Browsing by Subject "Visual art"
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Item Directing The difficulty of crossing a field : a symbolic and corporeal approach(2010-05) Leonard, Luke Landric; Douglas, Lucien; Dietz, Steven; Kanoff, Scott; Sawyer, Margo; Smith, MichaelThis thesis examines an approach to directing Mac Wellman and David Lang’s opera, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field; in addition, the paper reflects on my artistic development as a Master of Fine Arts in Directing student in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. As a director I seek a balance between form and content. Similar to Installation Art, I consider the relationship between space/architecture (the stage/theatre) and sculpture, i.e., anything that can be used to create shape: performers, props, scenery, wardrobe, makeup, light, sound, music, language, etc. As a deviser, not a dictator, the success of my work depends greatly on interdisciplinary collaboration and strategies that promote understanding and appreciation among both artists and audiences. My aim is to create structures for formal elements that when arranged uniquely and sophisticatedly have the ability to provoke emotion, thought, and memory in vivid and compelling ways. This paper explores selected stages of directing The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, the strategies that I employed, and concludes with an artistic statement.Item How the people feel: Visual art and socio-political critique in Bermuda, 1959-2009(2012-08) Smith, Ed; Chua, Kevin; Fehr, Dennis; Erler, Carolyn; Batra, Kanika; Schmidt, Ethan“No one is painting how the people feel, how they’re reacting to things.”"Race doesn't appear in the paintings, sex doesn't appear in the paintings, gender issues don't appear, and above all else what doesn't appear is money. There is no critique of anything." An artist and an art critic (Robert Barritt and Gregory Volk) made the preceding statements regarding the visual art of Bermuda. Is their perspective correct? Can overt social commentary be found in the visual art of Bermuda? In this dissertation I will tease out through a broad range of social evidence the implicit meanings and intentions in selected works of art and will show that Bermuda’s visual art does indeed present a critique and a perspective of its social conditions. In fact, the limited instances of these works are also a part of that commentary. Amazingly, neither the social realities nor the accompanying discourse as revealed in the visual art has changed significantly over the past half-century. The visual art commentary points to the fact that postcolonial Bermuda is experiencing a struggle entrenched in its racial relations. Public discourse ranging from the changing economy to the sustainable development of the country’s limited physical resources predictably returns to racial relations. More specifically Bermuda’s visual art speaks to identity and marginalization, contributing to the wider discourse of visibility/invisibility that extends even beyond the island’s racial and cultural relationships to the consideration of Bermuda as a whole as it makes determinations in regards to full decolonization, relationships with Atlantic World neighbors and its positioning in an age of globalization.Item Mutable terrorism : Gerhard Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, and the cultural memory of Germany’s Red Army Faction(2012-08) Williamson, Jason Kirk; Bos, Pascale R.; Hake, Sabine; Arens, Katherine; Crew, David; Streeck, JürgenThis project explores the intersection of postwar German history, visual art, and left-wing terrorism. More than thirty years have now passed since the German Red Army Faction’s (1970-1998) most spectacular violent campaign—the so-called “German Autumn” of 1977—and yet the organization continues to elicit a variety of cultural responses from many artists. Interestingly, many films, texts, and visual artworks featuring the Red Army Faction (RAF) as their subject focus heavily on the group’s charismatic founders and on the German state’s vigorous efforts to suppress them and their successors, and yet these works pay comparatively scant attention to the individuals whom the RAF murdered. In light of this observation, I argue that the German Left’s cultural memory of the RAF was and still is marked not only by a significant ambivalence concerning the RAF (especially the founders) and the German state, but also the victims. As a means of elucidating this ambivalence, I offer close “readings” of two works of visual art that debuted at different moments in the years following the German Autumn. Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1988) is a photorealist series that invites viewers to consider the lives and especially the deaths of the RAF’s principal members, while Hans-Peter Feldmann’s photo compilation The Dead 1967-1993 (1998) presents a sobering chronology of individuals killed either directly or indirectly as a result of the German leftist counterculture, including terrorist violence, without making an immediate distinction between perpetrators and victims. Within the framework of the larger RAF cultural memory, the works of Richter and Feldmann thus help clarify some of the causes and effects of the German Left’s suspended resolution regarding RAF terrorism.