as much weight on the indigenous aspects as on the others. Furthermore, it contextualizes the production of these ideological works with the literature, histories, treatises, and other works of art produced in the viceroyalty of New Spain during this century when the rise of the Creole class (people born in Mexico of Spanish-born parents) was beginning to make its imprint in the economic, social, and cultural spheres. By tracing the different threads that make up these works, their ideological impact, as well as their 300-year old histories, this dissertation aims for a better understanding of these works and the forces that made their production possible.
Framing the Nation: Nation Building, Resistance, and Democratization in Korean Photography, 1945-2008
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation examines photography in Korea since 1945, focusing on the medium's relation to the processes of nation building, civic resistance, and democratization. The dissertation evaluates a number of types of photograph, ranging from war photographs to family portraits to art photography. These assessments are informed by the ways in which photography has articulated, and in turn been shaped by, social, political, and technological shifts in Korean society. Korea's history since 1945--a history of liberation, war, nation building, and civic struggle against authoritarian military governments--parallels the culture's development of photography and its various practices. The relationship between photography and nation building and photography and democratization is thus crucial to the history of both the nation and the medium: photography does not merely re-present Korean life; it is an integral part of it. The investigation is organized chronologically, following the progression of South Korea's social and political development and treating the distinct formative periods in the nation-building process as backdrop and cultivator for the photographic works that emerged from each era.
Reframing the Narrative of Dada in New York, 1910-1926
Year of Dissertation:
2012
New York Dada has historically been positioned as incompatible or antithetical to American modernism. This dissertation argues that the Dada spirit in New York not only rejected European conventions of high art, but did so with the nationalistic desire to develop a modern and independent American idiom through the influence of anarchism and vernacular culture. This study traces the influence of anarchism in New York on Alfred Stieglitz, his influential gallery, "291," and his publication, Camera Work, as well as larger anarchistic networks during the early 1910s. In this atmosphere of iconoclastic experimentation, vernacular culture emerged as an alternative strategy to critique the definitions and institutions of fine art.