This dissertation examines representations of the Bulgarian peasant in order to explore how nationalist, agrarian and ultimately communist governments attempted to negotiate the meaning of "modernity" in predominantly rural Bulgaria. This work is not intended as a survey of displays of folk culture in the 20th century, but instead focuses each chapter on an important person, movement or organization which best seems to articulate Bulgaria's evolving sense of itself and its place on the edge of Europe. Beginning with a background chapter on the 1878-1917 period, I trace the foundation and development of ethnographic display, representations of peasants in the interwar educational press, campaigns to improve village hygiene and culture, alpine tourism, and the ever-changing image of peasants in propaganda from the years of agrarian rule in the 1920s through the early decades of communism. My dissertation explores the contested meanings of peasant images in Bulgaria's changing political and social milieu. Bulgaria's acceptance into first Europe and later the Soviet sphere of influence was for many nation-builders predicated upon her ability to attain European and later Soviet-style modernity. However, these modernities were based upon ideas of industrialization and urbanization. In the middle of the 20th century, however, Bulgaria's economy was still overwhelmingly agricultural. This represented a problem for Bulgaria's nation builders. Confronted with these seeming contradictions, different regimes attempted to incorporate the rural population into their visions of a modern Bulgaria. The changing nature of this imagined Bulgaria can be best elucidated through images of the Bulgarian peasantry. At one moment incorporated and at another excluded, modern and backward, embraced and reviled, the imagined peasantry reveals the anxieties and aspirations of Bulgarian state builders in the 20th century. / text

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century were an important period for popular shows involving the moving and projected image, yet there have been few sustained studies that have mapped optical entertainments systematically outside London or that have analysed the influence of such shows on early film exhibition. This thesis has profiled the popular and visual culture of five contrasting South West locations during this period, tracing the development and distribution of magic lantern shows and dioramas as well as identifying the local and touring companies who hosted film on its arrival in the region. Using the local press, the trade press, contemporary publications and ephemera, this thesis has reconstructed an account of local shows and culture which not only deepens our understanding of popular visual entertainments in regional contexts, but which also serves to stand as a comparison to other established urban and metropolitan paradigms and thus to contribute to a wider and more complex national picture. It advances the argument for a broader classification of such shows in response to local findings and for a more nuanced and detailed appraisal and understanding of their provenance and profiles, and the role film played within them. In addition, this thesis interrogates early film exhibition in these resorts following the move to fixed-venue cinemas in the late 1900s and investigates the arrival of cinema and its emergence as a fledgling industry in the region. It offers an overview of investment into the business locally and evidences the varied set of partnerships and individuals responsible for financing the first cinemas here. Responses to the new technologies and local modifications to business models for cinemas and film exhibition are analysed and their diversity examined. Managerial relationships with communities are evidenced as an important contributory factor to the success of many local cinemas, permitting adaptations to the needs of patrons which boosted audiences and increased revenue. The variety of local interpretations of cinema discovered here reflects the social and cultural diversity of these selected sites, and is a key finding of this thesis.

<p>“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs. </p><p> I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.</p><p> In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.</p><p> Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.</p><p> These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis examines the art of Babylonia, Iran and Bactria after the Macedonian conquest, from c.330 to c.100 BC, in light of current developments in archaeological theory of cultural interaction. In order to illustrate the character and scale of these interactions, the thesis presents a discussion of iconographic material ranging from architectural ornament and sculpture to minor arts. Chapters II-IV discuss the material from each site, highlighting regional characteristics and differences between media. Chapters V-VII use three cross-sections to examine cultural interaction visible in material used for different social functions (‘spheres’). The ‘sphere of gods’ discusses religious architectural ornament and iconography, and the implications for our interpretation of cult in Babylonia, Iran and Bactria in this period. The ‘sphere of kings’ considers ruler representation and the physical appearance of ‘royal space’ while the ‘sphere of citizens and subjects’ discusses material made and used by the wider populace. Macedonian rule and the influx of settlers to Babylonia, Iran and Bactria developed networks of exchange, transmission and transformation creating ‘visually multi-lingual’ societies. The adoption of new artistic influences did not replace all existing traditions or necessarily infringe ethnic identities. There was selective adoption and adaptation of iconography, styles and forms to suit the new patrons and contexts. This cultural co-existence included some combinations of features from different artistic traditions into individual compositions, emphasising how visual languages were not closed-off, rigidly defined or static. Patrons were not confined to using the visual language associated with their ethnicity or current location. There was flexibility of use and meaning, which may present a useful model in the study of other areas of cultural interaction in the Hellenistic period.

In the 1960s, art and business engaged in a sweeping but now largely forgotten romance. Corporations rushed to install art in their foyers and on their urban plazas. Many bought or commissioned works of art to display inside their factories and offices. They reproduced art in their advertisements and annual reports, and profiled it in press stunts and photo ops. They developed promotional art exhibitions that toured across the country and around the world. This dissertation considers how such artworks supported – but also sometimes disrupted – the marketing, public relations, lobbying and personnel strategies of large-scale corporate enterprise. By reconstructing this diverse field, this dissertation contends that art was a key tool for the burgeoning ‘persuasion industry’ of the sixties. Both in the United States and further afield, artists and businesses worked together to make artworks function as ‘forms of persuasion’, instruments by which the consensus of the corporation’s constituents – workers, consumers and regulators – could be secured. The case studies focus on range of companies active in this field, exploring the phenomenon in three thematic chapters, covering the use of pop art by the packaged goods business, the role of abstract painting in the workplace and the value of metal sculpture for the steel industry. It is argued that the practices described through these examples represent a defining cultural phenomena of sixties art, one that challenges the conventional art historical alignment of its avant-garde with the decade’s famed radical politics, protest and counterculture.

This grounded theory project researches and analyzes publications from 1990-2008 assessing the debate over aesthetics in/and VCAE in 21st century art education. Through a series of visual models, a working theory and its supporting evidence assess this contested subject. Within the context of Modern and Postmodern paradigm conflict, art educators’ debate over aesthetics in/and VCAE fundamentally deals with differing conceptions of identity and freedom. Although commonly sharing the goal of fostering the formation of student identity through the provision and exercise of freedom, art educators’ differing perspectives on identity and freedom result in differing prescriptions for 21st century art education. By presenting qualitative data analysis through grounded theory, I guide fellow art educators through this debate by providing snapshots of information as well as detailed portraits of the scholars and their multifarious rationales.

In this thesis, I identify and explore approaches to middle school art curricula that address the cultural expectations of gender in visual culture media. I use images from the Japanese comic Manga: Ranma1/2 to develop units of instruction with goals of engaging students in relating the study of art to their visual culture outside the classroom. The unit has three lessons that deal with cultural expectations of gender to help students become aware of understand gender differences in contemporary society. In the lessons, students examine how the Manga characters are depicted differently according to the character's gender. Also, the teacher utilizes feminist pedagogy which considers how educators and students can work in a classroom with less power struggles. Educators provide students space to let them open-minded to have conversation in the classroom. Through sharing personal experience and interacting with classmates and teachers, students may owing to the empower activity to get more confidence in their academic studies.

This study examines how the discourse of wenming (civilisation/civility) has been visualised throughout twentieth century Chinese art, with a particular emphasis on contemporary practice. Originally linked to concepts of modernity and change in the early twentieth century I argue that wenming continues to be of crucial importance in understanding how contemporary China wishes to be seen by the rest of the world. Through a series of close visual readings and case studies I explore how wenming attained considerable saliency as it was invoked to address a range of artistic and political reforms which resulted from China's socioeconomic transformations. Individual chapters focus on the work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Liu Gang, Wang Jin and Ai Weiwei amongst others. Taken together they provide an emic account of artistic praxis that seeks to understand contemporary art from China on its own terms. The study begins by examining how wenming was visualised in the early twentieth century. It then charts what happened to the term after the founding of the PRC in 1949 and how its appearance in locations such as Taiwan and Hong Kong provide sites of contention and alterity to mainland wenming discourse. It analyses how the bifurcation between material civilisation and spiritual civilisation that gained prominence following the economic reforms of the 1980s reconfigured the visual art of this period. Then, turning to a single art work, it theorises the relationship of wenming to an emerging corporeal politics. Finally, it explores how the discourse of wenming is being visually articulated in contemporary China as a result of these developments and traces its interaction with consumer culture, urbanisation and the politics of the internet.

Title: Criteriafor the comparison ofsportand art Objectives:The aim of this thesis is to develop its own criteria that enable sport and arts closer comparison. The criteria for comparison should be based on the sources studied, indicating the definition of sport and art. The sub-objectives include a definition of the field of sport and art that best suits examined issue. The work also aims to demonstrate that the issues examined are a topic that interested personalities such as Pierre de Coubertin and are still current as in the case of New Circus. Methods:The basicmethodologyof theoretical work, see chaptermethodology. Results: A close examinationof the literaturefocused onthedivisionof sport onpurposeandaesthetic. Comparisonaestheticssportswith artandcreate your owncomparison criteriaforthe sportandartusedon a specificexample of a newcircus. Keywords: Sport, art, visual culture, kalokagathia, olympism, the cult of the body. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This dissertation analyzes visual representations of Canadian women war workers during the Second World War, examining the intersections of labour, gender, beauty culture, bodies, media, consumer culture, advertising, class, whiteness, and sexuality featured in these images. It argues that without considering each of these themes, it is impossible to fully understand wartime representations of women workers. In examining these intersections, the dissertation highlights the power of visual representations and demonstrates the key roles of beauty culture and heterosexuality in munitions plants. By comparing images of women war workers in nationally-circulated magazines and advertisements, locally-produced newsletters from three southern Ontario war plants, archival photos, and newspaper coverage of the Miss War Worker beauty contest, this study shows that the beautiful woman war worker was a visual icon who symbolized the tensions, worries, and hopes around labour, beauty, and femininity, in wartime as well as in the postwar period, when war workers’ presumed next step into white motherhood was of particular importance to the national project. Women workers were constantly encouraged and pressured to engage with beauty culture and participate in self-fashioning. Probing the relationship between how war workers were depicted and what they experienced points to the power of images as well as the opportunities women had to exercise agency by pushing back against visual ideals as well as by emulating them. / Graduate / 2017-08-29