Browsing by Subject "Conceptual Art"

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 dissertation, “Sound Matters in Poetry, Music and Arts Under Dictatorship in Brazil,” shows how experiments with sound across three different fields—poetry, popular music, and fine art—established new models for poetic, musical, and artistic interventions in which sounding and listening practices were set to destabilize traumatic experiences under the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964–1985. The cases analyzed in this dissertation are a particular iteration of the long Brazilian modernist tradition, which both responds to global aesthetic modernism and local desires for the construction of a national culture. The first chapter looks at Augusto de Campos’s late concrete poetry, arguing that it is as auditory as it is visual, and that sound is central to his engagement with politics and media in mid-1960s Brazil. The second chapter turns to João Gilberto and Caetano Veloso’s early 1970s work: I show how, prompted by concrete poetry and new media technologies, these artists tackled the trauma of exile through an unconventional and creative use of sound, expanding musical conventions. The final chapter engages with sound art and media, examining works by Antonio Dias, Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas, and Paulo Bruscky: I analyze how they used vinyl records as a sculptural medium in order to combine conceptual inquiry with political critique. Ultimately, this dissertation presents a poetics of sound fostered by artists who created forms of micropolitical dissent during times of macropolitical authoritarianism and brutality.