Art history

In 1995, Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation held its inaugural symposium titled "Art in the Landscape". During the roundtable discussion, walking artist Hamish Fulton asserted that there are fundamental differences between his art and American Land Art. Drawing on Fulton's assertion, this dissertation argues for the redefinition of British environmental art, conventionally called Land Art after the American tradition. Through the exploration of the work of several contemporary and living British artists, the British School of Aesthetic Chorography is articulated. The practice of aesthetic chorography involves an embodied experience of place, such as walking or gardening, which results in a creative response. This creative response is the place-work of aesthetic chorography and can take a plethora of forms including the attachment of language to place, the creation of an ephemeral marker, an image or a representation or the creation of a printed object which recalls the place in some way. Derived from the unfolding of this place-work, the role of language in art is a theme which is carried through the dissertation. The role of language in childhood, memory and constituting knowledge claims is also explored particularly as this relates to place and to loss and the conservational potential of language with respect to place is theorized in a place theory of language and a recollective theory of place. The conservational element of this work is further developed through the articulation of aesthetic chorography as a parochial tending practice which devotes attention to place as an experienced phenomenon. The persistence of parochial places and vernacular tending practices, however, require conservation. The heritage work of the Common Ground Trust in the UK which seeks to promote the "local distinctiveness" of places is explored and the keeping place is raised as a way of thinking about the engaged and living preservation of vernacular places, particularly in the face of environmental crisis.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Aesthetic Chorography, Art, Common Ground Trust, Concrete Poetry, Conservation, Critical Topography, Environmental Aesthetics, Environmental Ethics, Epistemology, Heritage, Keeping Place, Land Art, Landscape, Language, Lieu de Mémoire, Local, Memory, Monument, Parochial, Place, Place-work, Tending, Vernacular, Walking, Jonathan Bordo, Lionel L. Ferguson, Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy, Donald Judd, Richard Long, Robert Macfarlane, Brian Nichols, Ferdinand de Saussure, Richard Skelton, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, W.J.T. Mitchell

Author Keywords: Aesthetic Chorography, Critical Topography, Heritage, Keeping Place, Landscape, Place

This thesis presents a critical history of stand-up comedy alongside rhetorical analyses of specific stand-up routines and performances to argue for stand-up's efficacy as a therapeutic artform. Through analysis of the history, function, and content of satire, this thesis presents stand-up comedy as an artform utilized for more than just simple laughter. Stand-up comedy, as a form and genre, provides the unique ability to engage with difficult subject matter, traumatic experiences, and offense for the benefit of both listener and audience in a way that subverts, therapizes, and equalizes instances of discrimination, trauma, and denigration.

Author Keywords: Abjection, Offense, Satire, Stand-up Comedy, Therapy

This dissertation is a critical review of the discursive formation of Islamic art in the twentieth century and the continuing problems that the early categorization of this discipline carries. It deals with the impact of these problems on the conceptualization of another category, Persian art. The subject is expounded by three propositions. First, the category of Islamic art was initially a product of Orientalism formulated regardless of the indigenous/Islamic knowledge of art. Second, during the early period when art historians examined different theoretical dimensions for constructing an aesthetic of Islamic art in the West, they imposed a temporal framework on Islamic art in which excluded the non-traditional and contemporary art of Islamic countries. Third, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iranian scholars eventually imposed academic authority over the discipline of Persian/Islamic art, they adopted the same inadequate methodologies that were initially used in some of the early studies on the art of the Muslims. These propositions are elaborated by examples from twentieth-century Iranian movements in painting, The Coffeehouse Painting and The School of Saqqakhaneh, and the incident of swapping Willem de Kooning's painting Woman III with the dismembered manuscript of the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp in 1994. The conceptualization of Islamic art as a discipline is also discussed in relation to the twentieth-century cultural context of Iran. The argument is divided into three chapters in relation to three important historical moments in the history of contemporary Iran: The Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), the modernization of Iran (1925-1975), and the Islamic Revolution (1979-onward). The formation of the discourse of Islamic art is the fruit of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Out of this discourse, Persian art as a modern discourse addressing the visual culture of Pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran came into being. I claim that after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian academics demonstrate a theoretical loyalty to the early theorizations of Islamic/Persian art. By this token, visual signs are given a meta-signified in the narrative of Islamic art. The ontological definition of this meta-signified is subjected to the dominant ideology, which determines how different centers of meaning should come into being and disappear. In the post-Revolution academia, the center is construed as the transcendental signified. Such inherence resulted in a fallacy in the reading of the Persian side of Islamic art, to which I refer as the "signification fallacy." The dissertation draws on the consequences of this fallacy in the critique of Islamic art.

Keywords: Persian art, Islamic art, Iranian art; Persian classical literature, Narrative. Image, Representation, Aniconism, Abstraction, Modernity, Tradition, Orientalism, The Constitutional Revolution, Modernization, The Islamic Revolution. Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, The Coffeehouse Painting, The School of Saqqakhaneh; Modernism: Woman III.

Author Keywords: Iranian Art, Islamic Art, Orientalism, Persian Art, The Constitutional Revolution, The Islamic Revolution

This thesis addresses the inclusion of women within Classic Maya works of art, consisting of, for this purpose, private-consumption ceramic vessels and large scale public monuments. Through the use of Feminist and Gender Theory, Performance Theory, and Iconographic Theory, the roles of women in iconographically depicted ceremonial performance is assessed. A Microsoft Access database was constructed in order to look at various aspects of female depiction, including but not limited to, bodily action, costume, and paraphernalia. The context, individual action, and associated paraphernalia of women performing numerous roles were analyzed, in which women were found to participate in many of the same roles as men, although there are some roles from which either men or women are excluded, and certain paraphernalia items with which women are not associated.

Author Keywords: Archaeology, Feminism, Gender Theory, Iconography, Maya Art, Performance Theory

Since the end of the Second World War, artists of Native descent have engaged with the Fine Art world where their work has come to be placed in the category of Native art. As a result of my journey, I have come to realize that in the Fine Art world the term Native art tends to be associated with the practices of our ancestors in times past obscuring our contemporary nature. In the present day context, however, I see an evolution and will tell the stories of the artists I met, who became a part of my life and thus a part of my narrative to point out that the voices of contemporary artists of Native descent, when speaking of their work, demonstrate a modern form of Native creativity, pride and joy that needs to be properly recognized. While Native artists do respect our traditions and do deal with issues of importance to our communities, they also create their artwork using sophisticated and modern techniques. It is up to us to make our contemporary nature known far and wide.

A storytelling approach based on the Michael Thrasher Medicine Wheel Teachings is employed to present the voices of our contemporary artists of Native descent who when speaking of their work create a rich and vibrant story of Native creativity, pride and joy.

Author Keywords: Culture, Elder, Indigenous Knowledge, Native Art, Storytelling

I have two goals. One, to offer new insights into Vienna Actionism (VA) and their notorious performances, through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the body without organs (BwO); and two, not simply to provide descriptions of the Vienna Actionists' performances, but also to write what I am calling a thesis without organs.

Documents from the Vienna Actionists, specifically Muehl's Leda and the Swan (1964), Brus' Vienna Walk (1965) and Nitsch's O.M. Theatre (1960-present), become documents without organs; they are documents that do not simply document original performances, but re-perform original performances while acting as performances themselves. Challenging the notion of live performance as fundamentally separate from its documentation (as performance theorist Peggy Phelan argues) through what Philip Auslander calls the document's performativity and what Christopher Bedford calls a viral ontology of performance, my thesis becomes a performance in and of itself. A thesis without organs.

Keywords: performance, performativity, viral ontology of performance, body without organs, rhizome, dirt, metaphor, metonymy, Vienna Actionism, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander, Christopher Bedford, Mary Douglas.

Author Keywords: Body without Organs, Performance, Performativity, Vienna Actionism