Browsing by Subject "Conceptual art"
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Item The collective El Sindicato, 1976-1979 : intervening in conceptualism in Latin America(2011-05) Rodríguez, María Teresa, 1983-; Giunta, Andrea; Tarver, Gina M.Conceptual practices developed in Colombia towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Even a cursory look at surveys of Colombian conceptual art shows that the collective El Sindicato, active between 1976 and 1979, secured its space in these accounts with its 1978 work Alacena con zapatos, which won the top prize at the XXVII Salón Nacional. However, Alacena con zapatos was neither the only, nor the most significant, contribution of El Sindicato to the development of conceptual practices. The collective’s rich oeuvre, while concise, was nonetheless remarkable in its interventions on public spaces as a means for social change. A number of factors have led to the critical misunderstanding and, ultimately, the historiographical neglect of these interventions. This thesis problematizes these factors in order to reframe and expand El Sindicato’s role within the narrative of Colombian art. To elucidate El Sindicato’s contributions, and taking into account that much of Colombian conceptual art remains unknown in the United States, this thesis also registers Colombia’s artistic field as it stood in the 1970s. In all, my project situates El Sindicato’s practices within the broader narrative of Conceptualism as a means to both enrich our understanding of contemporary art in Colombia and help expand the familiar boundaries of the map of conceptual art.Item A generative methodology for reframing visual culture(2013-05) Willett, Alice A; Lee, GloriaThe purpose of my experimental research in the MFA Design Program has been to develop a working methodology to transfer into a professional graphic design practice upon completion of the program. In my time here, I have built a body of work that clearly expresses my intention, and developed a solid comprehension of the field of design, its discourse, and where my work is situated within it. The intended audience for my work, which tends to fall in the blurred space between design and art, are consumers of image and pop culture in the field, gallery, and public sphere. The projects I’ll present in this report will provide a context for the process by which I arrived at a personal methodology and a narrative for how I came to think about my work up to this point.Item Photography as readymade art(2006-12) Hernsberger, Erin; Hazlett, Allan; Nathan, Daniel; Germany, RobinThe task of identifying and then explaining art and aesthetic experience is made more complicated by the recent inclusion of typical non-art objects into the world of art. It used to be that our artistic senses were engaged whenever a work struck us as very closely resembling an object, a scene, or a person. But, with the development of new media being added to traditional media, and, with the acceptance of what is included within the realm of art, it has become less and less clear what actually counts as art and why. For example, one might wonder what makes Warhol’s Brillo Boxes more valuable, or at least, more "art" than the kind bought in stores. The realm of fine art photography reveals the same confusion. Skeptics question if photographs can contain any artistic value at all – after all, why should we value a photograph of an object instead of simply valuing the object itself? In this paper, I explain the skeptic's argument, and while accepting the premise that an interest in a photograph is sometimes an interest in the object within the photograph, I will show how, even in such a case, a photograph can still be considered art -- art most similar to readymade art.Item Whose fly is this? and the beginning of Moscow linguistic conceptualism : text and image in the early works of Ilya Kabakov (1962-1966)(2011-05) Toteva, Maia; Shiff, Richard; Clarke, John; Henderson, Linda; Charlesworth, Michael; Reynolds, Ann; Wettlaufer, AlexandraThis dissertation examines the early works of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and traces the beginning of a linguistic trend in the development of Moscow Conceptualism. Analyzing the drawings and paintings that the artist created between 1962 and 1966, I place Kabakov’s artistic style and ideas in the context of the cultural, theoretical and scientific phenomena that affected Soviet art and society in the early 1960s. Kabakov’s works are shown as evolving in a process that renders the artist’s techniques increasingly polysemantic, dialogic and conceptual. The dissertation then demonstrates that Kabakov’s visual images and linguistic titles participated, indirectly yet actively, in the cultural debates of Moscow’s artistic underground and the Soviet society. The dynamic correspondence between a fervent cultural context, growing interest in linguistic and scientific ideas, increasing conceptualization of visual means of expression and intellectualization of the artistic approach to the image led to the appropriation of language in the works of Moscow underground artists. The dissertation establishes such a development in the early works of Ilya Kabakov, proposing that his earliest “conversational” work Whose Fly is This? was the first conceptual painting to display text in the form of a written dialogue. The colloquial style and conversational character of the depicted discourse are examined as an ironic gesture that takes its genesis from the polyphonic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and reverses the official non-dialogical imperatives of Soviet newspeak and ideology. The main figural image of the painting—the fly—is seen as articulating the utopias and anti-utopias of avant-garde figures such as Kharms or Malevich and interpreted as alluding to a key contemporaneous scientific discovery—the chromosomes of the drosophila. In the end, the words and the image of Whose Fly is This? form the two mutually exclusive and mutually complementary aspects of a compound conceptual signifier. That is the signifier of the free artistic spirit, evanescent human existence and mundane, yet resilient human nature that ironically survives—against all odds and despite all absurdities—beyond the boundary of the social utopia and the limits of epistemological systems.