IDSVA Dissertations are archived as electronic documents at the Maine State Library website. Click on the title of the dissertation (when available) to download the pdf.
Awarded to one graduate each year, The Ted Coons Dissertation Prize was established in 2015 to acknowledge outstanding IDSVA dissertations. It was made possible thanks to a generous donation by Dr. Ted Coons, Professor of Psychology, Cognition & Perception at the Center for Neural Science at NYU. Ted Coons is a pioneer in the field of neuroscience and a major contributor to early studies in neuroaesthetics.
This dissertation employs phenomenological and poststructuralist modes of inquiry to examine the relationship between techno’s utilization of abject experiences and the cultivation of a synergetic community embracing hope and inclusiveness. Using such key philosophers as: Mikhail Bakhtin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, and Rosalind Krauss, I emphasize parallels between community and track structure by investigating the interconnectedness between participants (including the DJ) within techno events and the interplay of samples within techno tracks. This analysis reveals tensions and dualities that shape the techno community and music, and involves the subversion and diminishing of hierarchical structures found within our day-to-day. Approaching techno in this way fills an underexplored gap within current scholarship, which commonly approaches the subject matter through the lenses of deviance, drug abuse, or its clumsy connections to shamanism.
I argue that techno continually forges a synergetic community, transcending prior superficial interpretations that situate techno as related to momentary cathartic release. I emphasize the importance of interconnectedness, participation, and technology in fostering intimacy within a world increasingly swallowed by detachment. With a focus on peace, love, unity, and respect (P.L.U.R.), I assert that technology empowers the subversion of hierarchical structures, drawing individuals closer to one another rather than furthering isolation and alienation. This shift highlights that techno belongs to both everyone and no one. However, as techno is increasingly integrated within the mainstream, it has greater possibility for exploitation. This is why understanding techno’s transformative potential is important. By examining techno as a participatory experience and an activist state, as well as focusing on its development through its use of Detroit’s abjection to spur hope, inclusiveness, and the act of continual forging, I situate techno as being capable of transforming how we treat ourselves, others, and the rest of the world.
This dissertation explores the materiality of dwelling as a woven threshold. The study begins with Martin Heidegger’s project concerning the problem of dwelling as a separation from Being to posit a concept of dwelling that weaves together the elements of nature, human presence, and the mystery of Being as a praxis of meaningful belonging with the world. In this fourfold, the aesthetics of dwelling reveal both the gift and the responsibility of human presence in the world. This study aims to unravel the knots that challenge dwelling by tracing the located separations from the world within the development of hierarchical hegemonies and by critiquing Western metaphysics, including the impulses of dualism, abstraction, and value calculation. Individual threads of the argument are teased out by using the methods of phenomenology, materialism, and feminist hermeneutics, assisted by the writing of Martin Heidegger, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adriana Cavarero, Luce Irigaray, Donna J. Haraway, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. The study traverses the historical, mythological, and political threads of domestic embodiment through the work of Neolithic weaving women and ancient Minoan practices of oikonomia to the rise of the polis and the development of political economies that work to separate the human body from the materiality of the world. The project honors the historical and contemporary unravelers whose work has navigated and opened the ways to dwelling, such as Guo Xi, Homer’s Penelope, Vanessa Bell, Roni Horn, Lenore Tawney, Chiharu Shiota, Candice and Dora Wheeler, and Virginia Woolf. Finally, while acknowledging the frayed remnants of the materiality of living on a damaged planet, the work returns to Heidegger’s uncanny being and the Daoist landscape to offer some hope for the recuperation of dwelling in the woven thresholds to come.
There is more than one world and more than just humans. An attention to process is recognized in artistic practice and is just beginning to be articulated in the philosophical as a significant response to the problematics of the Anthropocene, the impact of humans on world existence. We can think of and prepare for a future beyond capitalism and Western Metaphysics, with or without humans. Starting with the human use of culture, new relations can be cultivated with nonhumans and nonhuman sensing. Using America as a unique cultural and topological convergence outside of historical European context assists in creating connections between theory and practice as an embodied material praxis.
This project attends to the shift away from Western Metaphysics in aesthetic philosophy to incorporate American philosophers who develop alternate ethical considerations from the dominant paradigm. By starting from a point of deep ecology and the ecologically multiple, the human (and more than human) biome acts as a representation of continuous and continuously negotiated biomes (nature, culture, worlds, senses). This project seeks to recuperate an ethical understanding of these constructions as processes subject to reevaluation. This reevaluation proposes alternative solutions to the nihilistic directives of the Anthropocene. How humans interact with their environment informs their creation and value of culture and the cultivated.
Contemporary culture politicizes material nature by demeaning its corporeality. By using the concern of capitalism and the understanding of deep ecology as bookends, this project utilizes the invocation of the classical elements (Aether, Water, Earth, Fire, & Air) to assess aesthetic representations of freedom and their proposed ability to act as connections between all processes of being. The process of combining the intangible and the tangible creates and transforms values. Through such lenses as American pragmatism, Process philosophy, and Affect theory, an experimental philosophical analysis offers space for new ethos to emerge.
This dissertation identifies paths of escape from the familiar confines of care as presented by domesticated life. To this end I assert that the human capacity to care is a deeply rooted, creative impulse, which exceeds the visually governed human ontology. In other words, the human approach to the caring relationship presents certain self-centered and self-imposed limits which have served to truncate the relationship to care through the oppressive deployment of utility, roles, and stasis. I argue that wild care, in its a) visceral redolence, b) wavering grief, c) feral excess, and d) fetal potentiality, opens the threshold of human-being beyond the confines of its own domestication; that is to say, from caring for to being-with. By combining the hermeneutics of vital materialism and French surrealism within the ecosystem of the forest, I endeavor to build a new definition of care, which I term wild care. For the depth of the transformation necessary for wild care to emerge, the dynamics of decay and growth in the forest must be implemented into serious theoretical considerations. Hence, I introduce the following analytical concepts: the ambivalent loss, understood as wavering grief, that is a somatically inscribed and perpetually fluctuating state that opens the human threshold to encounter new ways of being;ferality, an ever present condition of the forest, that provides an escape from the captivity of domestic life and, in its excretive excess, bears the persistent residue of wild care; fetality–present in the womb of the woods, that is the most potent site of wild care which resists telos in favor of possibility, awakening the sense of being here, but not here yet. Being, then, as energy acting through material, therefore constantly breaks through the boundaries imposed by human perception, opening us to the wild side of care.
This inquiry considers the representation of Argentine women through popular mass-produced and mass-embodied artworks from the 1940s to the early 21st century. Selected artworks, authored by women, are analyzed in their capacity to trigger reflections and discussions, agitate, and question. I argue that the mass aesthetic, emerging from a political interest to a denunciation of feminine oppression within a patriarchal structure, is interconnected with a new feminine identity and visibility. Visibility means that women are not only seen but rather that they are heard and respected and can aspire to livable lives.
To understand the progressive slippages from sameness to heterogeneous identities and new visibility, I address the mass art aesthetic and philosophical intersections and their capacity to transform messages of grief and disobedience in the public and cyber spaces into affects and strong alliances. My combined methodology of narrative and hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry demonstrates how popular mass-produced and mass-embodied artworks authored by women, in the 1940s in Argentina until the present day, facilitate slippages in identity formation and visibility as an ongoing process of becoming 'Mujer Visible’ (Visible Woman).
My project explores the nexus of temporality and ontology intersecting with the work of art and the viewer. I focus on theatricality from Michael Fried’s 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,” which asserts the superiority of the “instantaneousness” of modernist art over the “duration” engendered by minimalism's objecthood, i.e., its strident physicality.
I trace the genealogy of Fried’s theory of theatricality through its partial subsumption under what he calls the problematic of beholding. Both address the idea that the work of art “acknowledges” the viewer’s presence. I argue that, despite its flaws, Fried’s initial theory in “Art and Objecthood,” with its synergistic (and antagonistic)approach, has kernels of a robust explication of the relation of the viewer to the work of art that his later iterations lack because he attenuates temporality and ontology. In Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), Fried returns to a vehement opposition to the theatricality of minimalism; however, his objections are eroded by his changing positions, as he has already established that certain aspects of theatricality are acceptable, inspired especially by contemporary photography and the paintings of Manet.
As a corrective, poet and theorist Octavio Paz provides us with models of the temporal and ontological tensions inherent in modernist art. Paz approaches these issues through the lens of modernism’s self-critique,from the Romantic poets’ clash of linear versus primordial time, to Duchamp’s questioning of the art object. Fried attempts to find a stable reading of a work of art through the separation of the temporal from the ontological, as in his analysis of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Through Paz, I propose an approach that celebrates these tensions without entirely abandoning Fried’s original conception of theatricality, furthering the dialogue regarding temporality and ontology and their intersection with the work of art and the viewer.
This dissertation establishes the concept of what I have named “removed closeness” as a means through which to develop a deeper understanding of, and dismantle ethereal discussions around, dance forms of the African Diaspora. I assert that removed closeness empowers the Black Tap Dancing Body to cross boundaries of geography, space, and time, enabling it to serve as a vehicle for catharsis, provide access to the sublime, and secure the future of Tap Dance as it maintains the link between tradition and innovation. Part One unpacks the concept of removed closeness and discusses catharsis, the sublime,and how removed closeness allows access to both. Additionally, African religion is discussed to clarify how African and western philosophical ideas can be bridged via the analysis of removed closeness and its manifestation in dance. Part Two delves into the history of Tap Dance, providing further context of the art form and how it became what we see today. Connections are drawn between the Black American movement systems involved in the creation of Tap Dance and the African movement systems that provided the initial groundwork. Part Three provides an earnest attempt to determine the future of the Black Tap Dancing Body. The philosophy of Afrofuturism is unpacked, along with its intersection with removed closeness– both place emphasis on the importance of maintaining a connection to tradition and using that connection to move forward, grow, andevolve. The first purpose of this research is to find a different way to understand the Black Dancing Body and investigate the experience of its past, present, andfuture. The second purpose is to give words to an experience and provide another discursive entry point for those most impacted by this query: Black Dancing Bodies that are performing Black Dance forms while navigating white dominated spaces.
An investigation of the art of Tara Donovan, Liza Lou, Dave Cole, and Wolfgang Laib precipitated an articulation of a unique concept, the domestic sublime. The use of non-traditional art materials employed by each artist is one of the unifying characteristics that makes their work illustrations of the domestic sublime. Each artist presents work that is familiar yet uncomfortable, comforting yet disturbing, and lastly, finite yet immeasurable. The combination of repetitive labor, vast quantities of physical materials, and forms that present the unknown reveal characteristics of the domestic sublime.
Tracing the concept of the sublime from its origins to today allows for its evolution from a transcendental experience to a tangible, material manifestation in contemporary discourse. Key figures in this argument include Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. Domesticity commonly refers to any labor, activity or material related to, in or around the home and has numerous social, historical, and philosophical contexts. Situated in notion of modernity, the domestic’s foundation is comprised of layers of discourse that include the politics of labor, economic implications, boundaries, technology, and identity. Contributing philosophers to the domestic include Gaston Bachelard, Witold Rybczynski, Simone de Beauvoir, Kathleen M. Kirby, Henri Lefebvre, and Martin Heidegger.
Characteristics from both the domestic and the sublime meld to a framework that supports the paradoxes and complexities inherent in both notions, while simultaneously revealing the overlapping notions that inextricably create the domestic sublime. The artwork that illustrates the notion of the domestic sublime combines domestic materials, labor, and space with the uncanny relationships inherent in the sublime such attraction and repulsion, interior and exterior, and comfort and terror.
This research addresses the constraints of creative practice as it exists within the realm of mainstream capitalist culture and the possibilities for creative practice when practiced through a lens of anarchism. Drawing from Silvia Federici’s historical analysis of Marxist enclosures, and Gregory Sholette’s argument of art as a form of enclosure, this research advocates for an expansion of what is considered creative practice. The Dominant Art World Structures indicate institutional organization, a relationship with the cultivation of capital, and a hierarchical construction, making space for the conversations, practices, and people that have been allocated to this realm of mainstream contemporary art practice. In my research, I explore the potential for a creative commons, that allows for inclusion of voices that would traditionally be excluded from the Dominant Art World Structures. I engage with practices that often lie outside of the Dominant Art World, that may not even be commonly identified as art. The research also includes examples of creative practitioners whose practices are not acknowledged. Sources include punk zines, small town newspapers, posters from events that were not otherwise documented, and interviews with community members. This research advocates for a foundation of anarchic perspective that grounds itself on consciousness as stemming from the relational of being part of the other, of being a participant of the collective.
The first half of the dissertation examines what capitalism, consumption, and commodification has created in relation to art, leaving a realm filled with competition with the eventual outcome being the monetization of people and relationships themselves. The second half of the dissertation begins to construct a perspective of what creative practice could be, when coming from a consciousness that employs anarchic sensibilities. These chapters identify characteristics of the creative commons and explore practices that demonstrate these characteristics, including collaboration or collective action without claim to authorship, skill sharing, and what it means to build from the ground up.
The commonalities that plants, shamans and artists share may not be evident at first glance, nevertheless, if we search for uncomfortable entanglements and difficult questions, we may find that for centuries the voice with which plants speak has been the Amazonian yachag and the chamana or healer. Furthermore, who has invariably accompanied different plateaus along humanity’s convoluted becomings, has been what I have called the artist in trance. This artist is a concoction born from Walter Benjamin’s notion of ecstatic trance and Nietzche’s tragic artist. In this research I have investigated the being of plants or plant ontology and how they may be others who we may learn from in order to relate to Earth in a better way. The artist-yachag or artist philosopher as we may call her, is the one who bridges disparate conocimientos or knowledge, those of plants and those of shamans and translates them into our own words and worlds. What for? To learn to inhabit this planet in a softermood, in a weak mood as Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala would say, stemming from other visions and other perspectives. The interconnectivity that plants generate, as well as the idea of them being a world in themselves allied with the yachag or shaman and the artist, may lead humanity towards the understanding of a world to come. Applyingand expanding the notion first posited by Levi-Strauss and then contested by Viveiros de Castro that the relation between nature and culture is one of“metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric resemblance”, I argue that the same kind of contiguity exists between plants,the Amazonian yachag and the artist in trance. The trope ofmetonymic contiguity serves to connect in a continuum these three entities one after the other in a nature-culture effervescent symbiosis.