Browsing by Subject "contemporary art"
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Item Invisible Men: The Risks and Pleasures of Self-Portrayal in the Work of Contemporary American Male Artists(2014-05) DeLand, LaurenThis dissertation examines the rare phenomenon of self-portrayal in the work of contemporary American male artists. The feminist art movement of the 1970s provided the aegis for many women artists to challenge the gendered dichotomy of artist/subject via the strategic deployment of their own bodies as artistic subjects. Yet remarkably little study has been dedicated to the question of why male artists so rarely make their own, allegedly privileged bodies the subjects of their work. I propose that the shifting definitions of masculinity in postwar America have in fact produced a stringently regulated economy of images of the male body. In four case studies of four contemporary American male artists (Kenneth Anger, Ron Athey, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Glenn Ligon), I employ visual analysis and comparative readings of juridical rulings and institutional policies that dictate the state of the body in contemporary American art.Item Shadow Feminism: Disavowed Feminized Labor in Postwar American Art(2015-05) Joseph, LauraThis dissertation examines the ways in which postwar art historical discourses routinely trivialize feminine creative, emotional, and physical labor, as well as the artists whose work is associated with this labor. It takes form of five case studies, each of which coheres around a different type of feminized laborer, including the domestic, the cook, the entertainer, the hostess, and the widow. It asserts that the labor that characterizes these roles gets written over by art historical practices that cannot conceive of time as doing anything but moving forward, of radicality as involving anything other than rejection of the past and of artistic and social conventions, and of the art object as anything other than autonomously authored and produced. These case studies do not correspond with an examination of four independent artists. Rather, they emulate the gendered work of American kin-work, a set of sustaining practices identified and studied by social scientists since the eighties. Each chapter traces a network of relations between artists whose affiliations are not legible within traditional art historical narratives. The artists who populate this study include a selection of those whose work has been trivialized on the basis of its affiliation with feminized labor, such as Janet Sobel, Lee Krasner, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Charlotte Moorman, and J Morgan Puett. These artist's careers span the transition from modernist to postmodernist art practices and several generations of feminist thought. These figures do not just serve to represent exclusion, however. Nor is it this project's goal to rescue them from obscurity. When we hold back, in order to survey what art historical narratives have left behind, we find that these remains offer alternative methods of meaning making, methods that abide by, rather than seek to dispel, obscurity. This project looks to other contemporary artists whose work addresses itself to the erasure of feminized creative, emotional, and physical labor--including Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Dario Robleto--to develop these historical methods.Item Tell Me About It: The Role of Confession in Contemporary Art(2019-11) Flaherty, ShannonThis dissertation investigates the role of confession in recent artistic practices in the United States and United Kingdom, as a recurring motif and as a method for addressing questions of identity formation and institutional power. Although deeply historical, confession also saturates the western contemporary moment, from judicial proceedings to reality television. Its very ubiquity, however, masks the mechanisms of power that elicit and analyze confession, particularly within the twenty-first century American culture of surveillance. Further, confession’s significant role in constituting truths about individual and group identities means that it more dramatically affects minoritarian subjects than those in dominant groups. I bring together works from the United States and United Kingdom to consider the ways shared historical traditions of confession, in Protestant faiths and systems of justice, both persist and diverge in our contemporary moment. More specifically, these works are made and exhibited in a post-September 11th context in which the global consequences of the American political and military-industrial systems depend upon and are disseminated via confessional logic, including “enhanced interrogation,” military imaging techniques aimed at discovering hidden secrets, and news media analysis expressed through feeling. By intervening in ongoing discussions on contemporary confession from an art historical perspective, I argue that analysis of the sensory experiences offered by art contributes to our understanding of confession in a significant way, distinct from other disciplines. I demonstrate that close attention to the relational and embodied practices of contemporary new media art allows us to understand the operations of power that establish and authorize expressions of truth and identity. I offer a consideration of ways artists engage conventions of confession, but, more importantly, argue for the potential for artworks to reimagine social relationships.