Browsing by Subject "temporality"

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    Through the Woods: documenta, Fairy Tales, and the Time of Enchantment
    (2019-07) López Prater, Erika
    Every five years, the town of Kassel, Germany hosts the contemporary art exhibition, documenta, an event that is a product of the post-WWII period and which began as a reaction against Nazi-era visual politics. In the early nineteenth century in the same town, the Brothers Grimm collected the fairy tales for which they are famous, and published Children’s- and Household Tales. This dissertation reads the disparate histories of these two major institutions of Kassel together in order to explore how documenta itself functions as a kind of fairy tale – one that both transforms and haunts, and has the potential to rehabilitate but also to harm. Employing an experimental historiography that draws from both the historical methods of artists and fairy tales, this dissertation argues that the fairy tale themes of magic, transformation, and repetition are integral to documenta – an event that is rooted in trauma and recovery. This project is thematic in its approach, and as such is not meant to serve as an exhaustive overview of documenta, nor does it endeavor to catalogue every occurrence of fairy tale art that has been present at the event. Rather, it brings two disparate bodies of literature into conversation with each other. Additionally, the artwork case studies that each of the chapters are based upon are not based upon pre-existing fairy tales, but this dissertation argues the artworks function as fairy tales. Chapter 1 examines the relationship between the first documenta in 1955 and the Nazi exhibition, “Degenerate Art” from 1937, in order to examine the curatorial innovations and shortcomings that undergird documenta. Chapter 2 looks at Joseph Beuys’s monumental environmental artwork 7000 Oaks and interprets it as a work that, through its metamorphosis, promotes both mourning and regeneration. Chapter 3 seeks out the ghosts that haunt Kassel and non-teleological forms of storytelling, through the case study of Stan Douglas’s Suspiria. Chapter 4 takes Mariam Ghani’s A Brief History of Collapses to think through both documenta’s relationship with iconoclasm and an enchanted, repetitive form temporality that allow it to imagine better possible futures and radical forms of empathy.
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    The Time-Suturing Technologies of Northern Song Musicology
    (2019-06) Christensen, Lars
    Scholars of ritual music in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) keenly sensed a temporal distance from the ancient sages that manifested as a divergence from canonical norms. To maintain a distinctive intellectual heritage and counterbalance outward-facing political and economic conditions, they located cultural identity in the idealized past. Given the overwhelming discursive importance of music, ministers and rulers alike sought to restore powerful practices and thereby transcend the boundedness of the dynastic cycle. Since their principal sources about antiquity, the textual classics, provided limited practical information about music, scholars had to supplement them with technologies grounded in linguistics, mathematics, and visualizations, which I explore in this dissertation. First, I observe how ritual music prescriptions were constituted in allusive or even paronomastic scholarly language. The Confucian principle of the rectification of names, stressing an enduring concord between words and reality, gave scholars rhetorical tools with which to critique at once society and music practices. Three case studies, treating the symbolism of the pentatonic scale, the discourse of harmony in the ritual bell-knife, and the implications of pitch metaphors, illustrate how reformers interrelated sociological commonplaces and concrete reform measures. Second, contrasting parallel mathematized and unmathematized music discourses, I trace the evolving relationship between mathematical and classical learning, showing how by Northern Song times mathematics could signify invariance. This discursive adoption afforded music reformers a precision that dovetailed elegantly with the royal prerogative of standardizing metrological systems. A case study explores the resilience of the numerical measurement of the standard pitch pipe across time and the overlapping metonymy that made it resistant to metrical reorganization. Finally, I contextualize the turn toward visual epistemology in the Northern Song in terms of classical precedent, the explosion of woodblock printing, and nascent archaeology. I compare two kinds of musical images, cosmological diagrams and prescriptive illustrations of ancient instruments. Though quite distinct in assumptions, intellectual pedigree, and style, both image types demonstrate a technology surpassing the power of text to organize, preserve, and disseminate orthodox musical practice. These technologies allowed the scholars to suture time, bringing them into more direct contact with their own exalted history.