In developing the study, the writer has attempted to devise a method whereby high-school students may gain an understanding of certain trends in modern abstract and non-objective painting.

The culmination of my graduate research and investigations is my thesis exhibition Solace; Intimately Remembered Places. This body of paintings is a visual representation of land, water and flora that focuses on my abstraction of nature to extract essential elements that expresses my deep connection to a specific time and place, layered with associated memories. By revisiting a landscape over a sustained period of time, I developed a personal visual vocabulary to communicate the essential abstract forms of nature and record the subtle nuances of color, light, shape, texture, positive and negative space to evoke a particular time and place. I expanded my painting techniques through the addition of a laser cutter. Rooted in a background of graphic design, my thesis also incorporated and included a book form using similar strategies. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This interdisciplinary thesis investigates the Action Painting movement using rhetorical theories and models with the intent of producing a higher level of understanding of the paintings and increasing their approachability. A brief history of nonobjective painting, the technique of automatism, and the Action Painting movement is given. Following this, the semiotic character of the visual elements within Action Paintings is discussed and their behavior catalogued through descriptive analysis, using Kenneth Pike's theory of tagmemics. The work culminates in a comparison of painted gestures to conversational implicatures and guidelines are given for establishing meaningful and relevant dialogues with the paintings, presupposing the importance of an intangible context as defined by the reconstruction of authorial intent and anticipated readership. / Department of English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Germanic Studies, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation analyzes art in Mozambique during the country’s transition from Marxist-Leninism to a multi-party democracy (1984-1994). The end of the socialist regime elicited diverse responses from Mozambican artists and art institutions, all of which tried to reconsider the recent radical past to suit the new political conditions of liberalization at the end of the Cold War. Part I of the dissertation focuses on the 1980s rehabilitation of artist Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, one of the first and most important figures in African modernism. Malangatana’s image as a national artist will be discussed alongside the emergence of the collective of art critics known as Rhandzarte, and the reconsideration of the state’s narrative of national unity. Part II looks at the artist Naguib Elias Abdula as an example of the move away from state patronage towards reliance on the private sector. Following the wide changes in its artistic values, Mozambique was the first African country to create an institution to foster corporate collecting in a state-owned initiative known as Horizon Art Diffusion. Part III will focus on the rise of abstraction in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While figurative works of art had been the norm since independence, the increased visibility of abstraction at the end of socialism shook the foundations of the country’s aesthetics. On the one hand, some abstract works can be seen as radical interrogations of what had constituted Mozambican art until then. On the other hand, much of the momentum of abstraction was a product of the Ujamaa workshops, which were modelled on the Triangle Art Foundation. In its significantly different political and aesthetic reverberations, Mozambican abstraction appeared as a definite break from the socialist past.

Multimodal NLP is an approach to language understanding that incorporates data from nontextual in order to enhance our linguistic understanding through additional contextual information. In particular, incorporating visual data has allowed for great strides in our ability to model language related to physical phenomena. The performance of these models has so far been contingent upon access to large datasets, focusing on classification problems without relative information, and constraining the problem space to literal descriptions and interpretations. In this thesis, we examine these limitations by investigating how types of data previously unused in these models can be reconfigured and worked with intelligently and on a small scale to enhance our understanding of the pragmatics of language. We contribute to comparative language grounding, emotional interpretation, and metaphoric understanding by releasing multiple annotated datasets, developing a new paradigm for modeling relative data, creating a new task in examining the generation of emotional descriptions for image information, and demonstrating a novel approach to working with figurative text for image generation. We start by examining how traditional grounding models could be adapted to incorporate relative information. As no previous work has ever utilized relative textual description for image understanding, we first constrain the problem by focusing on the language of color. We create a new dataset of comparative color terms with associated RGB datapoints, and use this data to develop a novel paradigm of grounding comparative color terms in RGB space, providing the first avenue towards utilizing relative information in a multimodal setting. Continuing our study of color, we then turn to examining the relationship between color and emotion. In order to further our understanding of this relationship, we define a new task, called Justified Affect Transformation, in which an image is recolored specifically to alter its emotional evocation and text is generated to explain the recoloring from an emotional perspective. We create a dataset of abstract art with contiguous emotion labels and textual rationales for the emotional evocation of multiple images, and using our new dataset for training, introduce a new unified model that recolors an image and provides a textual rationale explaining the recoloring with respect to the specified emotion. We use this model to examine the relationship between color and emotion devoid of confounding factors. Finally, we turn to figurative language as a resource, examining the pragmatics of visualizing metaphoric phrases. We demonstrate a novel approach to generating visual metaphor through the collaboration of large language models and diffusion-based text-to-image models, and in doing so create a novel dataset of visual metaphor with both literal and figurative captions. We then develop an evaluation framework using human-AI collaboration to examine the efficacy of the model collaboration, and choose a downstream task of visual entailment to evaluate the human-AI collaboration.

The dissertation examines the reception of Czech and European abstract art in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s. It assumes that the Czechoslovak cultural milieu was unfavourable for abstract art at that time, yet various forms of its reception were occurring. Thus, the objective is to demonstrate and document opportunities for abstract art public presentation, related critical reactions and theoretical reflection. The reception history perspective followed in the dissertation deals with written sources, and focuses on relationship between viewers and abstract art and on handling particular artworks. Predominantly recipients such as theorists, art critics, editors, artists, and other participants in the arts sector are taken into consideration when exploring contemporaneous exhibiting, evaluation and interpretation of abstract art. The paper includes responses and attitudes to abstract painting and sculpture as well as to abstract photography, film and kinetic art.

This mini-thesis is a supporting document to the exhibition titled via: a phenomenological site-specific series of intermedia interventions and installations at the 1820 Settlers National Monument in Grahamstown. This mini-thesis examines ways in which one negotiates the movement of the self and interactions with others within the non-place. Non-places are ‘habitually transient’ spaces for passage, communication and consumption, often viewed from highways, vehicles, hotels, petrol stations, airports and supermarkets. Characteristic of these generic and somewhat homogenous spaces is the paradox of material excess and concurrent psychological lack where a feeling of disorientation and disconnection is established due to the excesses of Supermodernity: excess of the individual, time and space. The non-place is a contested space as it does not hold enough significance to be regarded as a place and yet, despite its banality, is necessary – and in many ways a privilege – in everyday living. I explore the concept of non-places in relation to the intricate notions of space and place, and draw on empirical research as a means to interrogate how one perceives the phenomenological qualities of one’s surroundings. I discuss the implications of the multiplication of the non-place in relation to globalisation, time–space compression, site-specific art and absentmindedness, as theoretical themes which underpin the practical component of my research. In addition, I situate my artistic practice in relation to other contemporary artists dealing with the non-place as a theme, and critically engage with the multi-disciplinary and sensory installations and video pieces of Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck.

This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.

Mémoire (M.A.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1988. / Ce travail de recherche a été réalisé à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi dans le cadre du programme de maîtrise en arts plastiques extentionné de l'Université du Québec à Montréal à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. CaQCU Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU