INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
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 is an investigation of the combat sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) as both works of art and as philosophical processes for both fighters (the artists) and the spectators (the audience), an operation that inevitably leads to the disclosure of being. Using the anatomization’s of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the taxonomies of Roger Caillois, Friedrich Nietzsche’s notions on drama and animality, along with Martin Heidegger’s ontological confrontations with metaphysical forces, the inquiry aims to describe and extract some of the art- philosophy contained within MMA fight-works by investigating various principles, factors, and dynamics that become the constituting elements to the creation of form and meaning. The dissertation situates MMA within the context of a larger discourse in theater studies that aims to identify and describe the elements that distinguish this unique form of performance. This contextualization additionally clarifies the interdisciplinary nature of MMA and highlights the features which do not deny its athletic foundation but distinguish it from other sports and places it more accurately within the fine arts as embodied thought.
Relational attentiveness is necessary to reconsider being-in-the-world, especially our interactions with more-than-human subjectivities. As a form of being-with, relational attentiveness allows for greater attunement and engagement. This dissertation proposes philosophically to redefine and consolidate “attentiveness,” a term historically recognized for its importance but only referenced tangentially in contemporary philosophy and never accorded the status or rigor of a philosophical concept. Reframing Heidegger’s imperative question: What is called thinking? as What is called thinking-with? in concert with the work of vibrant materialist Jane Bennett, highlights attentiveness with the more-than-human. Although Bennett discusses the vibrancy of objects and affords the potential for an extension to other nonhuman subjectivities, she does not explicitly pursue this inquiry. Exploring a relationship with more-than-human and thus redefined subjectivities through relational attentiveness, intimacy, and sharing enables the subject to perceive and engage within interludes of vibrant space.
I define relational attentiveness as attention to meaning rather than purpose, which necessitates a departure from Cartesian dualism; I define a new concept of subjectivity that departs from and extends the metaphysics of the subject. I argue that relational attentiveness is necessary to shift notions of subjectivity by clarifying previously unregarded subjects within the vibrancy of spatial-temporal interludes. I develop a polyphonic methodology and use intertextual analysis, to consider the singularity of the voices present, both in their autonomous merit and in the greater harmony of relational attentiveness. In the mainstay of my methodological structure. I, too, become a voice in the polyphony and model an ethic of polyphonic engagement. In each chapter, I present members of the polyphony and their distinct contributions, both human and more-than-human. Engaging with the singularity of each voice develops the woven structure of my methodology, underscoring the dire need for increased relationality to engage with our worlds through curiosity rather than adherence to narratives of progress, technology, and the Metaphysical limits of speech and language.
This dissertation is the outcome of my research into the profound difference in the manner in which the tattooed body is perceived in Western compared to non-Western and indigenous cultures. Western scholarship on tattooing has ignored the relationship between the tattoo and the body. In I Ink, Therefore I Become: An Ontology of the Tattooed Body, I seek not only to reconcile this division but address the rupture that occurs in the West to the extent that such aestheticization divorces the tattoo from its meaning and the body. The history of tattooing in Western, and non-Western and indigenous cultures gives insight into how the tattooed body has been perceived by Western scholarship, which has traditionally grouped tattooing with more traditional art practices. Despite their similarities to painting and other traditional disciplines and participation in performance art, tattooing and the tattooed body challenge established art categories while announcing tattoo as a new discipline due to its nature as both an art object and a body with agency. When examining authorship as it applies to the tattooed body, a complex relationship is revealed due to the former’s multiplicity which challenges traditional authorship both legally and philosophically. The tattooed body, through bothits corporeality and its metaphysicality, also challenges traditional ontology and is explored through the work of Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO, Berardi’s sensuous skin, Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology and the flesh, and Nancy’s Corpus.This dissertation proposes an ontology of that tattooed body that departs from and questions established ontologies. I argue that an ontology, by addressing the lack of unification of art object and body, challenges aesthetic,philosophical, and legal definitions of art and authorship.
Western aesthetic discourse has grown complacent with the situs of art as planned encounter. Certain historical locations, such as the church, the museum and the gallery, have embedded the expectation of artistic encounter within the confines of their walls and gardens. Although certain practices like Earth Art and Public Art have moved art to outdoor locations open to and accessible by the public, they too perpetuate the notion of the planned aesthetic encounter through their public approval processes, newsworthiness, and fixed locations. Certain practices of street art challenge this legacy in critical ways. First, they do so by the intentional placement of the artwork outside of constrained institutional environments amid places where humans work, live and commune. Moreover, their methods render the work at once fixed by appending them within a static public context, and paradoxically ephemeral because of the likelihood that they will be removed, eventually fade or dissolve, or be painted over. Through these practices emerges what I call the aesthetics of displacement – that is, a decontextualization of the artwork which inhibits its re-placement in the museum and gallery. The paradigm embodied in these practices raises novel questions regarding both the ontology and the aesthetic of the artwork. What does it reveal about the being of the work? What does it inform about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its relevance to contemporary notions of community and v urbanity? In this dissertation, I argue that these street art practices are transformative because of the answers they offer to these questions. Specifically, they reveal and reinforce both a generative ontology of the work of art as well as a decontextualization of the aesthetic experience. The consequence is an aesthetic experience which becomes a repeatedly unique and iterative one arising from the coming together of artist, artwork and viewer in unexpected situations, always as experience of the present.
Contemporary time is marked by the proliferation of the endings of many worlds and as such the pivotal question becomes how can we become attuned, responsive, and responsible to these myriads of endings that are both material and immaterial, insensible and unintelligible to our limiting, human-only sense experience? This dissertation, oriented as an ongoing remapping project along both ethical and aesthetic fault-lines, argues and responds performatively to the imperative that thinking (as well as human-only iterations of time, space, and identity) itself be re-thought, re-defined, and practiced within the transfiguration of mourning and of the spectral— a transformation of thinking into mourning as generative, participatory, and performative mourning-with divergent, marginalized, and multispecies storytellers, participants, and ghosts. Mourning is both a deconstructing and generative constituting force that disrupts singular narratives of human exceptionalism, allowing for anthropocentrism to become loosened from classic ideologies and discourses, specifically the entrenchment of us versus them within human thinking and mapping practices. Outside of the limits of human sense experience, language, and representation mourning-with performs a reconfigured, epistemological pathway that creates a transfiguration of the ethical within aesthetics, an alternate space of ongoing weaving that I call vi the aesthetic-ethical pathway. This pathway, performed here through the methodological weaving practice of bringing together philosophical theory with narrative through the geographical motifs of land and sea, enables the work of an ongoing heteroglossic-hospitality that enlarges ecological consciousness and engages that which resists human-only senses, language, and mapping practices and enacts the space wherein we can begin to imagine equitable futurities for all manner of being to live and die well. Encountering both material and immaterial lines and threads that compose our shared and entangled worlds in-trouble requires a multispecies, more- than-human, and posthuman aesthetic-ethical imagination that allows for an ongoing poiesis of interrelationality and interdependence—the ongoing poiesis of mourning-arts.
This dissertation explores the ethico-aesthetic impulses of Viennese Actionism and the philosophical and aesthetic contributions of artists Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Due to its violent, sadomasochistic tendencies engaging with the taboo, Actionism remains framed by political, feminist, and psychoanalytical methodologies. This study extends our collective understanding by privileging the Actionists’ philosophical prose, articulating themes of extending art beyond the canvas into life, staging life as performative expression, and the work of art as life itself. An intertextual analysis of these practitioners with philosophers including Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, and Fredrich Nietzsche, centers on Félix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm, examining ecosophy—the relation of the environment and the formation of subjectivity through an emphasis on individual action, belief, and praxis—and chaosmosis, the unfixed and ontologically unstable groundless ground of subjectivity, a space of ontological possibility that defies neuroses.
This dissertation examines the Actionists’ aesthetic and philosophical contributions through the lens of both its ethical aims and shortcomings and argues that these practitioners invented themselves first and foremost as artist-philosophers. Like Nietzsche, the Actionists donned performative “monstrous and terrifying masks” to seek new values and possibilities of being. Intentionally occupying and provoking the intersection of ethics and aesthetics—an opening where novel ways of being and living in the world emerge—the Actionists engaged with place (topos), the psyche (subjectivity), and the socius (the political with the social). Their highly controlled and prescriptive violent performances expose the deep-seated and ever-present dark desires of humanity persisting underneath structures of ideology. As the Actionists revisited fundamental questions asking what is art and what is art’s responsibility, this dissertation reconsiders this line of inquiry and further asks what our obligation is in constructing a framework for understanding Actionism.
This dissertation deconstructs the organizing principles that govern information delivery in the classroom, presenting them as a significant obstacle to democracy. While federal and state regulations have advanced standardized testing, instructional materials, and teaching methods, these strategies are highly contested by progressive educators and critics, such as Henry Giroux and Diane Ravitch. In contrast to the education theories that inform educational criticism, this project explores an alternative path through the work of artists and philosophers who challenge the control of a single-voiced narrative, including Franco Berardi, Mikhail Bakhtin, John Cage, Mark Lombardi, and Tim Rollins. My research focuses on Berardi’s argument that technological advancements have automated and restricted the relationship between sensibility, communication, and labor. At this intersection, the dominant patterns of information delivery in the classroom reveal that data collection serves an agenda that disregards both the individual and the social body. In response, this project traces a brief history of school regulations to uncover the techniques that impose student distraction. Given the prominence of technology in automating classroom work, I aim to expand the discourse on technology from a focus on devices to encompass the techniques that organize both information and bodies. To counteract these automated methods, my project proposes a double-voiced practice, “Double I/Eye Mapping,” to decenter the reductive rules of analysis through the assembling techniques of artistic expression. By exploring “artists as teachers”—such as Josef Albers and Tim Rollins—I demonstrate how artists use negotiation strategies to interconnect language and imagery. Furthermore, I show how the voice, as a metaphor, is evident in the artist's work, offering students the flexibility to understand the function of organization in different kinds of work.
This dissertation explores the aesthetics of Kink Kulture (KK), a vernacular term used by its practitioners, lovingly identified as kinksters, a subculture characterized by consensual practices involving power, control, and pain, such as BDSM. The study argues that KK represents a significant aesthetic influence on an artist's lifeworld, providing freedom and creative inspiration. The research examines KK as a communal subjectivity emerging in modernity, contributing as a creative force in art.
The investigation takes a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, considering an artist's participation within the kink community as a source of inspiration, imagination, and creative intuition. It explores how KK provides enchantment to the world through the praxis of kink, offering a feeling of great pleasure and attraction due to its beauty.
The dissertation is structured into five chapters, covering topics such as the genealogy of algophilia, KK as a 'way of thinking', philosophical perspectives on KK, and its influence on visual and performing arts. KK’s influence intertextualizes the works of philosophers Nietzsche, Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, and highlights the artists Garth Knight, Kembra Pfahler, and Hermann Nitsch.
The study challenges traditional definitions of violence, resistance, pain, and pleasure within the context of algophilia. It argues that KK offers an optimistic lifeworld aesthetic and establishes a promise for the future in which the kink culture aesthetic contributes to the arts.
By exploring KK and its aesthetic relationship to the artist's lifeworld, this research aims to bridge the gap between academia and activism, examining personal meanings related to the constructs of pleasure and pain in consensual kink play. The dissertation contributes to the limited scholarly literature on kink as a significant cultural phenomenon and its impact on contemporary aesthetic philosophy.
Following the bee engages terra, flora, atmosphere, climate, cosmos, and animal species including the human. Human-bee relations, which are transhistorical and transcultural, spanning from prehistory to contemporary times, articulate relations across these planetary registers through a variety of aesthetic forms. This dissertation focuses on the honey bee, her creations of honey, wax, propolis, hives, and the entity of pollen. It then traces entangled transformations occurring across the airy rhizome of pollination to develop the overarching concept of what I call being melliferous. Being melliferous, a biological term for mutual reciprocities across plants and pollinators, is adapted into an aesthetic-philosophic proposal for rethinking hegemonic and anthropocentric paradigms of “nature” by incorporating a post-humanist, multispecies lens. Drawing from a range of thinkers including Jacques Derrida, Jane Bennett, Edouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Serres, Luce Irigaray and others; a hybrid methodology of affective phenomenology inspired by multispecies studies and deconstruction is practiced to develop concepts of being melliferous that work towards multispecies aesthetics. The six concepts of being melliferous - blur, gather, hum, threshold, permeability, and shimmer - emerge from human artistic-poetic practices that incorporate and interpret bees and bee adjacent substances. In addition to human crafted artifacts, artworks, installations, and fictional narratives; the creations of honey bees are also considered aesthetically and philosophically revising historical human-bee relationships to include the bee ix as artist and maker. These complex notions are explored through close analysis of bee-centric artworks created by artists including Joseph Beuys, Agentha Dyck, Terence Koh, Wolfgang Laib, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, and others; narratives written by authors Laline Paull and Sarah Blake; and ancient artifacts. As a result, the dissertation aims at revealing interspecies collaborative engagement relevant for the future understanding of planetary aesthetics.
This project studies ‘middle utterances’ in the Artaudian oeuvre. When Artaud’s poetics are engaged within the realms of song-and-dance cultures, this collective body of sound and gesture allows us to re-situate Artaud’s ‘voice’ within contemporized spaces of ritual-drama of the ancient Greek dramatic chorus and the contemporized medieval Japanese dramatic dance of Butō. The Artaudian ‘voice’ is positioned in terms of the ‘face/mask’ as prosópon, ‘self/voice’ as personae, and ‘body/space’ as soma, and within the ‘instruments of cruelty’ structured as tragodia, thrénos, and katharsis. Within a mode of Glissant’s ‘poetics of Relations’, Artaud’s embodied oeuvre as écho-monde opens to another écho-monde, that of the medieval/contemporary Japan ‘East’ dance performance and the ancient Greco ‘West’ chorus as expressions of corporeal image, sound, and movement toward the human condition, most heightened in the ancient tragedies. Created as a collage of poetic relations, this project illustrates the intertwined spaces and synechic edges of these song-and-dance cultures to informs our understanding of subject-affectedness in Artaudian poetics when it is placed with shared notions of imagery, magic, intensity, void, language, and transformative forces of bodies. The trajectory of song and dance cultures of tragedies transmit most profoundly subject-affected declarations as ‘I suffer’ or ‘I dance,’ rendering the most intense of transformative processes. It is the middle voice that delivers the utterance of suffering as the language of transformation. Guided by the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Stephen Barber, and Sondra Fraleigh, the contemporary Japanese vii dance of Butō advances Artaud’s ‘voice’ toward Eastern thought and extends his oeuvre into realms where in-betweens are proffered as a grammatical middle utterance in prose, correspondence, poetry, and the visual language of his (portrait) drawings. It is middle utterance that is best used to describe the enigmatic interval or gaps prevalent in Artaud’s correspondence and prose when we have an interface with the Eastern philosophical concept of ‘negative space’ known as ma in Japanese culture. Furthermore, by allowing affected ‘sensing’ or phenomenological perception as we find in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this project explores sensory connections between ‘bodies’ as utterance. What we call ‘middle utterance’ lends to the perceiving body as subject-affected events within modes of performance, and by extension, to transformative healing. Moreover, it is with the Artaudian construct of the ‘body without organs,’ reshaped as the BwO concept in Deleuze and Guattari where we find the philosophical praxis of a transformative ‘healing’ experience as middle utterance.
This dissertation addresses the transitional, in-between state of liminality, a topic of study that intersects philosophy, anthropology, art, literature, science, religious mysticism, and spiritual experience. It provides a narrow focus on the act of entering into an artwork as both an opening and point of slippage. A liminal experience is one in which quantifiers of space and time are seemingly absent, as are previously known entrances, exits and borders. This project argues that passage and transformative change may and do occur through acts of movement. It examines the phenomena of buoyancy, departure, falling, oscillation, and drift and their conveyance in art as potential catalysts for shifting into a liminal state of becoming.
Understanding liminality through the lens of engagement with art and movement will illuminate new ways of thinking about art today: how it may be entered, its significance to lived experience and its potential to impact an understanding of a bodily conscious, felt awareness. This project elucidates the liminal experience through close examination of specified movements. Encounters with specific works of art by John Everett Millais, Andrei Tarkovsky and Francesca Stern Woodman are analyzed against this framework, and within the context of literature and science. Philosophical writings by Dufourmantelle, Irigaray and Meleau-Ponty are key to this exploration.
This project addresses ritual aspects of art encounters to include viewer receptivity to possible liminal passage, identified as transcendent interiorizations—altered states of consciousness which blur internal experience and exterior reality. It proposes that a duration of receptive, subsuming engagement is essential for a viewer’s potential liminal experience, while raising questions regarding recent shifts towards art encounters. It argues that such an engaged encounter has transforming capabilities—as an entering into—as other. It contributes new theories and reflective conclusions regarding the art viewing experience and the conveyance of movement in art.
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).
This dissertation explores the concept of oceanic phenomenology, defined as a subjective, athletic ocean experience. This oceanic experience is studied through surfing, sailing, open water swimming, and freediving to reveal the athlete-philosopher-artist in a quest for meaningful existence. Athletic experiences are opportunities for analysis not only of the body’s movement in creative performance, but also the athlete’s sensory awareness as focused intensity or presence, and the resulting artworks of those experiences, be it film, literature, painting, or photography. The movement of the body in the ocean offers a physiological, psychological, and philosophical transformation of the athlete. In addition, while in the ocean, water athletes are able to encounter sentient, marine life creatures which opens up a larger feeling of connectedness and being-in-the-world. An oceanic ontology is thus developed through our experience of reality in the ocean, and the transformation of self upon reflection of those experiences when back on land. Presence, grace, space, time, and ethics of a body in motion are explored through the athletic endeavors of swimming, surfing, sailing, and freediving in the ocean to actualize and define the life of an athlete-philosopher-artist. It is with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Aristotle that this thesis is able to take hold and validate the body’s movement in nature to enable and offer phenomenological, oceanic experiences of a water athlete. I apply their philosophical perspectives to water sports, and thus elucidate how the sea is rich with phenomenological opportunities.
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.
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 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.
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 project explores the relationship between wonder and trauma within the realms of philosophy, art, and human existence. The inquiry begins with the etymological and mythological kinship between the ancient Greek words for wonder (thauma) and trauma (trauma). It reveals a reciprocal correspondence that goes beyond linguistic and symbolic affinities to the origins of basic thinking. The central thesis is that wonder and trauma are the same—where the ‘same’ means opposing, nonidentical aspects—in the experience of thaumazein. This primordial, disclosive wonder signifies a disposition, attunement, pathos, or mood. Thaumazein is also a philosophic wonder because it signifies the experience, in thought, said to be the beginning, archē, of philosophy and the one true pathos of the philosopher. Although wonder is named as the beginning of philosophy by the pre-Platonics, its meaning changes over time through its usage by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and modern scientists. A sub-thesis of this dissertation is that while metaphysics, modern science, and logical thinking still claims to be able to wonder as the ancient Greeks did, wonder’s meaning has been radically flattened and forgotten. The history of metaphysics is the history of its repression of the trauma inherent to all life and human existence. This inquiry expands on Heidegger’s claim that the history of metaphysics is the forgetting of Being by investigating how the process of forgetting is intimately related to the neurotic repression of the traumatic in the experience of wonder. This project explores possibilities for the recovery and cultivation of this forgotten attunement, in which wonder and trauma are one. To that end, the medium of photography in general and the photographic work and life of Garry Winogrand in particular offer real-world examples of how the wonder and trauma in thaumazein can inform the creative process and its results in today’s world.
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.
The ontological nature of “play” has been overlooked throughout our philosophical tradition. Too often play is lived out in human activity such as games and sports, but does not fully encapsulate the ontological nature of the topic, typically posing play in the context of competition with a winner and a loser or as an alternative to serious endeavors such as work. This project aims to move beyond and through these predetermined outcomes and various stances to reveal a valuable encounter within the essence of play and the interaction of players. Being in Play traces the history of how play as an aesthetic construct has been defined and documents influential thinkers, presenting carefully the tensions found within the paradigm of play itself. This project prioritizes the space of play as found in Martin Heidegger’s Spielraum. In this play-space, the ontological inquiry describes what I term “the playful event.” Relying on thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt, I employ an ontological approach to the event to reveal a movement that weakens a logocentric focus. The intersubjective aspects of play bring the distinctiveness of the Other to the surface. The intimacy of the playful event transforms the competitive and dominating approach of play to one that has the freedom to form a dialogue. Through themes such as winning and losing, anarchy, hospitality, socio-economics, asymmetrical relationships, and community, I incorporate artworks as events and praxis to disclose otherness as a possibility of emancipation.
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 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 introduces a new conceptual and theoretical framework called Black Artistic Thought, which represents the creative thought process behind works of art originating from Black women artists and thinkers. Specifically, this work focuses on how Black women artists and thinkers express the spiritual as an art form. As Black women carve out spaces for themselves within the philosophical canon, historically dominated by white males, this work aims to counter these exclusionary practices by building bridges between philosophical inquiry and their artistic expressions. The goal is to foster new philosophical pursuits in the area of cultural production, particularly concerning the spiritual.
Black Artistic Thought contributes to the broader dialogue that emphasizes how using embodied knowledge, along with intellectual knowledge, acts as a performative tool that can be used to interpret the language of the spiritual. Furthermore, this work demonstrates how the framework of Black Artistic Thought can be used as a new pedagogical approach to implement ideas of the spiritual in contemporary thought, employing a methodology known as spirit-literacy. Spirit-literacy emerges from David Driskell’s notion of reaching through the spiritual element through the presence of symbolic form to connect us to the human spirit. Advocating for a transformative pedagogical approach applicable in academia and daily life, capable of reshaping our thinking in the wake of decolonizing the curriculum, this work challenges existing paradigms and fosters a more inclusive understanding of the spiritual in contemporary thought.
Using Maya Angelou’s poem “Phenomenal Woman,” as a foundational definition to characterize Black women artists and thinkers, including bell hooks, Ofosuwa Abiola, Yvonne Daniel, Lauryn Hill, Harmonia Rosales, Helina Metaferia, Ebony Wildcat Brown, Jen White- Johnson, and others, this work illustrates how these Black women artists and thinkers have become ‘self-empowered subjects’ who illuminate Black Artistic Thought and the art of freedom.
Delving into the intersection of philosophy and quantum mechanics, in this dissertation I explore the dynamic journey of information’s transition from quantum potential to contextualized artistic expression, as it runs the risk of being challenged-forth by information technologies. I will explore contemporary theories of consciousness to examine the role of sentient observers on the articulation of spacetime, blurring the lines between human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Accordingly, the central inquiry of this study is to discern the role and identity of the observer: Who or what counts as an observer? How does this observer, as a principal architect of information in spacetime, influence creative aspects of existence, reshaping our experience of being in the world? Positing the observer as an active sentient agent within spacetime – an ‘information generator’ par excellence – I argue that the role of the observer transcends mere observation, engaging in a continuous strife against chance to create narratives of being by actively participating in the materialization of streams of information.
Central to this discourse is the concept of chance aesthetics, a term I have coined to encapsulate the aesthetics of serendipity and indeterminacy inherent to human experience. This concept emphasizes the aesthetic significance of the observer’s embrace of chance and serendipity in artistic endeavors. Consequently, I make a corollary argument that chance is not an ontological backdrop but a pivotal element of reality, playing a crucial role in both the creation and interpretation of art. With this in mind, using examples from photography the dissertation not only explores the role of the human observer, but expands the definition of an observer to include artificial intelligence, thereby opening new philosophical inquiries into the nature of consciousness, agency, and the subjective experience of existence.
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 examines the transformative potential of artmaking practices to decolonize structures of knowledge and oppression. While artists in the United States have engaged with colonization, gender, and racial oppression across different historical periods, contemporary artists such as Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker, Adriana Corral, and Rebecca Belmore critique the enduring systems of oppression that continue to shape current socio-political conditions. How do such artmaking practices challenge the production of the “other” and decolonize pre-established social and political boundaries to cultivate a deeper understanding of responsibility and the world’s interactive becoming? To expose art’s potential as a material-discursive practice that intervenes in power configurations, I argue that rethinking art as a gesture is essential to understanding how it responsibly reimagines and intra-actively reconfigures spacetimematter.
Weaving together insights from philosophy, epistemology, ethics, art, and politics illuminates subversive and restorative ways of knowing, thinking, making, and being that emerge in defiance of dominant Western European traditions. A Posthuman Feminist perspective of art as a gesture underscores the entanglement of mind and body in artistic practices that actively reshape materiality and ideas. In a world persistently defined by boundaries, art, viewed as an intra-active gesture, becomes an active force in reshaping our reality and revealing critical areas requiring intervention. This project employs a theoretical-practical approach that emphasizes artistic gestures can serve as material-epistemic interventions, renegotiating the interplay among ethics, knowledge, power, and the material world.
The study of Latinx graphic novels is a form of continual resistance is an area of popular culture that, for a long time, evaded proper examination and analysis due to the lack of an effective philosophical approach in addressing the phenomenological complexity of shapeshifting and marginalized identities. Presently, however, scholars and contemporary Latinx artists-writers have actively reimagined the field of graphic novels and the figure of the classic superhero as an infallible figure and disrupted the hegemonic principles that have constrained storytelling within a heteronormative structure. The emergence of contemporary artworks has aided in shattering the hegemonic representation of the classic superhero, as well, focused renewed interest in the relevance of representing superheroes as divergent forms and their impact on popular culture, particularly in the way that Latinx, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) voices are represented and amplified within the unfolding process of alternative storytelling.
Furthermore, this analysis explores how artists’ reiterations of classic comic book characters in alternative visual-verbal forms expose their vulnerabilities that move them beyond the realm of patriotic symbols of propaganda. This dissertation therefore examines the disruption of mainstream interpretation of the field of comics and their insertion into popular culture as forms of continual resistance that decenter authoritative narratives and reflect expressions of desire and sexualities that are still being invented. Latinx graphic novels create a space that allows the reader-viewer to imagine and invent possible futures that are not tethered to identitarianism or sameness in embracing different cultural perspectives without labels. Through the work of contemporary Latinx artists borrowing from the imagery of early comic characters, a radical, rhizomatic, reinvention of classic superheroes emerges to disrupt, expose, and reimagine one’s views of what a superhero represents in mainstream culture while expanding the field of Latinx futurism that reveals while not concealing other marginalized voices.
The technological advancements of recent history have undeniably led to greater comfort in some parts of the world. These technological advancements stem from a pursuit of mastery in scientific endeavors. At their limit, however, these advancements also serve to isolate human beings from one another and from the world they occupy leading to an increase in mental health issues and a lack of empathy. This project addresses this problem by asking, “What if human beings turned toward the pursuit of an aesthetic type of mastery alongside a scientific one?” and “What would comprise the practice of such mastery?” I will argue that the artistic study of the phenomenological world of appearances is the simultaneous practice of empathy which harbors a spiritual connectivity between subject and object. Using Georges Bataille’s notion that the subject is indistinguishable from the object at the limits of the object’s study, Friedrich Nietzsche’s consideration of amor fati, and Soren Kierkegaard’s consideration of sacrifice, Love, and union with God, I will paint a picture of an aesthetic mastery that is grounded upon sincerity, detached-empathy, and patience.
This paper examines public art and the role of contemporary artists in context of their relational experience in communities effected by environmental injustice. As a Michigan resident or as an out-of-state guest invited into an urban neighborhood, each of the twelve artists in this study participates within community through a unique cultural lens. Informed by historical and sociopolitical complexities, the public art bears witness for artists that care about the effects of a city’s water crisis, harm resulting from breached oil pipelines, generational loss of Indigenous traditions, and the inability to breathe unconditionally within certain neighborhood Zip Codes. Engaging in public art in the emerging role of ‘caretaker,’ the artist addresses evolving social narratives in such a way that the aesthetic form through its visual dialogue, becomes a catalyst
for change.
Current discourse on public art and environmental injustice regards a broad range of social contexts whereby the art performs a certain aesthetic or practical function relevant to location, however, the figure of the artist is rarely discussed. This paper focuses on the figure of the artist.
In posing the question, How does public art bear witness for the artist in the role of caretaker?, I argue that the artwork reveals the role of caretaker through the artist’s 1) aesthetic practice, 2) gentleness in form, and 3) particular elucidation that personifies ‘caretaker’ as assessed through aspects of Witness, Testimony, Shelter, and Call, whereby the four categories become markers within the art for attributing the artist’s relational experience within community. The public art fosters consideration for the viewer to gain new insight through aesthetic form that bears witness for the artist as caretaker and to reflect on one’s own role in an environmentally just community.
This dissertation proposes a new approach to soil remediation that I term becoming soil. Becoming soil seeks to help reclaim soil’s aesthetic dimensions, dimensions where soil is dynamic and alive. I argue that soil remediation is an artistic, creative, and collaborative practice that goes well beyond a romantic attempt to recover a lost fertile ground. Instead, it invites the senses to become invested in the continuous processes that keep soil alive. Furthermore, the dissertation reveals the hidden aesthetic underpinning of soil depletion, a crucial environmental problem, while offering creative means to resist the massive and adverse impact that humans have on soil. To this end, the subject of Becoming Soil is examined through five operational questions: a) What is Value? b) What Hides? c) What Remains? d) What Resurfaces? and e) What is Recovered? That correspond to the five artworks by artists Claire Pentecost’s Soil-Erg (2012), Frances Whitehead’s SLOW Clean-up (2008-10), Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991—ongoing), Jea Rhim Lee’s Infinity Burial Project (2009—ongoing), and Wormfarm Institute creative initiatives on art and agriculture, Fermentation Fest (2010—ongoing). I answer these questions in the light of contemporary ecological theory; more precisely, eco criticism and eco materialism, than like fermentation, are methods of transformation (a giving and and taking in reciprocity) that benefit both the aesthetic and scientific aspects of soil remediation. These methods make tangible transdisciplinary collaborations possible. Illuminate the impact of humans on soil, becoming soil reveals the possibilities for new artistic, scientific, economic, social, and political engagements that are soil centric. Moreover, becoming soil amplifies the aesthetic dimensions of soil remediation, helping to restore the sensual experiences of eating nutritious food, standing on solid ground, and the enigmatic return to the soil in death.
Contemporary aesthetic philosophy engages the notion of aesthetic experience from two conflicting lenses; on one hand are those who support a connection between the aesthetic and political while the other favors a more pragmatic position. An area of aesthetic engagement not yet explored inhabits an intermediary between these opposing poles, a modality of aesthetic experience I term, the aesthetic of repose. This dissertation traces the evolution of ideas regarding aesthetic experience through a survey of several philosophers whose varied perspectives form the foundation for my inquiry. Beginning with an exploration of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, proceeding through Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and progressing to John Dewey’s Art as Experience, my aim is first, to situate their individual aesthetic philosophies within the context of 21st century aesthetic experience. Despite their differing viewpoints, these thinkers share in common; 1) the importance of sense and sensation to valuable aesthetic experience and 2) a desire to find value and meaning in aesthetic experience for overcoming the ills of humanity and advancing culture.
Secondly, this dissertation examines a polarity of ideas that challenge the notion of authentic aesthetic experience in our times. Similar to their predecessors, contemporary aesthetic philosophers desire to make aesthetic experience a portal for humanity’s recuperation. There are thinkers such as Jacques Ranciére and Santiago Zabala, who advance an aesthetics of action; others, like Richard Shusterman and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht advocate for an aesthetics of presence. The aesthetic of repose rests uniquely between action and presence, as an area of slumber, where neither action nor presence is necessary. Rather, the idea is to remain in repose, linger there, where repositioning occurs naturally, as though without perception. One emerges from this seemingly imperceptible experience, having done nothing save moving through it, yet being forever changed by it.
Hip-Hop’s female artivists illustrate a completely functional, more efficient existence within the cooperative grayish conjunction and areas of womanism, rather than perform the individualistic either:or binary standard to negotiate an “acceptable” societal role. These performatives address the vital presence of intersectionality in womanism and the fluidity of gender identity, which challenges the status quo of American feminism and its prioritizing of gender inequality over other social injustices. Utilizing the principles of womanism as a philosophical thought with Hip-Hop culture, Black women fuse a comprehensive, more credible, and inclusive platform for future generations to expand the understanding of Blackness and gender performance. By garnering a better knowledge of their existence through Indigenous African spirituality, Black women reclaim ownership of their bodies from western European standards to challenge Christianity’s meaning of martyrdom to engage intersectionality through a discourse of American capitalism while upending the white supremacy’s either:or binary. As an oasis initiative, Hip Hop music elicits the good, the bad, and the ugliness of everything American to hone in on the development of the female voices and their indentation on the culture to establish American Christianity as a diplomatic and subjugated premise to objectify Black women through the mimicry of constructed systems. The chapters of this project will address the distinction of pro-autonomy versus the unification of culture and community to critique the white normative systematic constructs that alters the understanding of race, time, polyculturalism, and space concerning the Black Being.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
In this study, I will show how the categories of linear time and horizontal space in the United States and cyclical time and vertical space in Mexico persist into the 20th century and are revealed in the public mural art of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera. Incorporating the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Arnheim, I will demonstrate that the murals articulate the origin stories of each nation by drawing on the chronotopes (time-space) utilized by each artist to serve as the formal structures of national memorials.
I will argue that in the United States a national identity and collective memorare associated with a linear sense of time in which the past is insignificanand the present is simply a necessary step towards the future while a horizontal concept of space prevails in which the axis mundi expands and tilts outward andis best associated with the ideas of manifest destiny, constant change, progress, freedom and open space.
In contrast, we find in Mexico a national identity where collective story and memorare associated instead with a cyclical sense of time in which the past, presenand future are constantly linked and concurrent, and a vertical concept ospace around which one centers identity that lessens the distance between diverspeoples physically as well as culturally.
Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Raymond Williams, Erika Doss, Yi Fu Tuan and Hannah Arendt, Iwill further show that the way we perceive these representations expressed in the chronotopes of Benton and Rivera continue to define contemporary public art up through the 21st century, shaping conscious or unconscious attempts to represent and memorialize a national understanding of “we” in both countries.
Recent aesthetic theories have neglected ambiance as an experiential thought while emphasizing aura and atmosphere as affective states; feelings grounded in Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology. Existing literature, particularly the works of Tonino Griffero and Gernot Böhme, have muddied this debate and caused confusion by equating ambiance with aura, atmosphere, and Stimmung, or mood. This dissertation delineates ambiance and characterizes its existential structure and materialism as it presents itself to a historical subject through sculptures situated in the landscape of Africana political, social, cultural, and ecological life. Ambiance is like an embosphere, an experiential thing that is internal, subjective, and individual; it is neither objective like aura nor collective like atmosphere. In explicating “sculpted ambiance” as an alternative methodology vis-à-vis historicism, this dissertation critiques contemporary forms of representation while applying Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, i.e., intentionality, to space. This research fills a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on non-architectural visual art. It does this by episodically discussing ambiance as a momentary process of mise-en-scène (staging) experiences—looking, listening, and touching art, triggering audience’s affective registers. The research also builds on Böhme’s and Griffero’s identity of affective state which they characterize as “between place,” “something more,” and “excess effect.” Enveloping history, culture, and ecosystem, sculpture—as an artform and a shared monument—temporally and spatially mediates accounts of society. My main argument is that when we are allured by objects and conditions, we rely on perceptions and processes that are spatially and temporally mediated. Ambiance is part of a spatial hierarchy in the human ecosystem, a process that is epistemic and ontological. As imaginary elemental things, ambiances determine individual moods, attitudes, ways of thinking, and topologies constituting life in society.
Stephens through decolonizing the I, problematizes its universality throughout Western philosophy and aesthetics. She argues for bringing the messiness of the body to philosophical discussions through EmDisEmbodiment, an existential,phenomenological, and psychoanalytic method of not only embodiment or disembodiment but a relation between embodiment and disembodiment. An EmDisEmbodied I appreciates statements from another’s universal at odds with one's own realizing both the deconstructive and reconstructive potentials of identity formation. Shebelieves this approach will enrich philosophical conversations concerning the I and its relationship to others. She further argues that the conversation between aesthetics and philosophy can do exactly this. Taking an intersectional approach, she draws connections amongst what she refers to as Irigaray's fluidI, Fanon’s Universal-Particular I, and Jean Luc Nancy’s Absolute-Fragmented I.She sees the understanding of the nuances of the Universal-Particular questioning body that is reconstructing itself with a keen self-realization that it will never be complete; the Absolute-Fragmented relational body with frayed edges tying and untying knots; and the fluid body that thinks in terms of proximities and dualities; as key to expanding the conversation surrounding the various isms. Looking at ideas from these theorists, along with Lewis Gordon, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Spivak in conversation with the work of various artists she shows how the intercourse between conceptions of art, philosophy and “the I”get to the very needed connections amongst the universal, its drives, emotions,embodiment, disembodiment and her term EmDisEmbodiment.In turn she suggests a new understanding of the form vs. content, abstraction vs. figuration contemporary art debates. An understanding that does not set up a dichotomy that hierarchizes but instead complicates the divisions between form/content, figuration/abstraction, the body/the formless, and the universalI/the particular I. She concludes by looking at Nancy's “wandering labor of sense” as it relates to Édouard Glissant's errantry.
This dissertation examines how the immersive aesthetic experience engages sense and reason in interpretation of ontological questions. This examination is important, as it reveals how thinking contextually develops through the practice of nuance and lingering.This research demonstrates that the ontological task of aesthetics distinguishes art from entertainment. I argue that the immersive aesthetic experience avoids superficiality by addressing; embodiment, intertextuality, and the sublime.Embodiment relates to the abundance of sense data characteristic of immersives aesthetic experiences. Spaces, light, smells, environments that elicit physical response. Presented with, and as, ambiguous signs that appear to make ontological reference. Physical response stimulates interpretation, an interpretation that is intertextual. Understanding intertextuality can better facilitate operating in a complex and contextual world. These experiences require focus, becoming conscious of. The sublime, understood as an intense experience of aesthetic understanding, is integral to the description of immersive aesthetic experience developed in this study. When aesthetic understanding is of an ontological nature, occurs unexpectedly, briefly, and intensely, it is called sublime, and reveals the nature of singularity. This intense experience may act as an enticement to engage sense and reason, freely and with more frequency.
The dialogue developed in this research aims to to understand what immersives aesthetic experiences share in common and addresses four important questions.What kind of being does the ontological content of each work address? What is the formal approach to the work? How does the work physically engage sense? And what is revealed? The guiding voices that this dialogue depends on include; Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jean Luc Nancy, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson and Damien Hirst offer examples of the type of work that encourages nuance and lingering, and reveals presence. Ultimately resulting in understanding that being responds to, and is responsible for, theworld.
At the present two foremost studies, the Annenberg Report and CARD analyze the inclusion or exclusion of underrepresented communities in film and television in US American media, both conclude there is an epidemic of representation, which includes the invisibility and misrepresentation of characters and the narratives that surround them. This epidemic of representation has further the displacement of mothers in U.S. Media. In relation to this latter point, Alison Stone and EtiWade provide insight on maternal subjectivity and the gaze of the mother. bell hooks questions parental roles and challenges Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory and feminist critique with her oppositional gaze and a critical lens of feminist theory, by including the voice and experiences of women who had been placed in the margins, while Gwendolyn Foster examines possible tools to decolonize the gaze. From such starting points, this project focuses on how the culture of film has created a Gaze Economy that influences economic structures in the United States of America, from the labor market to the political economies that shape our view of others and our subjectivity, specifically of the mother, from an object to a subject. I define gaze economy as the constant flux of exchange between the one who sees and the one who is being seeing. Such models are hegemonic constructions which lead to perceptions of the judgment of others, the self by others, and the self by the self. In addition, the project introduces the concept of (m)other as the mothers who are grouped outside of the dominant maternal discourse, but whom should be considered as belonging within. Furthermore, this project presents the genealogy of(m)others and explores how the narratives, the representations, the misrepresentations and the absent representations of some characters of mothers, expand the culture of (m)others by furthering their conditions as an ostracized group. The main line of inquiry is whether films influence the societal judgment of others, particularly of ALL mothers? If so, how and who places such judgment? Is it the mother upon herself or a mother upon another mother? The findings of this project contribute to the film and media theory critique of the representation of mothers and the epidemic of invisibility of underrepresented groups. Furthermore, at the present, the project has deconstructed the narratives, performances, and characterizations of mothers in a leading role in the top 25 films from 2000 to 2019 in the United States of America to propose an extension of the feminist critique of such.
Confederate sculptures are not mundane objects that decorate the landscape in communities across the United States, but are ideological structures to white supremacy. When the words monument and memorial are used interchangeably and weaponized, the sculptures are trapped on a hermeneutic circle that escalates racial conflict to abuse. By twisting circular interpretation to form an apeiron, represented as an infinity symbol,rigidity can be opened to accept a multiplicity of truths.
This project begins by untangling the words monument and memorial to demonstrate abuses of power and memory. By stripping away the language, the sculptures and the work they perform in public to uphold white supremacist ideology is revealed. Exposing them removes their power and neutralizes the grounds for discourse where dialogical sculptures can then be inserted.
The inclusion of dialogical public art that moves Confederate aesthetics to an apeiron engages conflict transformation that expresses the fluidity of history, memory, and consciousness. Recontextualizing public art not only indicates a cultural paradigm shift, but has the power to form a new public that accepts a multiplicity of truths. Public art that aids in the formation of a new public holds the promise of helping the collective development of a new level of consciousness, compassion, empathy, and care that is extended to others.
This research emerges from my deep curiosity about the Buddhist concept of emptiness (śūnyatā) and the ways in which select artworks can express some manner of voidness. How can artworks embody and explore emptiness, pointing beyond image and language? My study begins with Ad Reinhardt’s enigmatic Abstract Painting (1963) and the black void in art. My analysis of Reinhardt’s work draws primarily from the writings of Nāgārjuna and Heidegger. Nāgārjuna’s understanding of emptiness suggests a complete deconstruction of all possible entities, leaving “no-thing” in its wake. In Chapter Three I turn to a different account of emptiness as presented in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions of Dzogchen, or Great Perfection. With Agnes Martin’s The Islands I-XII (1979) asmy focus, I engage the Dzogchen idea of “other emptiness” (shentong) as distinct from the emptiness of self. In Chapter Four Itransition to an exploration of the emptiness of bodily perception in James Turrell’s installation Aten Reign (2013).This site-specific artwork is an impermanent, non-material work that is simultaneously indeterminate and incorporeal yet existent and perceivable, andhere I draw on the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. The fourth artwork that I explore in Chapter Five is The Century with Mushroom Clouds:Project for the 20th Century (1996) by Cai Guo-Qiang. With Cai’s art the focus shifts from conceptual arguments for emptiness (as one finds in the ideas of Nāgārjuna, Heidegger, and Dölpopa) and the phenomenal experience of emptiness (as one finds in the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty) to a performative gesture that embodies the ephemeral, empty nature of reality as presented in East Asian traditions. I argue these four art-voids enable an aesthetic exploration of the experience and understanding of emptiness through reflective encounters with singular works of art.
Noise is sound that is loud, confusing, chaotic, unwanted, disturbing, and even dangerous. From this, many have concluded that noise is negative, as it can produce discomfort and terror. But, if noise is never considered beyond this, it continues to be a threat. Therefore,I argue, if we engage with noise aesthetically, we are likely to transcend our habitual aversion to it and experience it as a profound and nuanced phenomenon.
This requires filtering to gain greater levels of appreciation. Methods such as deep and deliberate listening, as well as engagement with psychological and phenomenological responses to noise, are employed to deconstruct works by Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Alison Knowles,Annea Lockwood, Alyce Santoro, and Sunn O))). To more fully realize the power of aesthetic noise, I approach these artists’ works through the philosophical filters of Edmund Burke, Martin Heidegger, Jacque Derrida, and Julia Kristeva.Their theoretical structures have been traditionally applied to literature, the visual arts, and even to music, but rarely if ever to noise.
In order to discern how philosophical filtering may enrich one’s experience of aesthetic noise, I listened to the aforementioned works through the filters of Burke’s beautiful and sublime; Heidegger’s interpretation of the four causes; Derrida’s premise of the parergon; and Kristeva’s theories on abjection and purification.
This investigation will demonstratethat noise is exceedingly multifaceted and multilayered, so no one philosophical approach would be adequate to elucidate its intricacies. However,by engaging multiple philosophical filters in concert, the value of aesthetic noise will be amplified, thus allowing the listener to better appreciate noise and its possibilities.
My dissertation focuses on the artist collective as a potential model to contribute to the reshaping of contemporary society. Through exploration of Michel Bahktin’s ‘polyphonic’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ‘rhizome’, Emmanuel Levinas’ theories of alterity, Edouard Glissant’s ‘relational aesthetics’, (among others) this project will explore how the contemporary artist collective engages autonomous subjectivity with others in the artist collective model by shifting ‘the group’ from a problematic modality into a multiplicitous mode of ‘being-with’ one another in collective space. In study of artist’s working in collaboration in history alongside contemporary artist collectives, this project argues that the artist collective considers the question of autonomy within collectivity through an assemblage of voices working together in relation to one another through practices that include: self governance, the question of authorship in relation to the multiplicity, and the engagement of outside participants with the created artwork. In so doing, the collective creates a community based on exchange with one another; one that engages the multiplicity of ideas and validates all forms of existence via communal making. Through comparative study of artist collectives based in contemporary society within the limits of the American, European, and Asian continents, this dissertation explores how creative collaboration occurs within collective practices. I will utilize a comparative-inductive approach through the intertextualization of contemporary artist collectives and thinkers. This project is an important contribution to the existing conversation surrounding the artist collective, because of the necessity to situate ‘collectivity’ through creative-collaborative endeavors as a practice in which we are all engaged, and in an attempt to re-configure oppressive societal apparatuses under which humanity exists, through creative collaboration of all others.
This dissertation establishes a new philosophical framework to understand, evaluate,and champion a category of art practice appearing in the world that I call “place-as-medium.”I will argue that place-as-medium reshapes horizons of knowledge by the way it changes the way we think as the activity of “thinking through place.” Chapter one sets up place-as-medium as an art practice that goes beyond metaphysical thinking in the artworks of Alfredo Jaar. Chapter two demonstrates how Jaaruses place-as-medium as an artistic strategy that gathers things together and brings them into appearance spatially through art forms-as-thinking gestures,defining “boundaries of place.” Chapter three considers dOCUMENTA (13), an expansive international exhibition organized by artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012 as a thinking-artistic-praxis. The central investigation is the exhibition’s play with spatial, temporal, and historical dimensions of art as ways to reconfigure conditions of place. Chapter four looks at the function of hospitality in three art projects that occurred around the Occupy movement in 2012, which use the aesthetic form of the tent. Chapter five looks at the topic of authorship in place-as-medium, leading to the conclusion that place-as-medium presents new opportunities for art to enact shared authorship of place.
This project is charged with the illumination and application of Jacques Ranciere’s theory of the distribution of the sensible and regimes of art in the examination of the historical posturing of black masculinity and what I propose as the new slavery inherent in mass incarceration. Paramount to this survey is the retrospection of the dialectic work of Kara Walker who is said to have desecrated black testament of freedom while contriving white desire. Contrary to this I argue Walker as artist-philosopher and her work as having the potential for the emancipation of the black man. Dissentient in nature Walker draws a comparison to the revolutionary comportment of Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner in the legislation of violence lodged against the archetypes of the master/slave narrative of history in her indispensable commission for the souls of black men. The distribution of the sensible is understood as the configuration of the sensible world as an ethical ought in the cartography of the Platonian republic as “living speech.” The silhouette participates in this discourse as the concatenation of knowledge and the soul vis-a-vis Plato. In this partitioning lies the birth of the Other as colonized thought. Knowledge as an epistemological grid shapes the discourse and terrain governing the black man as Other assigning him historically as an inferior product. The psychological predisposition of the black man as inferior is performed in history and recapitulated through the representative regime ad infinitum. The problem is the question concerning history as immutable law. How has law and legislation failed the black man in his procuration of freedom? I argue that the emancipation of the black man will be accomplished through an aesthetic education in his return to the primal scene of history as history. What comportment does genius have in this most critical excavation? How does art as knowledge participate in this intervention? Art is no abstract concept of community but its substratum taking form. How is form imperious to the fashioning of black masculinity, or at that Heidegger’s nothing?
This project began as an inquiry into the archive of the California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) Post Studio Program, whose only relic is a course description written by its founder, artist John Baldessari. An equally important component of this early inquiry was the discovery of Jean-François Lyotard’s palimpsestic text, Pacific Wall, whose frontispiece, “Five Car Stud,” was first publicly displayed at documenta V by artist Edward Kienholz. These two materials led toward a novel articulation of how post studio artistic methodologies – embodied by both Baldessari and Kienholz – intervened in the master narratives of modernism. I argue that the absence of a formal archive of post studio allows for such an intervention. The paucity of materials written on post studio led me to original sources within archives (including the San Francisco Art Institute, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Getty Research Institute), lending agency to each artist’s voice.
By engaging the missing archive of post studio through ventriloquizing its lack, this project deconstructs the normative apparatus of modernism and deromanticizes the sacred space of an artist’s studio. Scholarship generally has understood post studio practice as a methodology eschewing the studio as a space for generating art, its reliance on the political economy of the art market, and its spatialization of sovereign subjectivity. A site of resistance, with aesthetic implications, post studio offers a narrative of its own that defies the artistic conventions of modernism; including, importantly, the authorial legacies, master narratives, and the cult of originalism to which modernism was heavily invested.
Informed by French poststructuralism and its debates over postmodernity, I reclaim, posthumously, Craig Owens’s theories on power and representation alongside allegory and appropriation as the key methodologies of post studio artistic practice. These methodologies challenge postmodernity through a heretofore undocumented intervention into modernism.
Although much has been written on the phenomena and aesthetics of the sublime, especially over the past thirty-five years, I argue that a further interrogation is needed. This is because the Indo-Tibetan Yogācāra-Madhyamaka philosophy of ‘emptiness’ (Skt: śūnyatā) more precisely and elegantly elucidates what is happening in the mind when we experience the sublime. Therefore, I assert that a thorough interrogation of the Yogācāra-Madhyamaka notion of ‘emptiness’ (śūnyatā) will clarify our (mis)understandings of the aesthetic and phenomenological concepts of the sublime.
I address several epistemological and ontological problems inherent in understanding the sublime, as has been widely postulated both in and outside the work of art. While employing a method of dialectic in this project, my critique of ancient, modern, and postmodern theses of sublimity postulate new insights into concepts of the sublime. I demonstrate that the theses of the sublime are burdened by several not-insignificant epistemological and ontological problems, which reveal both incoherences and contradictions. Finally, I argue that to promote a coherent theory of the sublime is, in the end, absurd, by virtue of the fact that sublimity can be neither a coherently understood object of experience, nor anything short of an epistemological contradiction. I propose in response what I call the empty-sublime, and then turn to twentieth-century American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Agnes Martin, and the contemporary German artist Wolfgang Laib, whom I argue are examples of its authentic aesthetic praxis.
This study engages with Merleau-Ponty’s supposition, from Phenomenology of Perception, that exposing time underneath the subject and relinking it to all the contradictions of time, body, world, thing, and human other allows awareness to come into its fullness. I argue that rationales of thought associated with cultural violence and its images of the social world—both mental and tangible—link back to the ontological of time underneath each human being, where the conditions of language alter both consciousnesses and meanings behind the phenomenal dimensions of violence, appearance, being, and image. These alterations accompany violence into its reimaging, where an inaudible consciousness awaits each spectator.
My focus here is phenomenological, but not in the strict Husserlian sense. Rather, I take other discourses and their methodologies to the borders of this centering. Through an intertextual latitude of subsets, I define the meaning of a critical phenomenology of violence through its paradoxical sense, interrogating past and current thinkers across a wide spectrum within a Merleau-Pontian and Arendtian arch. I contend that dangers in the paradox of thinking partner with moral and perceptual thinking and that the phenomenon of imagination in the aesthetic of violence pairs with human will and the Kristevian abject; that Lévinas’s ontology merges with perception, when language creates loss of being; that Lacan’s reduction of the Freudian drive and its gazes couples with Merleau-Pontian desire and his radical, ontological look at psychoanalysis. Finally, the Nancian ontic text-image signals Arendtian insight on deceptive metaphors that expose facets in the blow of violence.
By the end, this study demonstrates that phenomena stay within their operations, but the power of the human will alternately recognizes or negates the authenticity behind the phenomenon of violence, while events remain actively, quietly at work in cyclical patterns of desires and perversions, placing the human being in the flux of endangerment and risk from an array of social images.
This dissertation traces the phenomenon we call the sublime as it relates to the lived experience. Not fully understood, this mystery, much like human existence, obscures any possible telos. The experience of the sublime shifts our perspective and focuses our attention on our being. The wonderings inspired by the experience of the sublime stimulates and directs our ontological viewpoint and our existential potentials.
This examination intends to reveal the necessity of sublime experiences in realizing our humanity and in plotting a course for a more just future. Tracing the genealogy of the sublime through foundational thinkers like Longinus, Burke, and Kant will establish the early interpretations of the experience. Examining the sublime through the shifting attitudes of Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Lacan will display a sense of uncertainty which unseated the sublime as integral to being human. Leaning upon thinkers like Rorty, Rescher, Deleuze, Guattari, and Kendall Walton, this works attempts to recover the sense of wonder inherent in experiences of the sublime. This exploration will examine the uncertain nature of the sublime and how it can be accessed in the contemporary world.
Contemporary cinema facilitates accessing the sublime in the modern world. Via our imaginations, we can, through engaging with creative and well-crafted stories, experience the sublime connections to our authentic being. Contemporary ideologies mediate interpretive associations of the sublime and create a cul-de-sac for the meanings of the experience and stifle the possibilities of the sublime. This exploration intends to reify the reflections on the sublime and re-establish the significance of the experience as part of humanities ongoing evolution.
The aim of this study is to examine shifts in the discourse of aesthetic representation in Western fashion. I argue that the democratization of Western fashion has radically transformed the way subjectivity is produced and community is organized. Through these changes, fashion has reformulated the possibilities for ways of being in the world and the ways communities are constituted. The democratizing moments I discuss over the span of modern fashion’s history are critical embodiments of the possibilities that dress opens up for sociocultural, sexual, and political emancipation. In other words, these aesthetic discourses of fashion have been and continue to be critical to the history of freedom.Focusing on three critical instances in the history of fashion from the eighteenth century to the present day, this project examines the fashions and work of Queen Marie Antoinette, the designer Coco Chanel, and the photographer Bill Cunningham. I trace the way fashion has constructed the immortal body of royalty, the aristocrat, the urban bourgeois, the working person, and every-body, extended into the limitless virtual body. I also trace authorship in fashion, moving from the invisible artisan behind the royal body to the genius couture designer, to machine-produced mass reproduction and now to infinite virtual reproduction. I show how fashion has constituted gender and sexuality, from elevating the royal body into a holy vessel meant to continue the divine right to fashioning the earthly working body of flesh, blood, sex, and pleasure. Each of these transformations through fashion has helped to represent and recreate subjectivity in its many iterations throughout history. This project explores the ways contemporary fashion has become democratized and democracy has been an effect of fashion.
Literary critics and art theorists celebrate the work of Virginia Woolf and the activities of London’s Bloomsbury Group as emblematic of the early achievements made in modernist art and aesthetics. This dissertation argues that their creative activities exceeded modernist ideologies and practices of unity, purity, and autonomy; they instead embody the distinct postmodernist traits of hybridity, discord, and fragmentation. This project relocates Woolf’s literary work and the culture of the Bloomsbury Group within a posthumanistic theater; modernism was a performative cloak for their radical personal beliefs and endeavors. In their private lives, the Bloomsberries’ feminism, queer subculture, atheism, pacifism, and mixing of social classes reveal them – as individuals and as an intimate group – to be highly performative, heterogeneous, and post-human.I assert that Woolf’s novels describe the Bloomsberries’ radical social values and behaviors via the genre of fiction. The genre safeguarded the novels’ contents for public consumption on the premise that fiction is not confined to facts and real people or events. Woolf’s stories offered unutterable truths about herself, the group, and quotidian urban life. This postmodern re-reading of Woolf’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and her essay, A Room of One’s Own, repositions Woolf’s lyric prose as contributing to discourse on the post-human condition and with contemporary feminist and queer theory. Yoking the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Haraway, Braidotti, Bryant, Bergson, and others, I assert that Woolf’s stories occupy a threshold between fiction and post-human philosophy, because her characters exceed being in the world and instead participate in a scheme of becoming-with the world. Woolf’s scheme for intersubjective consciousness is a rhizomatic relation of encounters, machines, and multispecies alliances that permeate the post-human body and psyche. We find, in her century-old artistic vision, a schema for today’s post-human storytelling in the Anthropocene.
This dissertation argues that intimacy has the capacity to operate as a radical disruption of ideological constructs, and therefore possesses political agency. Furthermore, contemporary art that employs radical intimacy may be deployed as ideological-political activism. Grounded in the psychoanalytic-poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva, particularly her research on abjection, intimacy and revolt, the project examines intimacy as an ambivalence of subjectivity and borders, inside and outside. The project explores the practices of several contemporary artists, namely: Leigh Ledare, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Ellen Jong, Joseph Maida and Lorraine O’Grady. Beginning with Freud’s erotic and unconscious-oriented discourse, and continuing into Lacan’s split subjectivity and desire, the theoretical arc follows Kristeva’s poetics into a discourse of ambivalence between subject and object. Engaging Althusser’s theories on interpellation of subjectivity and ideology, I situate radical intimacy in contemporary art practice as a rejection of oppressive ideological constructs, particularly, subjectivity itself. Kristeva’s notion of revolt as a return to the individual’s singular truth supports a philosophy of intimacy grounded in speech and the perpetual questioning of identity, and a radical reconsideration of subjectivity. The project concludes with an introduction to object-oriented feminism, a new school of feminist praxis, grounded in the limits of subjectivity, and the radical ontology of objecthood. This final step situates radical intimacy in contemporary art within the political arena of activist practices, demonstrating the ways that abjection, revolt and the dissolution of categories catalyzed by intimate practice, effect an ontological shift from subjectivity to objecthood. Thus, radical intimacy disrupts the modern hegemony of subjectivity, suggesting a new language for the contemporary philosophical era that equalizes the ontological status of humans and non-human entities, inviting new modes of ecological thinking.
My research is concerned with investigating how we can come to understand embodiment as consciousness through choreography, performativity, and performance. Further and more deeply, how the “knowing body” (Merleau-Ponty) enables liberation through an ontological embodiment. I contend that a black liberational spirituality, as an ontological embodiment, is revealed through the phenomenological aesthetics of the black concert dance/performance tradition. Here, I explore the works of eight African American dance/performance artists who convey, lucidly, this subject matter and who are firmly positioned within the black concert dance/performance tradition: Katherine Dunham (“Shango”), Pearl Primus (“Fanga” and “Hard Time Blues”), Eleo Pomare (“Blues for the Jungle”), Reggie Wilson (“Introduction”), Preach R Sun (“CHRYSALIS (Cry Solace)”), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (“Batty Moves”), and Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine (“how to survive a plague”). A main point of departure for my subject is an articulation of Haitian Vodou spirit possession (a sublime embodiment) as a perceptual means for the recontextualization of the beautiful. The choreographic and performance work of the eight artists lead the way along with my inquiry. Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Frantz Fanon offer phenomenological guideposts, while still other thinkers provide necessary grounding in areas specifically focused on temporality, spatiality, gender and spirituality. Three points that guide my investigation of this subject matter are all shared between the artists: (1) the works testify to the power of black embodiment through performativity and aesthetics; (2) the works recognize the interplay between the sacred and the secular domains; and (3) the works maintain a legibility of an inherent spirituality functioning as an animating, illuminating, and vital creative force both conscious and ancestral. The artists signal the viability of an embodied aesthetic of black subjectivity, and their works are infused with an urgency of spirit and a radicalism that demands recognition. It is through their works that the revelation of liberation through the secular ritual act of dance/performance may be encountered. It is, first, the centering of the black body that envisages the discourse from a place of agency rather than alterity. The ultimate goal is to decenter race as a governing principle in determining the beautiful in these works in order to turn our attention to a more equitable place of discovery that contests racial privileging, difference as equal.
This dissertation is a response to Martin Heidegger’s call to action asserted at the conclusion of his oft-cited essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he offers the realm of art as the mainspring for our emancipation from the grip of technological enframing. The following chapters investigate artists Martha Rosler, Christian Boltanski, Krzysztof Wodiczko and finally, collaborators Noor Mirza and Brad Butler, whose artworks offer a counterbalance to the erosion of the human capacity for thought as a particular feature of our Being, or Dasein, as proposed by Heidegger. Their shared characteristic lies in truth’s manifestation within artworks as happenings or events rather than a quest for fixed certainty or correspondence. Through their work, the artists catalyze a reckoning, compelling the viewer to question and reflect on his intersubjective ethical responsibility for the other. The common thread connecting them is a powerful shifting of thought — in a distinctly revelatory acting upon the viewer’s awareness. I will argue that, as technological aesthetic narratives are increasingly sophisticated and nuanced, politically conscious artists such as these become better able to harness their potential voices in deeply critical ways allowing the inter-subjective ethos of care to manifest and thrive in dialogic expressions of truth. Furthermore, they begin to formulate a way of considering and using technology that not only resists enframing by interrogating the very essence of our relationship with it, but also functions as a way of engaging with the question of Being itself (which encompasses Heidegger’s fundamental project). In the end, this dissertation will demonstrate that Being comes to itself in the site of exchange as his/her awareness of responsibility grows and thought is returned to its poetical dwelling. In these times of narrowed perspectives and technological addiction qua enframing, Heidegger’s call to action and the works responding to it must be brought to the fore and celebrated
The Cartesian paradigm, in its modern existence, can be understood as comprised of four pillars—the founding principle of cogito ergo sum, dualism, a mechanistic worldview, and mathesis universalis. Each of these four pillars contributes to aesthetic philosophy in foundational ways that are largely unacknowledged. This error is owed to literal readings of Descartes’ works that neglect the operational intentions of his paradigm. When one approaches the Cartesian paradigm operationally, it is revealed that aesthetic philosophy owes a tremendous debt to Descartes’ works. Moreover, modern philosophers have dedicated substantial efforts to connecting subjective concepts such as mood and sensation to Descartes’ paradigm. These connections, which all rely on literal readings of the paradigm, are often tenuous and depend heavily on large extrapolation from small notations. However a broader reading of Descartes’ model of the soul reveals a unique niche for subjective expression which provides a distinct role for aesthetic considerations in his epistemology. Revelatory knowledge—knowledge of a nonscientific nature that reveals things as they are—need not be marginalized from mathesis universalis. What is more, it is revealed that aesthetic philosophy is one of the largest contributors to the overall project of mathesis universalis in modernity. This contribution is based on the act of poiesis—a form of knowledge-making that is grossly overlooked as an epistemological process. A series of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby provide a case study of how revelatory knowledge can be integrated with, and inform, the Cartesian paradigm. Concepts of modernity by Hans Blumenberg illuminate the need for understanding revelatory knowledge as integral to mathesis universalis by imaging the pillar as an evolving mechanism of human construction. In conclusion, a discussion of the parallels between aesthetics and other marginalized epistemic sources (women, artists, and fiction) reveal consonant efforts to reshape mathesis universalis as more inclusive of revelatory knowledge.
This is a phenomenological study of patriarchy through the examination of its genealogy as it relates to/parallels with the creative process. I argue patriarchy, while a product of human creativity itself, has artificially elevated itself to prominence, and as such, has dominated and shaped subjectivities to its own end. It has done so by undermining individuality, necessary for establishing the foundation of a more democratic form of government in the region of the Middle East. In this democracy, a dynamic balance and equity is envisioned between the subject and community. Therefore, this study is concerned with the power of imagination, in the broad sense, encompassing all creative endeavors that shape the subject. It focuses on the relationship between subjecthood, freedom and the infusion of Neoplatonic ideas with iterations of Islamic principles manifested in art and philosophy serving patriarchy. This study is predicated on the idea that the exploration of art and subjectivity can uncover the hidden, implicit power relations between humans and the creative process, and it relies upon the philosophy of power to establish a theory that aims to reach beyond what Foucault developed. Further, it intends to highlight the issue of “gap” in general, and the gap in particular that existed between the major Islamic text/principles—a variation of the Platonic “gap”—and the ideas/actions that have unfolded to this day, but has never been questioned. The objective of this study is to create a space in which the Middle East and the West, each through its “other,” can recognize the importance of the process of the formation and preservation of individual within a collective subjectivity. Finally, this research through a new theory, aims to make more visible the current movements underscoring the individual subjectivity in the Middle East and work toward protecting and preserving individual rights.
In the United States, the sideshow occupies a marginal and often controversial space in popular culture. Despite a decline of the sideshow during the early twentieth century, its postmodern reinvention in 1980 has inspired a proliferation of the aesthetics of the sideshow within mass media and culture as a highly profitable commodity. The current existence of the sideshow as a thriving genre can sometimes be met with surprise, disbelief, or disgust because of the history of sideshow and existing codes of “normality.” Although there is pre-existing scholarship on Bakhtin and the sideshow, what is missing is an exploration of Bakhtin’s dialogism in relation to the art of the postmodern sideshow. This dissertation argues that the postmodern sideshow as an art form is an example of a reinvention of intersubjectivity through Bakhtin’s dialogic and still relevant for understanding contemporary aesthetics. Furthermore, I propose that the carnivalesque is an aspect of the dialogic because the carnivalesque renews hope for a better future which reverberates through unfinalizable time. Instead, I will propose an intertextual genealogy between philosophical thought and the first-hand voices of sideshow performers and related show people in the spirit of dialogism. However, I assert that the dialogic is nearly impossible without a dissensus because of precarization and our permanent cellular connection as a result of our technological progress, which did not exist at the height of postmodernism. This new tyranny of normality has depersonalized our time, dissolved our friendships and communities, our ability to communicate, and our social consciousness to empathize with others in a fundamental shift to our notions of exploitation. A revolution of the aesthetic regime through the maternal will create a new paradigm that reorganizes our senses, our social consciousness, and the conditions for possibility in the dialogic.
The contemporary role of information, as a driver and shaper of our technosocial era, is predicated increasingly on information’s usefulness for purging indeterminacy, streamlining situations, and circumscribing potentials. Are there alternate information modes that operate counter to this, predicated less on quantification, standardization and reification than on relational emergence and qualitative potentiation? In other words, whereas regulative information resolves indeterminacy and constrains difference, what about generative information that instead sustains indeterminacy and differentiation? As I show here, just such open and indeterminate information is what we otherwise call art. Specifically, I argue that information in its aesthetic mode is a différance engine that resists equilibrial settling into answer and fact, and instead unfinalizably produces, rather than resolves, differentiation and in definition. By not only considering art in terms of information but also information in terms of art, I describe here how both are surface effects of the same deep operations of difference and disparity. Put simply, information is to art as difference is to differencing, and as being is to becoming. Defining art as a reciprocally differential feedback relation between an object of focus and its context, I articulate the above ideas by exploring the 1960s emergence of (and subsequent dissolution of) the artwork as object, which marked a shift from artworks that represent worlds to artworks situated as elements of the world. As I show, this ingression introduced complex perturbations into art’s traditional processes of actualization, catalyzing an efflorescence of such increasingly atmospheric and ambient information modes as entropic fields, theatrical space, artworld Umwelten, associated milieus, and adjacent possibility transspaces. By exploring how these aesthetic information processes operate, my goal is to reveal not only the differential and non-deterministic processes that underlie discourse formation and artistic progress, but also how information operates as an open and expansive generator of contexts and potentials, rather than as merely a regulator of situations and outcomes.
Organized religion in the Western Hemisphere and the art world share more than just a shared history of collaboration. Their most significant bond is an economic narrative powered by spiritual capital which produces aura. I contend that religion, specifically Christianity, and the art world share an economy of spiritual capital delivered through aura. Aura in a work of art is not an inherent property of the work itself, but it is manufactured by the art economy which draws its influence from the early formation of the Christian Church. This system involves a number of qualifying factors which I will isolate and investigate through this dissertation. Specifically, both religious and art economies: acquire physical space; establish a structure of cooperative agents; use an exclusive language which produces a discourse of disavowal that denies active participation in a consumer driven economy; and deploy ceremonial symbols of power during ritual events. Additionally, the placement of money within this assembly of practices and practitioners will be presented as an original element inside the art world. The entwinement of the art market and the church’s growth as an international business will finally merge to create a construction of both physical and metaphysical value actualized through aura in spiritual capital. This dissertation offers a new reading of Benjamin's theory of "auratic perception" as identified in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In coordination with such theorists as Deleuze and Guattari, Bordieu, Marx, Weber, Agamben, Baudrillard, Massumi, Bourriaud, and others, we can understand the historical trajectory and formation of spiritual capital as a part of the economy of art as we are liberated from the taboo of discussing money and its relationship to art and religion.
As it reshapes the world we inhabit, the concept of the network has emerged as the dominant cultural paradigm across numerous fields and disciplines. Whether biological, social, political, global, communicational, or computational, networks are constituted by a decentered, distributed, multiplicitous, nonlinear system of nodes, plateaus, and edges that are endlessly interconnected and interdependent. Networks prioritize relationships between things over the things themselves, suggesting a reconfiguring of binary elements including: digital/tactile, virtual/material, private/public, and past/present. As networks rapidly change our world, it is logical to assume that contemporary artistic practices are impacted as well. In fact, works of art are uniquely situated to discover and reveal new ways of understanding social and cultural phenomena including that of the network.Several questions arise: How do contemporary works of art relate to network culture? Alternately, how do networks redefine our understanding of specific works of art? How, in turn, are these works expanding our understanding of the network? As a way of focusing these questions, the dissertation addresses works by four contemporary artists: Franklin Evans, Simon Starling, Jenny Odell, and Pablo Helguera. Based on close art historical analysis, I argue that instead of depicting, illustrating or referring to networks as context, the works discussed are constituted or composed in and as networks. They are dynamic relational forms in which the work of art and the network are rendered indissociable from one another. I further claim, that components which were previously considered as existing outside of the work of art – the gallery, the studio, references to texts, histories, artworks, historic objects, other artists, place, and even public programs and participants – are now part of what constitutes the work, thus indicating a profound shift in perspective in what we consider the “work of art” and the ways in which it is addressed and interpreted.
Jackson Pollock has long been heralded as the quintessential Modernist. His work marks the pinnacle of the Golden Age of Modernism and the culmination of a long experiment with modernist ideas elaborated by theorists such as Croce, Fry, Bell, Greenberg and others. Within the predominant concerns of Modernism (including intuition, imagination, and abstraction), Pollock is the paragon of the modernist solitary genius. However, this view of Pollock depends primarily on analysis of his drip paintings and disregards the development of processes inherent within them. This enframing critique of Pollock overlooks the presence of symbol, allegory, and ritual upon which Pollock’s work depends. It neglects to account for the fact that far from pure abstractions, Pollock’s work crosses the boundaries of abstraction in order to reinstitute mimêsis in art. My analysis of Pollock’s work views his methodology as a recuperation of indigenous American aesthetics through mimêsis. I claim that through the forms, modes, and functions of mimêsis Pollock’s work transgresses modernity’s claims to pure form in favor of an inquiry into the forms and techniques of indigenous American aesthetics, thereby reintroducing notions of ritual and mythos in contemporary art.
Toward an econo-aesthetic points to a much needed shift to recuperate, or at this point, to imagine a comprehensive approach to being in the world. As such, the artist contains the promise of a reconciliation of the lost connection linking aesthetics and economies. The relationship between art and money has ambiguous overtones increasingly inherent since the end of the renaissance. Porcelain contains clues to that ambiguity because of its tight relationship with both. The history of porcelain or ‘white gold’, so called since its advent in Europe during the 18th century, is the paradigmatic material for deconstructing what I consider a false schism between finance and aesthetics. In this dissertation, I argue that through a conflation of economics and aesthetics, using the history of porcelain as an art material, the role of the artist in community is more clearly identified as essential, in opposition to the marginalized position the artist currently employs in the west, especially the United States. I approach my argument through the history of porcelain in Europe and the US, and by linking that history to a history of economics I found a strong case for a hidden component of vitality through the expression of aesthetic materiality in the processes held within porcelain and economics. The marginalization of the artist is part of a hegemonic imperative seeking to repress the free expression and visionary potential of the creative spirit. Exercising the agency integral within aesthetic practice, in particular through the materiality of porcelain’s vernacular, the most basic characteristic of a free and vital condition contains the seeds of alternative futures leading out from a darkness born of an increasingly myopic view of the modern world.
What happens when someone confronts a work of art—the inexplicable connection to something brought into the world by an artist? Might we call this moment love? If so, how does this love differ from other loves, like eros or philia? Love originating in the interconnectedness of viewer, artwork and artist resists conventional positions; art is in fact a philosophy of love in action.I argue the primary action for love in art is thinking. Thinking about art is a manifestation of love when the viewer is overcome by wonder when contemplating a work of art. This love arises from a movement—yet something beyond the semblance of logical movement—that occurs in the viewer and artist. This conveyance offers the potential of a rupture, a burst that takes place in the between, a theoretical zero space of love. As a space of pure potential, the between allows for the connection necessary for thinking love, a love that asks unanswerable questions. Love in art offers indefinite openness because it initiates endless possibilities for what a subject can feel or know.Love as I define it is not necessarily dependent on empathy, struggle, hierarchy or equivalence; it is not dogma, ideal or truth; it is neither rational nor irrational. It is not to be desperately sought and located; it is a matter of presence and duration. Love in art waivers between understanding and ignorance; it is embodied, immeasurable, generous, fleeting and erratic. It is a manner of thriving in the expansion of self. With this paper I stake a claim for the importance of love in contemporary aesthetic practice.
During Winston Churchill’s long career he painted hundreds of landscapes which have been viewed as picturesque, a British genre popular to painters and landscape gardeners, mimicking nature. Artists sold flatwork, architectural designs, or led countryside tours; for the gentleman, painting was merely an aristocratic pastime. I will argue that analyzing Churchill’s bright palette used to saturate spatiality on canvas, often resembling military field mapping, uncovers considerations beyond a pastime.Russian Constructivism permeated Britain’s art groups between the wars, acting as a backdrop to Churchill the painter, thus providing contextual contrast in the form of abstracted works to his representational landscapes. Applying a cultural Marxist methodology in the guise of Russian Constructivism to his art elucidates his unintentional responses to social and political change, along with his commitment to the survival of Britain, while allowing for aristocratic ideologies expected in Churchill’s aesthetics.Overlooked contextual underpinnings such as Britain’s struggles with two World Wars while maintaining the Empire, are layered into Romantic and Modernist stylizations. Artists, primarily Cezanne with his determination to objectify Impressionistic light, appealed to Churchill who painted Britain’s place even when abroad. I will argue that the category of amateur placed on deceased artists continues to be ill- defined. Insightful content found beneath Churchill’s paintings has been overlooked because he was deemed a gentleman painter during his life. Churchill’s aristocratic lineage, evident at Blenheim, left him the social status of amateur artist no matter how much talent he exuded or how many works he sold. Post World War II commercialism produced Kitsch which Churchill readily embraced, thus eroding his amateur status which contributed to increasing the value of his artwork. Contextual analysis of Churchill’s landscapes through a Constructivist-cultural Marxist framework allows contemplation of his paintings not just as a gentleman’s pastime but also as troped imagery imbibed with social and political thought complimenting his writings and orations, leading to a better understanding of the man and his times.
This dissertation examines the steampunk movement as a significant contemporary expression of the human condition. Although its aesthetic inspiration comes from the Victorian past, as re-tooled, re-imagined, and re-energized for the twenty-first century, steampunk’s underlying interest is in a speculative view of the future and a concern for the contemporary individual’s struggle to retain autonomy in a de-centered, de-territorialized world. As such the steampunk movement participates in, and contributes to, an important ongoing philosophical and aesthetic dialog.The project examines the motivations for steampunk’s visual inspiration in the Victorian. Technological and scientific advancements in that period greatly impacted societal traditions and the role of the individual within it. Economic, social, and political changes revolutionized daily life and the individual faced a new self-consciousness as she confronted, and adapted to, these significant changes. Today, similar technological advancements force new tensions between the individual and the world around her. Astounding developments in computing and artificial intelligence, and the concept of the cyborg and other hybrid beings challenge the contemporary individual’s sense of self. By looking to the past, steampunk seeks to recuperate the Victorian individual’s successful navigation of technological change. She does so in order to facilitate our own navigation of current waters. The project traces the movement’s modest roots as a literary sub-genre of science fiction, explores its sources in the Victorian, and describes the movement’s rapid evolution to global phenomenon. Today steampunk is fully integrated into contemporary culture as an aesthetic observed in visual, decorative, and fashion arts, comic books, movies, and television. The project explores the current landscape of art and philosophy in order to position the steampunk movement within the larger scope of the contemporary scene. A triad of prevailing philosophical trends—postmodernism, transhumanism, and post-humanism, help to reveal steampunk’s involvement in the contemporary philosophical and aesthetic dialog.
The research that I am about to embark on focuses on the shift in expressions of gendered race in a screened world. This study is primarily centered on this mode of representation as it has been transformed through the evolution of image technology in film, television, and cyberspace. These three media platforms, in particular, are greatly influential on our cultural understanding of self-image, and the image of others. I will look closely at how depictions of gendered race have been authored in each medium, and the mental impact of these images on our individual and collective consciousness.I will argue that race, although not an invention of mass media, derived its meaning in large part from the mythology of images. And mass media, film and TV most specifically, used images of race to invent narratives about collective identification. There is an inherent connection between the images we see and how we identify or are identified, and the screen has been highly successful at mediating this delicate relationship to both detrimental and productive ends. I will be examining gendered race, as a performance of the double. The double is a mental function and an appearance. It signifies the psychological equation of the self + the other - as well as the social condition of race consciousness.The appearance of the racial double, in its earliest form in Hollywood film and television, was a corrosive image. It was designed to misrepresent, stigmatize and belittle. This was the case for the predominate image of blacks, which pointed back to the black body and reified the experience of racism and oppression within American culture. This is the image of the racial double that I reference throughout as the unproductive other because it is meant to draw sharp, impassable lines between white and black, or more theoretically the self and other. This traditional way of image identification comes from a colonial structure of white/European supremacy, from which the subjugated position of the racial other was founded.In this dissertation, I make the claim for a productive other. This form of doubling acknowledges but is liberated from the old practices of racial individuation. The new form of the productive other accepts images as pure copies, without origin, that do not point back to a single, organic source. It is an appearance that embodies transcendence, and is constantly seeking to be in connection with others. I refer to the process of embodied transcendence as eRacial, and it is the method by which we obtain a new, tertiary experience with image-identification in cyberspace. The tertiary experience breaks out of old pathological binaries, recognizes the image as myth and therefore carries the potential for radical identification.
This dissertation considers the ways in which artists working with living animals articulate the complex and paradoxical nature of human-animal relationships. The examples used are from signature moments in the more recent past, with an emphasis the interactions of contemporary European and American artists. Works considered include circus acts, natural history dioramas, and pieces by Bartabas, Joseph Beuys, Carolyn Carlson, Catherine Chalmers, Hubert Duprat, David Nita Little, Joanna Mendl Shaw, and David Wojnarowicz.Various discursive and knowledge systems are at play in these works, and affect how the animals are treated and how they are represented. This project also challenges the cultural construction we call nature. Much effort has been put into avoiding the hazards of positivism, duality, and relativism. In spite of the inevitably limiting cultural and historical constraints, my aim is to generate some usable knowledge that informs how we understand the languages of art and philosophy and engage with systems of knowledge, especially as it concerns our ethical and aesthetic relationships with animals, including other humans.Combining artistic and deconstructive practices within the theoretical framework of situated textualities reveals the richly complex yet tenuous nature of our relationships. The art works considered here express misunderstandings, tensions, connections, and the potential for transformation, sometimes simultaneously. Deconstruction is used as a prism to reveal a spectrum of insights, where what once seemed familiar now points toward the unknown, ignored, or overlooked. Situated textualities, which insists that a complex matrix of practices, materials, beings, and contexts must also be taken into account, offers openings for tacit and sensory ways of knowing, which both complement and resist the limits of rational analysis. My theoretical approach is influenced by the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Matthew Calarco, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Lynette Hunter, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jakob Von Uexküll and, of course, by the artists whose work is considered here.
Abstract: This dissertation examines philosophical modes of understanding subject formation within the realm of the virtual. I primarily base the evaluations within the concepts of misrecognition, alienation, and purposelessness found within the virtual world. I discuss the strength of the mirroring image while at play in the virtual game, which leads players to greater heights of understanding as to who they are and who they might become. Interactivity within the virtual, coupled with play and forms of meditative reflection, offer the player unique paths to finding freedom. Drawing primarily on the work of Jacques Lacan, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche, I demonstrate how creation within the virtual realm holds promise for an improved nature of becoming autonomous creators of one’s life content and surrounding communities. My analysis takes Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage by showing how the virtual uniquely provides choice beyond the self. Hegel’s concepts of self-consciousness, spirit, and mind are linked in the broader sense to the virtual space. Nietzsche’s views on self-creation and will to power are expounded upon within the ability to design one’s life. Heidegger’s views on technology and authenticity are considered in relation to the authentic inner self found when playing. I argue that the emerging genre of virtual play is not as much about a personal escape, but that of a spiritual journey. The power of becoming self-aware is understood in terms of its ability to enhance what one brings back to physical reality. The virtual experience does not deplete life’s tangibility. Rather, it has the ability to give one’s life new meaning, and imbue a stronger sense of self––a new impression of reality. It is my contention that virtual interactivity covertly activates the cognitive mode to return the player to a state of authenticity that was previously veiled.
There is no denying contemporary graffiti’s prevalence throughout the modern landscape. Hailed or disdained, the genre solidified its place in popular society through a manifold of discursive methods and ideologies. Now a global aesthetic, it compels a significant and wide range of assessments aimed at comprehending both the overarching heterogeneity that manifest throughout the counterculture as well as the larger socio-political impact made by the entirety of the genre. These analyses often establish their theories on the basis that contemporary graffiti originates as a statement of presence. Thus meaning that through a piece of graffiti, its author claims, “I am here.” This dissertation challenges that foundation, and rethinks the genre as a statement of absence that proclaims, “I was here.” Working from this provenance, I argue that absence constitutes contemporary graffiti’s ontology and underscores the entirety of the counterculture. Coupling this position with the genre’s continual diversification, this dissertation theorizes that contemporary graffiti is an anti-establishing. This means that as a socio-political aesthetic, it continually self-perpetuates its own self-negation and relies on both methodological and ideological differences so as to refute any attempts at totalization and subsequent unification originating from either within the counterculture or its surrounding discourses. Instead, the genre always places itself in-difference and a-part from itself and others thus cultivating relationships of contact without union with the various parties involved. Relying primarily on Jean-Luc Nancy’s radicalization of community, I demonstrate how these relationships are affirmations of his philosophy, as they constitute a community predicated on the exposition of finitude. From such an assignment, this dissertation expands what is commonly understood as contemporary graffiti practices and argues for the continued legitimization of the genre’s rebellious constitution despite its rampant appropriation by popular society.
Abstract: This study investigates the roles of wonder and a sensibility to “the numinous” in the work of Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo and Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, each of whom created fabulist narratives, visual and literary respectively. An investigation of wonder as a distinctly “disruptive” universal phenomenon and its accompanying “not-knowing” and “self-forgetting” qualities serve as an entryway for engaging, contemplating and depicting the infinitely shifting terrain that marks the invisibility of the numinous. Eastern approaches to understanding the variations and fluctuations of aesthetic consciousness might describe this theme as a “gateless gate.” Thus European and Asian thought are combined to support the argument that Varo and Borges’s irrealistic narratives challenge any immutable account of truth and reality in art. The proposal herein is that truth and reality are ultimately indefinable aspects of art. Grounding this study in a philosophico-phenomenological orientation by combining a methodology rooted in Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with aesthetically oriented philosophical commentary by other thinkers allows the seemingly amorphous and paradoxical roles of subjectivity and spiritual consciousness in modern art and aesthetics to be more directly examined and understood. That the dynamic of the artist-philosopher fuels an impulse to make visible through art the invisibility of what Rudolf Otto called “the numinous” reflects how, as Remedios Varo asserted, art is made “as a way of communicating the incommunicable,” thus bringing meaning to what Borges describes as “the overwhelming disorder of the real world.” The seminal roles of subjectivity—the decentering of the subject, Husserlian transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and intertexual philosophical assessments of subjectivity— are all used to explore Borges’s literary and Varo’s visual storytelling and their respective searches for truth and reality.
Abstract: A new language to discuss and critique interactive artwork is emerging from the intersections of cybernetics, neuroscience, and embodied philosophy. This language includes both biological materialism and posthuman developments as part of an evolutionary trend in aesthetics. Interactive aesthetics has emerged from the historical discourse of a phenomenally situated subject. Adding a neuroscientific lens to our understanding of embodiment brings into further focus some of the detailed ways in which we deploy choices in our actions. This project challenges the traditional notion of neuroaesthetics as a reductionist methodology. As an alternative, neuroscientific findings can provide ways in which to understand the brain as a series of patterns of activity that provide introspection for full-body actions within the larger world. Using the frame of behavioral aesthetics, this project offers a critique that argues interactivity as a common language for the post-biological object to have voice approximate to that of the biological subject. This multidisciplinary investigation explores the ways in which interactive artworks are reinventing a place in contemporary practice that focuses our attention on how experience creates aesthetic purpose. Embodied aesthetics deploys the phenomenological affirmation that we are always present in thought and perception. We load cognitive work onto the environment and the environment offers us fresh stimuli. The environment is very much a part of a cognitive system and is able to impact the configuration of our cognitive function, often in unpredictable ways. Cognition is body-based and works in a distributed way across all systems to employ—to urge from the environment—an empathetic participation. A study of interactive artworks brings attention to this act of creative inhabitance.
Abstract: Place has been a central consideration in much philosophical discourse since at least the ancient Greeks. This dissertation will argue, however, that in certain instances in the history of thinking, place has played a significant and unique role, one beyond typical considerations.In these specific intellectual projects, place is a method for situating and focusing the development of thought. This relationship with place produces a particular type of thought, one that ontologically fuses place and thinker together. I regard this merger as a topographical convergence of situated contemplation that creates a localized episteme, or in other words, “place-produced thought.” Within this reciprocal relationship between place, thinker, and thought, I argue that the agency of place plays a far more significant role than it is routinely ascribed.Throughout this thesis, I also argue for the distinctive possibilities of indigenous knowledge. Much of this argument is built upon certain instances of thinking with/in place, in which the place itself asserts its agency and influence into the actual production of thought. My argument is constructed in a manner that illustrates how this relationship between thinker and place is much different than other approaches of creating a relationship with one’s surroundings. Finally, I have tried to elucidate the innovative and irruptive possibilities for place-produced thought—important sources of new identities, thoughts, boundaries, and modes of being. In an increasingly globalized and technological world, the potential value and efficacy of such thought needs to be considered.
Abstract: Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogical has recently entered the museum world where it is sometimes understood as a communication tool between museums and visitors. While Bakhtin highlights the position of author and hero, it must be noted that the dialogical is not a dyadic but a triadic phenomenon, which is to say, it is through the plurality of autonomous voices, independent from the authorial discourse, that dialogue is actualized. This dissertation argues that Bakhtin’s dialogism can serve as a model for the contemporary museum as it seeks to give itself new relevance in the wake of Poststructuralism. It is specifically concerned with the contested issue of authority in the museum space. Instead of viewing authority as a form of power and control, the Bakhtinian perspective is predicated on an architectonics of co-authorship allowing a myriad of voices to interact simultaneously. That isn’t to say that every voice is the same or, no voices will be heard. Architectonics, which is the distinguishing feature of Bakhtin’s dialogism, is an exchange within the boundaries of ratio and proportion while at the same time being open to change. Bakhtin’s concept of authoring changes the way we experience museums as it rejects the centrality of voice, be it the institution’s, the collection’s or the visitor’s. Significantly, dialogism emphasizes the ethical call of signifying other identities and rendering them complete. Thus understood, dialogism anchors the museum as a place where intersubjectivity can be explored, experienced, and learned. A corollary claim is made for artist interventions in the museum space as a way to break through the institution’s hegemonic structure. Drawing from museums and artists as well as critical theory and philosophy (Bakhtin, Kristeva, Foucault, Rancière, Agamben, etc.) this dissertation seeks to redefine notions of authority, subjectivity, community, participation and experience in contemporary art and museum.
Abstract: During the Biennale, Venice, with its unique urban topography and waterscape, functions as a staging ground for nations and other political and cultural groups. Unlike the crop of biennials that have recently exploded on the art scene, the Venice Biennale is the world’s longest running festival of its kind. Its origins coincide with both the crystallization of capitalism in the nineteenth century, the creation of a unified Italian nation, and major challenges to European colonialism. A distinctive characteristic of the Venice Biennale is its reliance on an exhibition setup modeled on the cultural display of modern, sovereign nations, which has persisted over time. In recent decades, neoliberalism has impacted the geopolitical layout and the inclusion of nations at the Venice Biennale as a site where gestures—artistic, curatorial, institutional, political, tourist, and urban—are involved in the production and exhibition of contemporary art. These gestures are some of the means by which nations are presented, enacted, modeled, behaved, revealed, contained, erased, and experienced. In this dissertation, I read such gestures within the context of select national pavilion exhibitions and what the Biennale calls “collateral events” from 1993 to the present through the lens of critical theory, visual studies, and performance studies in order to examine how such gestures enable and reveal material relations and the structuring of power in neoliberalism, where freedom is placed under erasure.
Abstract: This dissertation explores contemporary works of art and theory that utilize a discourse of openness that recognizes contingency through participation and dialogic engagement. I argue that the incorporation of the third highlights a dialogic encounter that functions as an attribute of an ethico-aesthetic predicated on a philosophy of care. In recent years, many artists have been investigating forms of participatory relationships in works that explore notions of performative, rather than contemplative, response. An ethico-aesthetics is more readily manifest in this sort of artwork than in other, more traditional forms, because the inclusion of the third often is a component of work that concertedly focuses on empathy, connection, and care. At the same time, there has been a philosophical shift from regarding ethics in the context of universal truth or objective judgment, to proposing an ethics of care grounded in a performative and embodied engagement—one that recognizes that “truth” is situational and contingent. Many philosophers and theorists have been addressing the notion of the impossibility of static truth in philosophy, literary and psychoanalytic theory. Indebted to theory by Martin Heidegger, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, and Kelly Oliver, this dissertation places their work in a conversation with the visual arts to examine recent shifts in aesthetic discourse.
Abstract: In the span of the last forty years, genetic advancements have remapped humans’ understanding of the body, and the interaction between the self and the Other. This has helped to continually alter humans’ understanding of various sociocultural environments. Within this dissertation, four chapters are organized by decade to allow for an in-depth analysis of one genetic advancement per decade, the related changing nuclear family structure, gender roles, and care-giving, as well as reflecting upon how these advancements and changes are found in visual arts.Each chapter is further structured through the use of Edmund Husserls’ concept of the life-world, Michel Foucault’s argument of the increasing presences of biopolitical power, and Günther Anders theories about technological agency. In each chapter, an emphasis is placed on the argument that these methods of analysis should be viewed as interconnected and relevant to the past and the present, as well as, to the future.
Abstract: The dissertation explores the intertwining of video art practices and the ontological implications around the central themes and questions posed, in part, by Martin Heidegger. The essay evaluates his respective approaches to technology and “becoming” in relation to a number of central questions including the rapid dissolving of the boundaries and distinctions between video and cinema. I look at video installations by Dan Graham as they allow for interaction between the mediation of the image and the immediacy of the physical experience of the viewer, and I look at important precedents for the role of bodily performance in relation to video art. In response, I demonstrate why a philosophy of video is necessary. Finally, I also investigate the new paradigms of video production and distribution as they contrast with traditional practices and video’s dialogic relations. In the context of this research I then suggest the paradigm shift of video as a democratized medium.
Abstract: My goal is to investigate the role of culture in the formation of knowledge and its relation to politics of history. I depart from the specific historical accounts of nation building in Canada, striving to demonstrate some of the ways in which different lines of inquiry are skewed from entering the bulk of the epitome that guides political praxis and its function in culture and society. I also critically underline how governmental policies justify spending on arts’ grants, while dismissing specific cultural information and everyday practices that affect the underwriting of policies and the distribution of economic funds. For my research, I seek examples in the production of culture that sustain ideas if freedom, equality, and social justice, giving voice to minorities throughout history. I draw attention to the culture of Canada’s Aboriginal communities that interconnect current and universal relations of time and space through folklore and societal function, exemplified by art practices, documentary filmmaking, and story telling. This urges us to rethink the way we record, validate, and define knowledge, and how knowledge is transformed into political policies that sustain injustice in a government that claims itself just.
Abstract: Cultural exchanges, family life, and community engagement, both local and global in nature, are all sites wherein the ethic of hospitality is active, yet, the complexities of hospitality are not commonly understood in these venues of socialization. Therefore, I have approached this work with the intention of it serving as a primer on the ethic of hospitality; the first two chapters are particularly important in that regard, as they explicate the lexicon and practices of hospitality historically. The challenge for a contemporary ethic of hospitality is to move through the fearful notions motivating hospitality historically toward more conscious and realistic affirmative relations among humans and between humans and other sentient beings. In Chapter 3, I argue that the need for the present configuration of hospitality might be eliminated upon the dismantling of patriarchy and through a contemporary orientation to the concepts of peace and love. I explore alternatives to the dichotomy of self/other that encompass mutual rights, responsibilities, and opportunities vis-à-vis ontology and space. With this in mind, in Chapter 4, I consider what gifts a philosophy of physical geography has to offer the ethic of hospitality. No doubt the geography of home informs our psyches in foundational ways. How does art similarly mediate the liminal grounds of these external and internal territories? I begin Chapter 5 with a discussion of art that utilizes hospitality as an organizing feature. I then posit the ways in which art made from natural materials is uniquely orientated toward the ethic of hospitality and advance the notion that works of art that exemplify this connection can bring us to more nuanced articulations of hospitality and further, that art generally is hospitality embodied.
Abstract: The role of visual art in anatomical illustration answers a particular need for “descriptive” images to serve definite clinical and instructional applications. Beyond this clinical, pedagogical, and pragmatic need, I argue, the function of the visual arts in anatomical illustration is to represent of the human “spirit,” a concept beyond the descriptive capacities of anatomical science. By the term “spirit,” I mean the dialectical and ethical aspects of human Being, synthesized into a hybrid of the medical-material and the ethical-spiritual body through the “style” of artistic representations. Conceived in terms of nature and culture, science and art, the body in anatomical illustrations requires the work of the artist to be fully visible. The artist thematizes and concretizes our bodies as ethical and material entities, representing the “science of the body” as an awakening and recollection of the ethical chord between self and other.In this dissertation, I argue that the body presented by anatomy is a culturally determined ideological construct, and not the embodiment of a disinterested, objective and universally scientific truth. Variations in the appearance of the body within anatomical science are due as much to changes in aesthetic and ethical contexts, the conceptions of human spirit abroad in a given period, as they are to “advances” in medical knowledge.
Abstract: The dissertation explores the intertwining of video art practices and the ontological implications around the central themes and questions posed, in part, by Martin Heidegger. The essay evaluates his respective approaches to technology and “becoming” in relation to a number of central questions including the rapid dissolving of the boundaries and distinctions between video and cinema. I look at video installations by Dan Graham as they allow for interaction between the mediation of the image and the immediacy of the physical experience of the viewer, and I look at important precedents for the role of bodily performance in relation to video art. In response, I demonstrate why a philosophy of video is necessary. Finally, I also investigate the new paradigms of video production and distribution as they contrast with traditional practices and video’s dialogic relations. In the context of this research I then suggest the paradigm shift of video as a democratized medium.