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.
The past decade has witnessed a marked increase of institutional interest in Black art production, particularly from women as they visualize and verbalize a multi-dimensional Black experience. Positioning at the intersection of historical race and gender subjugation in Europe and America uniquely situates women to maintain a gaze turned toward the self in which to create representations that conceptually, materially, and aesthetically personifies the complexities of Blackness. I examine representations of Black women created by Black women for the past century, that with the feminist traditions of care and regard, employ the use of the vernacular forms of African mythology, diasporic folklore, and storytelling. The aim of this study is to meet the profusion of institutional exhibitions and public interest in the creative labors of Black women with structure building in the form of an academic and critical framework that will make the moment substantive and sustaining. Through a methodology of case studies that presents the work and voice of an individual artist, I examine creative production across mediums that works to shape a collective genealogical trajectory. Connections among artists reveal how vernacular forms and feminist traditions are woven throughout the creative spaces of fiction, poetry, critical theory, and visual representations, and are active components in making whole the fragmented narratives that rise from interpretations of materials contained in the archive; thus expanding the boundaries that define a unique sense of Black time and space.
This dissertation argues that ceramic philosophy has the capacity to expand the curriculum of ceramics and its revolution. Furthermore, ceramics understood as a mode of philosophy and philosophy understood as a mode of ceramics, revolutionizes the way we think about clay, fire, and being. Grounded in the poetic ecology theory of material imagination of Gaston Bachelard, particularly his research on the imagination of matter, and reverie of fires, the project examines ceramics as a nexus of elemental thinking from the inside out. The project explores the practices of several modern ceramists, namely: Charles Binns, Bernard Leach, M.C. Richards, Lucio Fontana, and Peter Voulkos. Beginning with the question of ceramics situated between 1910- 1952 and continuing into Schelling’s notion of the mythological translated into clay myths, the theoretical arc follows Bachelard’s poetics of fire into a discourse that situates ceramics, ontologically and geologically, within the problem of a restoration ecology of material imagination. Engaging Leach’s notion of knowing goodclay and goodfire as a return to ceramics supports a fireclay philosophy grounded in materiality, I situate ceramic practice within John Sallis’s notion of the elemental gathering. Bachelard’s notion of reverie as a return to the awakening of material imagination supports a ceramic philosophy grounded in elemental thinking. The project concludes with an introduction to Kant and Schelling’s force of fire as a call to restoration ecology, a new curriculum of ceramic praxis grounded within mythological and geological forces. This final step situates the ‘ceramic turn’ as an important milestone in the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and the arts. Thus, just as ceramics once formally entered the canon of fine art, ceramic philosophy suggests a new language and opportunity, a radical alteration in how one thinks with clay and with fire, a mode of philosophy—one to which we all belong.
This dissertation will explore issues of inclusivity and underlying ethical questions that surround mainstream and independent creator-owned comic book characters in order to better understand what digital comic books mean and how they function in society. Mainstream comics, which developed in the early twentieth century and originated the idea of the female comic book superhero character, portray strong enduring females in metaphorical artistic narratives. Nonetheless, these female character concepts are today enhanced and expanded upon by creator-owned digital comics and multimedia art that provide gender and sexuality multiplicity, intersectional representations, and open-ended narratives. Although there is extensive scholarship on comic books in general, what is missing is an ethical exploration of the creator-owned digital comics portrayal of gender and sexuality of characters as they move into traditional art spaces and are seen through the lens of artistic free expression. Independent, creator-owned digital comics, such as Monstress, SAGA, and Moonstruck, provide more diverse representations of intersectionality, identity, and non-conforming narratives than mainstream comic books. I argue that the development of creator-owned comics presented as a new digital medium and in the realm of high art, opens the conversation to ponder broader cultural questions surrounding identity, performativity, and dissensus. I will form my argument by intertextualizing the sexuality and gender feminist theories of performativity of Judith Butler, the polyphonic carnival theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, and political dissensus theory of Jacques Rancière. Using contemporary works of art from Ian Cheng (Life After BOB and Bad Corgi), Alison Bechdel, (Fun Home, Are You My Mother, and Fun Home the musical), Ed Atkins (Old Food, and Corpsing), and Kerry James Marshall (Rythm Mastr), this study will contribute to a more thorough understanding of digital comic aesthetics and multi-media character representations as artistic open-ended expressions.
This project argues that Black/ness embodies a uniqueness that is communicated through its poetic and aesthetic expression. This uniqueness is posited here as the Black Sublime. It addresses the conditionality of Black/ness in a state of constant historical and ongoing oppression this thesis calls Black State. This is the conditionality of DuBois’s Veil, or Glissant’s matrix, which screams for Opacity. Christina Sharpe aligns this historical context in her work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being with what she calls, “Wake Work”. The process of Wake Work moves through DuBois’s Veil, and Glissant’s aquatic reality, as a baptism, a violent submersion into nothingness that becomes a rebirth into thinglyness.
Exploring the realms of Black/ness as Black Sublime read with and against/despite the Kantian Sublime, is to understand more fully the connections between Black/ness and the possibilities of representation, this is to say, the As If. This as if, which is an abstraction, allows for the construction of race, which challenges Black/ness and its pursuit of Being, but is also a chaotic and poetic realm which ironically allows for possibilities outside of the fixed Black State of impossibility.
We will argue how its beingness or its ontology is disclosed through aesthetics and poetics, acting not only as a disruption to Western standards of language and the binding narrative of Black/ness as contrary to the “Reasoning” human, but also opens to something transformative and beyond it. This project explores the As Is of Black/ness and its relation to spirit, soul, abjection, and the sublime. We will show how the gesture of a Black Sublime allows for a generative liberational praxis that motivates and exists beyond the performativity of resistance and the metaphor of freedom. It is the possibility of the impossible.
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 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.