Browsing by Subject "Contemporary art"

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.

Before the rise of the ubiquitous MOCA (museum of contemporary) there was the Musée national du Luxembourg that since its foundation in 1818, served as the first museum anywhere dedicated to contemporary art. Yet the Luxembourg has been left to lurk in the shadows of art history. Best remembered for its mismanagement of the Caillebotte Bequest (1894-1897) that left the French state as the beneficiary of several dozen Impressionist canvases, the Luxembourg has been dismissed as epitomizing official support for an exhausted academicism.

This dissertation has sought to correct these misconceptions of the museum and the Third Republic Fine Arts administration. It provides an institutional history of the museum under the early Third Republic (1871-1914) that reconsiders how different interpretations of republicanism informed its curators' policies and practices. Information culled from archives, official publications, art criticism, and even tourist brochures, has revealed that in the 1890s and especially the 1900s, the museum's curators embraced the politics of solidarism. Applying solidarist principles such as eclecticism, tolerance, and commitment to public education, its curators defended their acquisition of both avant-garde and academic works of art. These principles further spurred curators to trace the spectrum of contemporary painterly styles to French artist tradition. In so doing, the Luxembourg's administrators implicitly upheld republicanism as a characteristically, even classically, French ideology that, in its translation into paint and institutional policies, testified to the nation's continued cultural, artistic, and political supremacy.

This project focuses on the question: how might we understand the politics of contemporary art? Grounding my research in feminist political theory, I argue that art’s most critical function—in the US-based context of neoliberalism—may be found in art’s ability to perform the work of social reproduction. I draw the concept of social reproduction from feminist and critical theory to mean two things. First, regarding social reproduction as a paradigm for social change, I ask how works of art participate in building subjects and structures that prefigure alternative, life sustaining worlds. Second, regarding social reproduction as the labor of care, I develop a theory of art as a source of critical hope and sensible rejuvenation. My work thus complicates the common belief—held for example in critical theory—that sensible stimulation obscures critical awareness and encourages apolitical escape. To the contrary, I find art to offer needed resources for critical world-building precisely through the aesthetic dispositions that artworks prompt. I build this argument through close attention to the work of three US-based women artists: Simone Leigh, Roni Horn, and Mika Rottenberg. By foregrounding the work of these artists in conversation with recent feminist thinking on affect and political economy, my research reorients the discourse on aesthetics and politics away from an emphasis on knowledge and subject representation, toward the undervalued work of somatic care and subject formation.

In 1949, Bell Lab mathematician Claude Shannon modeled telephone communication by assigning statistic regularity to the rather irregular usage of human language. His lab mate Warren Weaver took a step further, putting the novel Alice in Wonderland through a translation machine in pursuit of a unified form of intercultural communication. Amidst the ideological polarities of the Cold War, this rationalist pursuit was idealistic. Yet today it still guides the scholarly approach to intercultural communication. This approach to data analysis poses a problem: the corporate sector simply has far superior systems of aggregating data and manipulating information, while individual academics would either have to ally with the world’s most popular social media or be forever trapped in isolation and by deficits. My work, on the contrary, focuses on the advantages of studying deficits. It questions why and how details are deliberately stripped out, why and how experience is transformed into algorithmic power, all for creating the impression of mere “data.”

This dissertation has two main objectives, one inwardly focused, the other outwardly oriented: first, to create a dialogue between literary studies and media studies through discussions of informational loss; second, to shift the narrow focus of North American and German media theory by drawing broadly on the material history of literature, media, and art from modern and contemporary China. China studies, a field born out of Cold War contexts in the West, have thus far developed under the growing pressure to track the particularities of this cultural other like China, without paying much attention to what documents are doing to a history rife with deliberately omitted information. This dissertation rectifies this mistreatment of lost details. Targeting communication scholar Marshall McLuhan’s provocation that “the medium is the message,” we may say that what is missing is the message; preserving what is missing in a cultural other end up making us not see China at all.

How do we approach objects that are opaque and always disappearing from view? This study locates this issue at the intersection of media theory and literary theory through reviewing key historical moments in both fields: this study examines the archival compression of the historical figure and the corpus called “Lu Xun” (1881-1936) to rethink the destructive role of print media in constructing Chinese modernity; returns to the industrial production of “books to lose” in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to rethink the inevitable, functional bias of preservation in historiography; reviews the 1980s’ indulgence in a kind of “information fetishism” to reveal that opacity, too, can be a political ideal; and evaluates the claim of China’s 5G and AI “authoritarian networks” to expose the problematic metaphors of informatics. Each of the four chapters draws on literary and artistic texts, including Lu Xun’s untranslated essays (chapter 1), Yan Lianke’s fictional historiographies (chapter 2), Liu Cixin’s politicized science fiction (chapter 3), and emerging media arts in China (chapter 4). Referring to what tends to be hidden by acts of collecting, what becomes opaque, and what gets erased when the technological context is neglected, I borrow the term “lossy” from computer science. This term circumvents the notion of history based on static archives and their imaginary solidity. Interweaving two distinct threads of exposition (media studies and literature), this dissertation provides a multi-fold narrative about history, politics, and China.

This dissertation examines photographic representations of Ethiopian identity. It focuses on Emperor Haile Selassie I as a recuperative figure in Pan-African contexts, images by court photographer and later London studio portraitist Shemelis Desta, and contemporary works created by Ethiopian artists in the diaspora one generation after the Derg’s collapse. Exploring visual processes that concern, inform, and confront the practices of photographers working at the intersection of ethnic identity and nationalism, this dissertation scrutinizes Ethiopian artists’ views of the importance of their work to their country and to the African diaspora in conjunction with opposing historical narratives adopted by Black nationalists, and alternatively, white imperialists in the early twentieth century.

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.

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.