Browsing by Subject "Art criticism"

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.

This thesis will describe the way a story functions within a sermon as a layer of meaning placed over the biblical text that enhances a particular message from the Gospel. Stories allow the faithful to become active listeners as they unite their own stories to the one being told, creating a shared, lived experience. To demonstrate how the layering of stories function in a homily, I have created an art series of assemblages, visually illustrating how each layer focuses on certain textual details while discarding others. This visual exegesis highlights themes in the biblical text and illuminates the sermonic role of stories. It also provides an avenue for spiritual reflection, revealing similarities between my artistic process and my process of sermon preparation. The thesis is completed with a homily, synthesizing the elements described and sharing a message of hope from the scriptural account of the three young men in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3).

This dissertation deals with Cuban art criticism and other written texts related to Abstract Art. From a critical perspective that relates art to society and political and institutional practices, all of the above texts are interpreted as bearers of aesthetic ideologies, which are expressed in the paradigms from which Art Criticism attempted to validate Abstraction. This study further demonstrates that the dominant discourses in the realm of Art Criticism are strongly related to Ideological State Apparatuses. Art Criticism not only mediates between the artwork and the spectator, but also between artistic acts of provocation and the establishment.

Abstraction in Cuba constituted an important axis in the polemic between autonomous art and socially committed art, but the debates themselves were subsumed in ideological and even political battlefields. Art Criticism oriented these debates, by emphasizing certain problems, and diminishing the importance of other ones.

This dissertation is organized in function of the dominant questions that Cuban Art Criticism addressed. The first chapter accordingly deals with definitions of abstract art that were prevalent in art writing and publications from 1948 to 1957, a period in which Art Criticism is mostly concerned with the autonomy of art. The second chapter follows the debates about the social commitment of abstract art, which became predominant during the first years of a Marxist-oriented Revolution. This polemic is implicit in the emergence of an Anti-Academic movement in the visual arts, and it began to lose its strength once the Cuban Avant-Garde started to gain institutional recognition. After being relegated to a peripheral position, the question concerning the social commitment of Abstract Art became crucial after the triumph of the Revolution. The final chapter deals with the relations between Abstract Art and the diverse documents that embodied and defined the Cultural Policy during the Cuban Revolution.

Throughout, this study strives to establish the place of Abstract Art in the Institutional, and discursive practices from 1959 onwards. This place is defined by its instability, as it is constituted through intermittencies and steps backwards on the path towards the institutional consecration of non-figurative tendencies.

Art historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.

Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.

Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.

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.

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

Maintenance Works: The Aesthetics and Politics of Collective Support investigates the cultural visibility and value of maintenance labor through a critical examination of American visual and material culture, post-1969. Starting from the visual and performance practice of self-proclaimed “maintenance artist” Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!, I develop a conceptual definition of maintenance as sustaining activity that occurs across scales, from the intimate labor of caring for bodies, to the collective, macro-scale problems of sustaining infrastructures and environments. I argue that, with the gesture of assigning her own and others’ maintenance labor the status of “artwork”, Ukeles prompts a critical re-valuation of the visibility and social and economic value of maintenance that resonates with a host of historical and contemporary discourses on the gendered and stratified distribution of material and social reproduction, including Marxist-feminist approaches to care work, critiques of innovation discourse in science and technology studies, and concern with issues of social and economic precarity in recent cultural criticism and critical theory. At the center of both Ukeles’ project and these discussions lie important questions about the status, conditions, and social distribution of care and support: Who is doing it? How does it get done? How does it feel to maintain or be maintained? What happens when practices and structures of social and material support fail, whether through immediate crisis or prolonged neglect? How do those affected find ways of maintaining otherwise? Each chapter of Maintenance Works approaches these questions by examining the visual and material culture around what I define as late 20th-century “crises of maintenance”: shifting economies of care and support, global environmental destruction, and institutionalized abandonment and neglect. The cultural objects I discuss span decades and genres, including land and environmental art, feminist and queer performance, and social practice. Through these material case studies I add important theoretical and cultural foundation to contemporary discussions on care, precarity, and sustainability across disciplines from queer and feminist theory to eco-critical humanities, to science and technology studies, and center the production and reception of artwork as sites for critical inquiry and knowledge production.

This dissertation argues that critical practices in the expanded field of art, technology, and space illustrate the potential of twenty-first century media by materializing depths of our experiential dimensions. Scholarship on digital embodiment and materialism in art, media studies, and aesthetics has paid much attention to the central role played by the human body in contemporary media environments. Grounded in these studies, however, this study moves forward to understand the more fundamental quality that grounds and conditions the experience of the human body—namely depth.

Drawing on diverse disciplines, such as art history, visual studies, media studies, critical theory, phenomenology, and aesthetics, this study provides a reconstruction of the notion of depth to unpack the complex dimensionality of human experiences that are solicited by different critical spatial practices. As a spatial medium that produces the body subject and the world through the process of intertwining, depth points to an environmental affordance that prepares or conditions the ways in which the body processes the information in the world. The dimension of depth is not available to natural human perception. However, incorporating twenty-first century media that are seamlessly embedded in physical environments, critical spatial practices sensibly materialize the virtual dimensions of depth by animating space in a way that is different from the past.

This dissertation provides comprehensive analyses of these critical spatial practices by artists who create constructed situations that bring the experiential dimensions of depth to the fore. The acknowledgement of depth allows us to understand the spatialities of bodies and their implication in the vaster worldly spatiality. In doing so, this study attends to major contemporary philosophical and aesthetic challenges by reframing the body as the locus of subjectivity that is always interdependent upon broader sociocultural and technological environments.

This thesis discusses the subject and media of Dmitri Karamazov an interactive graphic novel with Augmented Reality component. Dmitri Karamazov is adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel the Brothers Karamazov. The author uses a fannish, feminine reading strategy to interpret Dostoevsky's character Mitya, transforms the original narrative and retells the story with the assistance of AR technology. The use of AR in Dmitri Karamazov highlights the fanfiction nature of this interactive graphic novel. It shows how a reader can actively participate in literary interpretation, criticism, writing, rewriting, adapting and creating in a new layer of reality. In terms of literature appreciation and consumption, AR encourages people to break away from their traditional passive-reader roles, and provides a virtual space for people to assume authorship of the materials they encounter.

This dissertation is an attempt to explain art in the 21st century by an artist/researcher. It is a theoretical writing on art informed by current discourses that influence art such as science and technology. There are two goals of this project. The first one is to understand art’s cultural role in the age of the anthropocene. What is the anthropocene? How does art’s role in society change in this particular geological epoch (following Crutzen’s definition), compared to for instance Holocene? This brings us to the second goal of my project. To better understand art’s role in society, can we benefit from a theory of art, that could present an insight on the dynamics within an artistic experience? What are the current tools and tendencies that can help form such a theory of art? Which fields can contribute to such an understanding?

As an instance of artistic research practice which involves both academic research and art practice, I will be using art projects as case studies to reach these goals. Case studies will consist of my own projects as well as projects by other artists who had been working on similar topics such as Edward Burtynsky, Chris Jordan, Louis Bec, Trevor Paglen, Patricia Piccinini and Lynn Hershmann to name a few. From Timothy Morton to Mackenzie Wark to Donna Haraway cultural theorists of our time, highlight the fact that there is a need for a cultural theory that can attend to what we might call the anthropocene. What is the contribution of art for such a theory? Or can art be instrumental in building a cultural theory at all? My dissertation offers a multi-disciplinary argument for the need to address such questions . Starting from art’s roots in biology and extending to what we might call our biological imagination, the dissertation focuses on art’s connection to biology to initiate a formula for art in the age of the anthropocene.

Today, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control. The increasingly complex and abstract, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, as well as the local and global scales. Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers – where its differential impacts are felt and negotiated strongly.

This dialectical move, unifying and differentiating at once, is crucial for my project of situating the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital, thereby overcoming its peripherical reading. In contrast to the post-oil spectacles of the Arabian Gulf, such as Dubai, I look at the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, such as Beirut, due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration. Hence, these cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of wealth accumulation and class formation in the region underlying the dominance of the Gulf and US imperialism. Consequently, we can unpack the spatial-temporal reconfigurations of global capital from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, militarism, logistics, and computation.

Expanding on Jonathan Beller’s idea of computational capital, I argue that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism. In other words, computational media are operationalized within a capitalist society that preys on the continuous reproduction of imperial divisions, techniques, institutions, and rights while obscuring their historicity. Thus, we need to bring back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law). Consequently, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction but also due its embeddedness within the histories of modern thought and colonialism.

My aim is to revive the utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism while reformulating the image of historicity and globality today. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, intervening in the economic, legal, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle Eastern context, ranging from smart weapons to smart cities. My analyses show that artistic practice could allow us some insights about the economic and social structures that govern our immediate and situated experience, whereas media studies could help us to navigate through the convoluted cartographies of computational capital today.

As my project demonstrates, there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space. Those urban struggles will persist, always exceeding the bounds of our theories. My project affirms an aesthetic that does not exist yet, not because it is impossible but, rather, it cannot be encapsulated in a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.

In the industrial vocabulary of the nineteenth century, “obsolescence” is regularly cast as a loss; it is the profit forfeited when advances in technology render the current means of production unnecessary. But in the twentieth century obsolescence morphs in both sensibility and cultural meaning, becoming a routine feature of discourses dedicated to the re-invention of the self, as in the declaration of an ad from the New York Times of November 12,1950: “New New a thousand times New (we’d rather die than obsolesce!)” Here and elsewhere obsolescence becomes valued for the distinction it helps to impart: that modernity is about newness, that futurity and commodities are often linked to the ephemeral. For the Futurists, “houses will last less long than we”; for General Motor’s Alfred P. Sloan, automobiles will change every year; for the post-WWII manufacturers of disposable goods, objects like Kleenex will lapse mere seconds after their use. My dissertation “Useless: The Aesthetics of Obsolescence in Twentieth Century U.S. Culture” studies how art acts as a repository for the obsolete, a “home” for the worthless objects, rejected places, and ruined bodies otherwise considered to be useless.

The project is divided into four chapters that trace how the presence of obsolescence in cultural texts produces aesthetic effects that resist, mourn, or disrupt the logic of obsolescence. In my first chapter, “The Totemic: Willa Cather, Mesa Verde, and Modernist Form,” I illustrate how modern artists form a relation to obsolete objects that is sacred. Reading Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House (1925) in relation to her own cross-country journey to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915, I argue that the park, the museum, and the World Exposition all demonstrate the ways in which the U.S. forges a “totemic” relation between its citizens and obsolete indigenous objects in the first decades of the twentieth century. This relation is what motivates the National Park Service to preserve the indigenous ruin and to accrue vast tracks of land and expend Federal resources to assure their continuity; it is also what attracts Cather to these particular objects as worthy of literary representation, producing a “totemic” form that mirrors the form of the National Park. Importantly, the various acts the U.S. is committing contemporaneously in order to preserve the ruins (expelling tribes from ancestral homelands, laying claim to sacred spaces, appropriating funeral objects) is actively under erasure in both the NPS and Cather’s text.

In Chapter Two “Decaying Spaces: Faulkner’s Gothic and the Construction of the Capitalist Real,” I continue the trajectory begun in the first chapter with a focus on how obsolescence impacts modernist aesthetic practice. In particular, I study William Faulkner’s novels As I Lay Dying (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Absalom, Absalom (1932) to illustrate how his literary modernism is not a movement dedicated to the “new” but is instead deeply invested in the objects (and bodies) made “useless” by industrialization. Interestingly, it is his investment in rusting artifacts that prompts literary critics to assign his works to the gothic tradition. Responding to this classification, I argue that since the categorization of literature often defaults to realism-mimesis as the originary mode from which all other genres deviate, many critical accounts of Faulkner tend to simply approximate how far his narration strays from accurately describing economic reality. The paradox is that Faulkner’s narration of the actual decay present in his cultural landscape is often not “real” enough to be considered realism; it is in “excess” of the real, which suggests that the capitalist real is an ideal referent containing only minimal traces of degradation. I therefore explore the tension in the first half of the 20th century between realism and Gothicism where, increasingly, the capitalist real comes to be articulated around that which is new, modern, and efficient.

Taking as its historical marker the automation of industry, Chapter Three “The Political: Junk, Trash, and Post-Modern Technique” investigates how a junk aesthetic begins to develop in the mid-century out of the detritus of industrial production. To illustrate how this aesthetic functions in literary texts, I examine Philip K Dick’s novels Time Out of Joint (1954), Ubik (1969), and Valis (1981) as well as his depiction in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) of “kipple”—all of the useless objects like wrappers, containers, and plastics that industrialism leaves behind and that ultimately threatens the grounding of our material existence. Since Gross Domestic Product peaks in the middle of the century, making these the years in which the United States floods the cultural landscape with a staggering amount of disposable goods, I argue that writers and artists in the 1950s and 60s (Bruce Conner, George Herms, Ed Kienholz) respond to this saturation by making sculptures and fictional worlds out of plastic chairs, dirty dishes, and wrecked autos, an illustration of how the obsolete commodity, meant to be ephemeral, takes on a new political significance in the art of the mid-century.

The last chapter “Apocalyptic Vision: Revelation in the Ruins of Detroit” examines how the city that perfects built-in obsolescence finds itself obsolete. In particular, I study how the recent proliferation of ruin photography circulating both online and in print registers the obsolescence of the U.S. industrial sector. Based on the sheer number of visual texts that take Detroit’s ruins as its subject: Lowell Boileau’s The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit (1996), Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (2010), Dan Austin and Sean Doerr’s Lost Detroit (2010), Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit (2010), Marchand and Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit (2011), not to mention all of the amateur footage on YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, I consider Detroit ruin photography to be a genre in its own right. I illustrate how the focus of these representations is on industrial decay—the ruinous landscape of post-industrial Detroit with its abandoned houses, defunct factories, and rusting ports, and argue that the effect of this decay is “apocalyptic”; it is, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, the very concept of the City that is in decline. To illustrate the economic force of obsolescence, I interrogate how post-industrial artists like Detroit’s Tyree Guyton re-purpose defunct industrial objects into art pieces at the same time that portions of decaying Detroit houses sell on the global art market as found art.

In our capitalist world-economy, fear has become the primary source material for wealth production. Fear underwrites regimes of limited access and various systems of occupation. Occupation as a strategic operational paradigm extends into civilian life of the dark and unresolved colonial, imperial and totalitarian legacies. The domestic and international exclusion of certain populations is grounded in age-old, mostly violent self/other distinctions that have been re-activated from their latent state and again made into viral political discourse material. An array of complex infrastructures, which include legal architectures and the built environment, have acquired operational importance. Such infrastructures are characterized by a built-in violence designed to control, contain, and redirect the massive population flows created by the globally destabilizing and denaturalizing affects of contemporary capital. Access to opportunity, vital resources, and security have become the crucial equity that populations compete for in the early 21st century. The very nature of capital has been transformed into actual economies of fear. Whereas parts of the world’s population will have the chance to live a dignified life, other parts will be indefinitely deprived of such fortunes and left to perish. The end result of such economies is the death-world.

The analysis proposed by this dissertation blurs the disciplinary boundaries between art, cultural anthropology, sociology, military history, economics, political science, psychology, architecture, urban studies, philosophy. This transdisciplinary methodology originates from the understanding that an effective critique of global capital as the dominant economic world-system can no longer be explained via a single knowledge field or academic specialty. Moving a step beyond interdisciplinary studies to bona fide informational crossovers between textual and visual archives allows for a more encompassing and thick investigation. The multi-sited approach of this study examines the visual traces found in the built environment and the controversial social realities expressed in current global geopolitics. The resulting synthesis between theory and practice offers new pathways for citizen participation and for potential solutions to collective grievances and global risks. This transdisciplinary approach gives art a leading role in establishing a new sense of place in which people are empowered to articulate their ideas—a new place built from a rehabilitated understanding of trust in self, trust in collective institutions, and trust in reality and truth. Above all, this new place holds the promise of a future worth living and fighting for.