Browsing by Author "Stiles, Kristine"

This dissertation is a historical examination of the broad and multifaceted role of appropriation in twentieth and twenty-first century American art. It argues for the complementarity of research in legal and art theory with respect to the origins, significance, and future of appropriation and contends that the historical development of appropriation art is indissolubly interconnected with changes in intellectual property laws. This dissertation proposes that a history of contemporary appropriation requires an interdisciplinary approach, employing art historical, legal, and economic theory to examine interrelations between appropriation art, postmodern theory, and the legal doctrine of fair use. Special attention is paid to the development of terms used to describe and define appropriation art. The art historical definition of appropriation is traced through a review of academic criticism and museum exhibitions. The legal understanding of appropriation, which has a direct impact on the creation and dissemination of art that builds on prior works, is explored and clarified. Economic claims about artistic property rights and art markets are also considered and differentiated. Throughout, I question established understandings of appropriation and identify unresolved issues in the scholarly treatment of appropriation art. I draw distinctions between ethical and legal guidelines for reuse of images and suggest that further development of ethical guidelines is more important than further clarification of legal rules. Ultimately, I conclude that transformative use is a valuable framework for understanding appropriation, but conclude that judges cannot be expected to determine whether or not a work is transformative without expert guidance, preferably from artists themselves, and recommend that artists participate actively in the development of an ethical fair use.

This dissertation analyzes experimental art movements in Hungary and the former Yugoslavia from 1968 to 1989, examining the variety of ways that artists responded to the ideological and practical failures of communism. I also deliberate on how artists, living in the specter of Marxist ideology, negotiated socio-political and cultural systems dominated by the state; how they undermined the moral consciousness that state socialism imposed from above; and how they created alternative ways of being in an era that had promised the opening of society and art but that failed that pledge. I suggest that some artists increasingly questioned the state's hegemony in everyday relationships, language, and symbols, and attempted to neutralize self-censorship and gain sovereignty over their own bodies and minds through "decision as art." The dissertation approaches authoritarian domination within the context of the artists' aesthetic choices, especially the development of conceptual and performance art as a mode of opposition. Deliberating on the notion of decision as central to the conceptualization and execution of resistance to the state, I focus on the alternative ways in which Yugoslavian and Hungarian artists made art in variegated forms and modes of ethical commitment. I argue that such art must be understood as an active decision to live in and through art while enduring political circumstance.

The dissertation explores the artistic and cultural histories behind Egyptian national monuments and museums that were built and renovated by North Korean artists and architects. Archival materials from the American University in Cairo, Seoul National University, and the North Korean Research Center are used to contextualize these cultural sites within the broader history of diplomatic exchanges between the two nations. Such exchanges are framed as part of the international Cold War and inter-Korean competition. By piecing together resources such as government documents, artworks, and media coverage, the dissertation provides a history of exchanged aesthetics, ideologies, and methods of memorialization connecting the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East. The dissertation attends to questions of representation and national identity as they pertain to national monuments, museums, and cultural sites.

The dissertation begins by outlining the cultural and political developments between Egypt with North and South Korea from 1956 to present, complicating Cold War as a concept and extending beyond outdated geographic and temporal limitations. Then the dissertation uses Egyptian news coverage to trace the history of three buildings resulting from Hosni Mubarak’s 1983 diplomatic tour in Asia; the Japanese-funded Cairo Opera House (1988), the North Korean-designed October War Panorama (1989), and the Chinese-built Cairo Conference Center (1989). Next, the study theorizes the function of North Korean museums in Egypt and questions the implications of importing nationalistic aesthetics. Subsequent analysis addresses paintings by North Korean artists in the Egyptian National Military Museum that take inspiration from international films set in Egypt through the ages, from antiquity to the colonial era. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of the relationship between North Korean Juche ideology and the display of diplomatic gifts at the International Friendship Exhibition.

The medium of performance art locates both the art-making subject and the art object in the body of the artist. Performance art thus serves as an appropriate medium for integrating the complex, repetitive, and often unconscious somatic knowledges developed by two distinct experiences: the practice of religious ritual and the overwhelming conditions of trauma. In this dissertation, I explore the foundational idea that the artist's body can become a site of both theological significance and traumatic memory. I examine the connections among the forms of performance art, bodily worship practices, and traumatic experience in the work of three contemporary U.S. performance artists with devout religious backgrounds. Born between the1940s and the 1960s, Linda Montano, John Duncan, and Ron Athey have all consistently positioned their work in religious contexts. This trans-generational set of artists represents a spectrum of Christian traditions in the United States: Athey's improvisational Pentecostalism, the liturgical tradition of Montano's Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism in the form of Duncan's Calvinist Presbyterianism. At the same time, all three artists struggle with the persistent affect of traumatic experience, from domestic violence to sexual assault. These artists' works represent their traumatic experiences as mediated through the bodily, visual, intellectual, and aural forms of their respective Christian traditions. My dissertation identifies religion as a neglected foundation of performance art and as a fundamental motivating factor and force in shaping its forms, content, and significance.

This dissertation investigates how non-academic agents (i.e. artists, curators, and institutions) helped construct the current canon of Latin American art. It takes as case studies key exhibitions held in Brazil in order to examine how the central concepts of anthropophagy, geometric abstraction, and the political came to characterize the art of the region. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this work traces a local genealogy, thus offering a different starting point for understanding the Latin American art canon that has been recently institutionalized in such places as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of the global turn in art history.

Citing their different language and colonial history, Brazilian artists and critics have tended to view their art production as distinct from that of the rest of the continent. This dissertation, by contrast, recognizes Brazil as a fundamental player in the shaping of both a Latin American cultural identity and an expanded notion of the Americas. This expansion of Latin American art influences how artists represent themselves and how such production is actively being inserted into collections around the world.

The dissertation examines the work contemporary artists, curators, and scholars who have, in the last two decades, addressed urgent political and economic questions by revisiting the legacies of the Yugoslav twentieth century: multinationalism, socialist self-management, non-alignment, and war. I conceptualize the work of contemporary artists as that of Yugoslavia’s “surviving generation,” and use it as a starting point for a reconstruction of what I argue is a decolonial twentieth-century Yugoslav aesthetics that has persisted into the present despite numerous and violent historical ruptures. I also seek analogies between this aesthetics and a number of theoretical frameworks, in particular those of Edmund Husserl, Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler, whose work similarly arose out of constellations of crisis, death, and survival. The worldwide strengthening of conservative and nationalist movements following the crisis of capitalism in 2008 reveals the violent break-up of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a precursor to global developments, rather than an exception, and my dissertation argues for a global import of the Yugoslav experience. From the anti-imperialist assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the communist-led resistance during WW2, the anti-Stalinist socialist state and its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement, to the war-ridden, post-communist transition, the Yugoslav century is not only co-extensive with the dreams and disasters of the “short twentieth century” (1914-1991), but can be seen as this century’s metonymy, or even, synecdoche. The engagement of contemporary artists, scholars and curators with the aesthetic and political legacies of the Yugoslav century, the dissertation argues, opens up the possibility to read Yugoslavia both as a proper name, designating a particular history, and as a universally valid signifier for a number of unresolved and persisting questions of the past: the quest for social equality, ongoing forms of colonialism and decolonization, the return(s) of nationalism, and the crises of capitalism and democracy.

This dissertation explores and theorizes the work of American artist Matthew Barney through the concept of deadpan, and situates it in relation to themes of hybridity and animality in parallel histories of sculpture, performance art, and film.

The visual representation of Indigenous North American peoples in contemporary visual culture continues to rely on romanticized images drawn from early twentieth century salvage ethnography surveys, presenting Indigenous American nations as part of the continent’s storied past while denying their active presence in contemporary society. This dissertation explores a body of conceptual art photography, created between the 1990’s and the present, that responds uniquely to the persistence of romantic ethnographic visual tropes. Focusing on the work of artists who are members of Native American nations situated within the United States, this study explores the relationships among anthropological visual conventions, Western philosophies defining what it means to be human, Western academic theories of photography, and settler-colonial history in North America. It delves specifically into the links between the foundations of anthropological visualities and later twentieth century theory positing the photographic image as a mode of death, popularized by scholars including Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Martha Rosler, among others. I consider how the contemporary artists addressed intervene in these theoretical discourses of photography by way of interjecting elements of performance into photography. I identify and analyze strategies including the appropriation and physical manipulation of historic images; a reimaging of the photographic act; performative interventions into the still image; the use of satire and affect; Indigenous Futurisms; storytelling; and a radical collapsing of the boundaries between performance action and photography.

This dissertation examines the visual production of capital in socialist realist images during the Maoist era (1949-1976). By deconstructing the pseudo-opposition between capitalism and socialism, my research demonstrates that, although the country was subject to the unchallenged rules of capital and its accumulation in both domestic and international spheres, Maoist visual culture was intended to veil China's state capitalism and construct its socialist persona. This historical analysis illustrates the ways in which the Maoist regime recoded and resolved the versatile contradictions of capital in an imaginary socialist utopia. Under these conditions, a wide spectrum of Maoist images played a key role in shaping the public perception of socialism as a reality in everyday lives. Here the aesthetic protocols of socialist realism functioned to create for the imagined socialist world a new currency that converted economic values, which followed the universal laws of capital, into the fetish of socialism. Such a collective "cognitive mapping" in Fredric Jameson's words - which situated people in the non-capitalist, socialist world and inserted them into the flow of socialist time - rendered imperceptible a mutated capitalism on the terrain of the People's Republic of China under Mao. This research aims to build a conversation between the real, material space subordinated to the laws of capital and the visual production of imaginary capital in the landscapes of socialist realism, for the purpose of mapping out how uneven geographical development contributed to activating, dispersing, and intensifying the global movement of Soviet and Chinese capital in the cultural form of socialist realism. This study also illustrates how, via the image-making process, socialist realist and Maoist images influenced by Mao's romantic vision of the countryside were meant to neutralize this uneven development in China and mask its on-going internal colonialism. Through this analysis, I argue that, in the interesting juncture where art for art's sake and art for politics intersected, Maoist visual culture ended up reproducing the hegemony of capital as a means of creating national wealth.

For more than three decades the Moscow-based conceptual artist group "Collective Actions" has been organizing actions. Each action, typically taking place at the outskirts of Moscow, is regarded as a trigger for a series of intellectual activities, such as analysis, interpretation, narration, and description. The artists have systematically recorded and transcribed these activities, collecting and assembling texts, diagrams, and photographs in a ten-volume publication entitled "Journeys Outside the City." Five volumes of this publication concern the activities of the group before, and five after, 1989. Over the years the "Journeys Outside the City" became an idiosyncratic, self-sufficient aesthetic discourse arrayed along a constellation of concepts developed by those engaged in "Collective Actions." In its elusive hermeticism and self-referentiality the aesthetic framework constructed by these artists formed a closed system, gathering bundles of signs that seldom referred to anything concrete outside the horizon of Moscow Conceptualism. It is in this regard that the early volumes of the "Journeys Outside the City" can be compared to the similarly closed ideological discourse of the Soviet Politburo. After 1989, however, with the transition from socialism to capitalism, the aesthetic and artistic language of this group began to change as its text-based self-sufficient system began to open up under pressure from new socioeconomic conditions introduced by the processes of democratization and liberalization.

My dissertation "Transition in Post-Soviet Art: `Collective Actions' Before and After 1989" is neither a history of nor a monographical work on "Collective Actions," but rather an analytical exploration of aesthetic, artistic and institutional changes that have transpired in the "Journeys Outside the City" during the transition from socialism to capitalism. As the artists migrated from one art historical category into another (from the status of "unofficial artists" to that of "contemporary artists"), their aesthetics and art revealed a series of stylistic, technical, formal, textual, and aesthetical transformations and metamorphoses that paralleled broader cultural conversions taking place in post-Soviet and Eastern European art during the transition to capitalism.

This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

This dissertation analyzes Wolf Vostell's Fluxus Zug, 1981, arguing that it was simultaneously a work of art, a museum, an academy, and an archive. I explore the art work/alternative institution in relation to other museums that Vostell conceived and realized from the 1960s until his death in 1998; the interdisciplinary collaborations that he established in the 1960s; his concept for an ideal academy from 1969; the archive that he began building in the 1950s; and recent theories of the Archive. This microhistorical study reveals Vostell's centrality to contemporary experimental art. I argue that the spirit of Vostell's art and ideas are very much alive today as artists demonstrate widespread interest in curating as an art practice, in the construction of alternative pedagogies, and in working in, with, and against the Archive.