Browsing by Subject "Art History"

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Art Deco Tea Sets and Cocktail Sets: Making Modernity Accessible
(2014-02-25) Melanie, Keating;
This essay examines American Art Deco tea sets and cocktails sets and their accessibility to a large audience. It covers the origin of Art Deco and describes certain common features by visually analyzing relevant examples. It argues that Art Deco tea sets and cocktail sets blended aspects of modern and traditional design in order to appeal to progressive and conservative consumers. The designers studied include Jean Puiforcat, Norman Bel Geddes, Virginia Hamill, Gene Theobald, Louis W. Rice, Russel Wright, Howard Reichenbach, and Walter von Nessen.
Christians of the Western Desert in Late Antiquity: the fourth-century church complex of Ain el-Gedida, Upper Egypt.
(2009-06) Aravecchia, Nicola
This dissertation examines the fourth-century church complex excavated, between 2006 and 2008, at Ain el-Gedida, in the Dakhla Oasis of Upper Egypt (project directed by Professor Roger Bagnall). The church and the set of interconnected rooms that form the complex are one of the earliest examples discovered in Egypt thus far. Therefore, they provide valuable information on the development of Christian public architecture, not only in the region of the Western Desert but also throughout Egypt. Furthermore, the uncommon layout of the church itself, its location within a cluster of rooms serving more utilitarian functions, and the evidence of different phases of substantial architectural alterations make the complex a particularly significant case study. One goal of this dissertation is not to discuss the church complex as an isolated building, but to contextualize it within the topographical framework of the settlement. The archaeological evidence from the complex is not presented in the form of a standard report; rather, it is used to approach more general issues, regarding the chronology of the site, its abandonment, and the nature of the settlement, particularly the social structure of its inhabitants. This work first examines the architectural history of the complex and sheds light on its different phases, thanks to the study of the evidence gathered in the field. Furthermore, it discusses the results of comparative analysis between the church of Ain el-Gedida and other examples of Early Christian architecture inside and outside Egypt. In particular, it emphasizes the considerable typological similarities shared with the Small East Church at the nearby site of Ismant el-Kharab (ancient Kellis). The investigation of the typological origins of the church of Ain el-Gedida includes comparisons with the earliest known examples of Christian architecture, even from relatively distant regions, such as Dura Europos and its well-known domus ecclesiae. Furthermore, methods of spatial analysis, in particular access analysis, are applied to the church complex and its immediate surroundings, with the aim of investigating patterns of access control and use of space at the site in Late Antiquity. The results are offered as a valuable ingredient in typological analysis, integrating the available archaeological evidence. In its last section, this dissertation examines issues of chronology, both relative and absolute, in relation to the church complex. It also takes into consideration the highly debated question concerning the nature of the complex and, more in general, of the site of Ain el-Gedida, with the goal of shedding light on its people and their social identity. In addition to the monastery/village readings, originally brought forth by scholars, further interpretations are proposed, analyzing the available evidence in favor or against any of them.
Delineations: American art history and the discourse of inheritance.
(2009-02) Johnson Bidler, Tiffany Ann
This project is devoted to understanding works of art that, in a paraphrase of James Baldwin's words, look down the line and wonder. I outlined the significance of art history's mobilization of what I called the discourse of inheritance. I argued that this discourse secures art history's disciplinary boundaries, and, by way of art historical practice, reinforces normative conceptualizations of beauty, race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. I provided an analysis of inheritance as a theme in works of art, objects of material culture, art criticism, and art history, but I also sought, by way of rigorous formal analysis of a wide range of artworks, to understand the discourse of inheritance that permeates art historical writing and thinking. My research necessarily violated the proper domains art history has drawn, e.g., the division between the fields of American art and contemporary art, in order to gain an understanding of the mechanisms of inheritance and in order better to understand the work of artists, such as Kara Walker, who make use of inherited imagery. I saw my writing engaging in a kind of art historical miscegenation (improper or illegitimate mixing of fields), and for this reason much of this project focused on the iconography of miscegenation that appears in the silhouette work of Walker. It follows that the ultimate significance of the project may pivot on the development of an initial understanding of the relationships between art history's mobilization of the discourse of inheritance, historical and contemporary violations of African-Americans' civil rights, and historical and contemporary race-based violence.
Gifts in motion: Ottoman-Safavid cultural exchange, 1501-1618
(2012-08) Arcak, Sine
Between the sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the Shiite Safavids of Iran and the Sunni Ottomans of Turkey--two of the greatest Islamic empires in history--developed a complex relationship in which tenuous peace alternated with bloody conflict, often with dizzying speed. This dissertation is the first systematic study of this relationship from the perspective of visual culture, and focuses specifically on the objects exchanged, through gifting, by the royal courts of these two empires. These objects--ranging from lavishly illustrated books and exquisite silk carpets to richly embroidered tents, chandeliers and even live birds of prey-- enriched the visual culture of each court, and led to the formulation of two distinctive artistic canons with a lasting legacy in the artistic traditions of each empire. This study aims to deepen our understanding of this cultural exchange and the role it played in the relations between these two rival empires. It argues that the movement of luxurious objects functioned as a primary mechanism for the expression of competitive interaction between the two courts. This thesis focuses primarily on gifts received by Ottoman sultans from Safavid shahs from the early sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century. Specifically, the exchange of gifts between the two courts is explored at certain key moments in the development of their relationship, each of which forms a separate chapter in the dissertation. Through an examination of the elaborate ceremonies that typically accompanied the exchange of objects at these moments, I investigate the ritual use of material culture to project both political power and cultural influence in the early modern world. The four chapters are organized in rough chronological order, with each one focusing on a specific exchange or a set of ceremonial exchanges that provide visual and material clues about how objects functioned in the early modern Muslim world. Each case study takes as its unit of analysis a group of routinely exchanged objects on the one hand, and one-of-a-kind objects on the other. I examine both the actual gifts exchanged, as well as manuscript paintings depicting and describing their ritual presentation and reception. The textual evidence ranges from treasury records and court chronicles to epistolary sources and first-hand ambassadorial accounts in Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Italian. The purpose of each chapter is thus to understand the potential and actual movement of objects in illuminating the convoluted relationship between two rival empires.
I'm Not Yelling
(2024-04-06) Polikoff, Whalen
Ornate visions of knowledge and power: formation of Marinid Madrasas in Maghrib al-Aqsâ.
(2011-05) Latif, Riyaz Mansur
Decoding the cultural lives of monuments and the many meanings that accrue to them in time has been vital to art historical inquiry. In this framework, this dissertation explores the composite meanings constructed around the 13th-14th century madrasas (theological seminaries) commissioned by the Marinids (1269-1465), primarily at Fez in Morocco. As independent built-forms, these institutions emerged conspicuously late in the Maghrib (western North Africa), and thus, their emergence under the Marinids raises vital questions about their social, ideological and visual meanings. Fusing these madrasas' historical incidence with nuances of their visual formation in the social, cultural, and political realm of 14th-century Maghrib as well as the Mediterranean, the dissertation seeks to attend to the wider implications of their presence, and place these structures in the domain of their concurrences with and departures from the visuality of similar educational institutions in other Islamic cultures. At the outset, addressing the relatively unusual presence of a madrasa in the Marinid dynastic necropolis of the Chella near Rabat by suggesting that the Marinids aligned themselves with the consecrated aura of this ancient site, the dissertation subsequently moves to understand the emergence of the Marinid madrasas, not only in light of the cultural and political aspirations of the Marinid sovereignty, but also in relation to issues of the urban topography of Fez, and the economy of waqf (endowment) and water which is inscribed in their formation. In exploring the madrasas' spatial, decorative and inscriptional schema, the dissertation seeks to understand their architectural embellishments as a visual archive geared for transmission through the art of memory. Also, the correspondences between the functions and the visuality of these madrasas can be understood as a symptom of the power-knowledge nexus involving the Marinid state patronage. Probing the visual formation of the Marinid madrasas on several levels, the dissertation raises pertinent queries about these madrasas' transformed visual meanings over time, foregrounding the implications of colonial modernity for scholastic engagement with the art and architectural production in the Islamic west.
Selfsame spaces: Gandhi, architecture and allusions in twentieth century India.
(2011-05) Maddipati, Venugopal
In this dissertation, I suggest that the Indian political leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi infused deep and enigmatic meanings into everyday physical objects, particularly buildings. Indeed, the manner in which Gandhi named the buildings in his famous Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad in the early part of the twentieth century, makes it somewhat difficult to write, in isolation, about their physical appearance. Quite apart from considering what the buildings at the Ashram denoted physically, that is, architecture as shelter, one must also take into account what their names connoted. Writing a history of Gandhi's engagement with architecture must necessarily involve taking into account how he sometimes mythified architectural spaces into metaphors for other spaces. In this dissertation, then, I enquire into how Gandhi mobilized particular aspects of the physical appearances of the buildings that he lived in or considered between 1891 and 1930, as allegories. I also write about how Gandhi systematically infused allegorical meaning into his experiences of places by giving names to those places. Moreover, I consider how, in 1936, Gandhi explicitly emphasized the physical appearance of a hut that had been built in the village of Segaon by Mira Behn, the famous social worker. If Gandhi spoke at length about how Mira Behn had built that hut out of material that contingently became available to her in Segaon, he did so in order to emphasize life as the activity of making do with contingencies. To fully appreciate the purport of Gandhi's description of Mira Behn's hut, then, one has to read it primarily as an allusion towards a contrast between an inner life of equanimity and an outward life of coping with transience and contingencies. Indeed, on the one occasion Gandhi exclusively spoke about the denotative aspects of architecture, he did so in order to make those very aspects connote a deeper, more enigmatic spatial reality which he was always already familiar with. I derive, then, from Gandhi's reading of spaces as allegories for other intensely familiar spaces, or what I call self-same spaces, to write about Gandhian architectural experiments in post-colonial India.
Where there were no longer walls: globalization, nostalgia, and art in Finland.
(2009-06) Wilson, Sterling Paul
While most of the literature on art and globalization theorizes globalization in terms of its effects on art institutions and markets, I focus on the way in which artists, artworks, and institutions produce the time-space narratives of globalization rather than simply reflect them. I conceptualize globalization as a hegemonic way of articulating the relationships between time, space, and identity in the contemporary moment. As such, it comes into direct conflict with nationalism, which served as the dominant template for creating such narratives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nostalgia, a longing for a past time or lost place, plays a significant, though largely unnoticed, role in negotiating these shifting discourses of identity. As it is an aestheticization of the relationships between time and space, nostalgia is a powerful cultural tool with which to rework the relationships of the individual to the social, the local to the global, and the past to the present. Each chapter examines a broadly defined site of time-space narrative production, using artworks by artists working in Finland or in nearby Vyborg, Russia or Tallinn, Estonia. I discuss work by the following artists, filmmakers, and photographers: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Elina Brotherus, Tellervo Kalleinen, Oskar Kochta-Kalleinen, Esko Männikkö, Petri Nuutinen, Anu Pennanen, Minna Rainio, Liisa Roberts, Kari Soinio, and Pekka Turunen. I also address institutional phenomena such as the Helsinki School, the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, and the international biennial system.

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