Browsing by Subject "Conceptualism"
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Item Against against affect (again) : æffect in Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American deaths and disasters(2014-05) Boruszak, Jeffrey Kyle; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne)Recent scholarship on conceptual writing has turned to the role of affect in poetry. Critics such as Calvin Bedient claim that by using appropriated text and appealing to intellectual encounters with poetry based around a central “concept,” conceptual writing diminishes or even ignores affect. Bedient in particular is concerned with affect's relationship with political efficacy, a relationship I call “æffect.” I make the case that because of its use of appropriated material, we must examine the transformation from source text to poetic work when discussing affect in conceptual writing. Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which consists of transcriptions of audio recordings made during and immediately following major American tragedies, involves a specific kind of affective transformation: the cliché. I discuss what makes a cliché, especially in relation to affect, before turning to Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings and her concept of “stuplimity.” Stuplimity is an often ignored and not easily articulated affect that arises from boredom and repetition. Stuplimity is critical for Seven American Deaths and Disasters, especially for the “open feeling” that it produces in its wake. This uncanny feeling indicates a changing tide in conversations about conceptual writing. Rather than focus on the affect of æffect, we should instead turn to the effect.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 Encountering Vito Acconci : performing Conceptual Art circa 1970(2016-08) Green, Kate Guttmacher; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Abzug, Robert H; Giunta, Andrea; Shiff, Richard A; Smith, Cherise“Encountering Vito Acconci: Performing Conceptual Art circa 1970” reframes Vito Acconci’s familiar oeuvre through re-uniting it with the contexts that first gave it meaning to audiences. Over the three chapters of this study I establish that Acconci began “performing” within the anti-establishment context of Conceptual Art in 1969 and continued doing so until 1974, and that his performance-based activities, which revolved around audience interaction, related to concerns at the time in the artist’s community and beyond about the nature and importance of human connection. More specifically, I show that Acconci’s performance-based activities related to social sciences discourses at the time with which the artist among others were framing ideas about human connection: systems, encounters, and technology. In each of three chapters I analyze several of Acconci’s activities and associated photographs, texts, diagrams, videotapes, and films alongside elements that framed them when they were first encountered by audiences: exhibition titles, other artworks, catalogue texts, reviews, and exhibition-related ephemera from the time, but also articles and books that the artist and others involved in Conceptual Art. Through examining Acconci’s practice within its original context I offer a new, more expansive perspective on his work. I also illuminate an important period in American art history, by showing that performance-based Conceptual Art was part of discourse in the United States in the social sciences and beyond about the importance of human connection in shaping experience and therefore meaning, including of 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.