This dissertation re-contextualizes the types, uses, and meanings of reliquaries in the Middle Byzantine period (843–1204). Relics are the remains of—or the materials associated with—Christ, the Mother of God, apostles, martyrs, and saints. For the faithful, they were the physical presence of the divine, imbued with miraculous power and grace. Reliquaries are the containers that enshrined, protected, and displayed this sacred matter. They are/were made of lavish materials—gold, silver, gems, and pearls—which conferred honor upon, and testified to the spiritual value of, the contents. Numerous Middle Byzantine reliquaries survive or are known through textual descriptions, but there has not been a study that examines these objects as a group. This dissertation fills this gap, charting out a paradigm for understanding the forms and functions of these objects. I take as my focus those reliquaries inscribed with metrical inscriptions, or epigrams. These texts provide a great deal of information about reliquaries, and they served a variety of functions—as ex-voto prayers, as expressions of identity, as performative texts, and as descriptions of the objects that they accompany. I demonstrate that epigrams are also visual, functioning as but one part of the reliquaries' complex visual programs in which word, image, and sacred matter converge, complement, and interact with each other. I examine the mechanisms of these interactions, revealing the messages they conveyed on behalf of the patrons and the ways in which reliquaries and epigrams functioned in the artistic and literary culture of Byzantium. Chapter 1, "Introduction," defines the critical terms of this dissertation, presents an overview of the scholarship, and outlines my methodological contributions. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the reader to the forms and functions of reliquaries in the Middle Byzantine period, and are thus the foundation for the dissertation. Chapter 2 outlines the different types of reliquaries that were inscribed with epigrams. It presents aspects of their design and form, including imagery and the placement of the epigrams. Chapter 3 provides a brief historical survey of the various contexts in which reliquaries were used, from personal possessions to public veneration practices. Chapters 4–6 focus on epigrams. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which epigrams—both in content and placement—function to make relics visually and haptically accessible to the faithful. Chapter 5 explores the relationship between reliquary and metaphor. What are the ways in which the ekphrastic character of epigrams describes, interprets, and presents reliquaries for and to their owners? Chapter 6 situates reliquaries in the context of religious gift-giving by addressing the various ways in which a patron articulates his/her identity, connection with a holy figure, and what he/she hopes to receive in return. Chapter 7 presents my conclusions concerning the forms of reliquaries, relic accessibility, viewer interpretations, and patron motivations. The Appendices catalogue the 74 Middle Byzantine reliquaries inscribed with epigrams. The case studies I present in these chapters demonstrate that Middle Byzantine reliquaries with epigrams are/were a complex system of texts, images, relics, and materials that interact with each other. I demonstrate that epigrams—in addition to being textual—have visual and spatial dimensions, wrapping the exterior, interior, front, back, and sides of reliquaries. They are dynamic texts that pulled the viewers in and taught them how to see, interpret, and handle the reliquaries, and how to access relics. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2015. / April 6, 2015. / epigrams, epigraphy, inscriptions, patronage, relics, reliquaries / Includes bibliographical references. / Lynn Jones, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robert Romanchuk, University Representative; Paula Gerson, Committee Member; Stephanie Leitch, Committee Member.

Ek’ Balam’s ceremonial precinct offers what appears at first glance to be an interesting bricolage of architectural styles and anomalies. In this dissertation I examine the amalgamation of styles through the concept of placemaking and argue that through placemaking the built environment at Ek’ Balam appears less unusual and more as a specific approach to meaning-making in the built environment. This dissertation is a monograph on the site of Ek’ Balam that examines the architecture attributed to the dynastic founder, Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’ and how he and his polity constructed meaning through the use of and mixing of specific architectural styles. I argue that the architectural landscape at Ek’ Balam introduced an important medium for this powerful discourse as a process of meaning-making at the inter-site and intra-site level. Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’, meaning the “Father of the Four Hard Flints,” becomes a principal actor in the creation of place and meaning-making by selecting and combining various styles to craft a city that was altogether different. The rulers of Ek’ Balam separated and divorced styles from their original geographic spheres, marginalized those forms to the periphery, and reformed them into a new aggregate ecology. Most importantly, by gathering all of the known data about Ek’ Balam in one place we can better identify and appreciate how Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’ specifically appropriated and mixed styles to project a unique vision of his rule. Placemaking refers to a particular strategy, both multi-faceted and complex. In this dissertation I define placemaking as a process involved in the planning and design of ancient Maya cities, as well as the treatment and handling of the built environment, its masonry forms, texts, and visual representations, over time. The notion of placemaking describes the relationships that people have to a specific place and the realization of those connections, as well as the relationships among people within the space of place formation. Sometimes activities involved in forming, renovating, and representing a place are unremarkable and discreet while at other times these appear superbly dramatic, like those made at the site of Ek’ Balam under the reign of Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’. What may appear to some as a minor, unremarkable site with an assortment of masonry forms, the architectural choices made by the dynastic founder at Ek’ Balam invested power in his reign and imagined on the most impressive stage the eternal reprise of his grandest moment – his rebirth as a divine ancestor through the symbolic jaws of the earth monster crafted in stone on the south-facing façade of GT-1. Lastly, I argue based on oseteological, epigraphic, and iconographical evidence that Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’ arrived as a foreigner from the Rio Bec or Chenes heartlands and that the architectural landscape at Ek’ Balam reflects the network of relationships he maintained with the Northern Plains, the peninsula as a whole, and the Maya world further to the south. In addition to the famous zoomorphic façade of GT-1 at Ek’ Balam, Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’ scattered features of the Rio Bec and Chenes heartlands throughout his city, including rounded corners, columns, and false stairs. Not only do these elements reveal his place of origin, but they inscribe meaning on the built environment through Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’s relationship to distant pensinular cities. In this dissertation I present Ek’ Balam and its built environment in its richness and complexity. The architectural, artistic, and epigraphic evidence unearths the social and political relationships maintained by Ek’ Balam and its preeminent ruler, Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / April 15, 2016. / Ek' Balam, Maya architecture, Placemaking / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael D. Carrasco, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robinson Herrera, University Representative; Paul Niell, Committee Member; Karen Bearor, Committee Member.

Devotional sculptures and their attendant ritual interactions allow for pointed critical engagement with the very nature of images, both formally and in the intersection of art and sacra. Within the visual systems employed by the city-states of Pre-Columbian central Mexico, sacred imagery was merely one of multiple mechanisms designed to pull the periphery to the center and to actively construct specific cultural narratives. To that end, this dissertation will explore the manner by which ixiptla, a type of central Mexican cult effigy, functioned to shape conceptions of space, place, and cultural identity in the Postclassic Period (c.900-1521 CE). By investigating their position within the visual milieu, I posit that, through their material agency, ixiptla were crucial in the formation of the aforementioned social systems in Pre-Columbian central Mexico. This dissertation further argues that sacred images are, as a class of representation, indices of collective memory through the mythic narratives inscribed upon the objects themselves and their usage. They in turn form the visual rhetoric that is illustrative, and formative, of the construction of space, place, and identity. This project will specifically address the manner in which these images defined the idea of place, primarily through their position, movement within, and integration with both the physical and cultural landscape. Furthermore, Pre-Columbian devotional objects served to reinforce existing cultural systems while simultaneously shaping the overarching aesthetic narrative. In the manner of a community presenting itself to itself, they both display the overarching cultural matrix as well as participate in its formation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 3, 2017. / Aztec, ixiptla, Mexica, Pre-Columbian, sacred, sculpture / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael Carrasco, Professor Directing Dissertation; Joseph Hellweg, University Representative; Paul Niell, Committee Member; Laura Lee, Committee Member; Molly Harbour Bassett, Committee Member.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-58). / In his essay The Poetics of the Open Work, Umberto Eco suggests that 'open work' of the 1960s, which stressed audience involvement, contingency and an anti-institutional stance, is an expression of a Quantum paradigm. Here, the irrationality and lack of order of Quantum Theory is seen as paralleled in artistic expression. Since the mid 1990s, participatory art has gained prominence, both in terms of current art production and retrospectives of Dadaist and 1960s 'open work'. Using Eco's essay as a model, this could be seen as a result of the progression of a Quantum Theory worldview to a view that is understood in terms of Chaos Theory. The patterns that mathematical models such as natural numbers, Calculus, Statistical Mathematics and Quantum Theory propose have parallels in social and artistic expression. In an extension of this, Chaos Theory is the latest mathematical model that social and artistic trends express. This is suggested by the mirroring of Chaos patterns in current social phenomena such as the Internet and experience economy. The similarity in approach between social phenomena and participatory art suggests that they answer the same social/audience demands. My primary contention is that the environment in which audiences and artists currently operate is such that demands and expectations raised by Chaos Theory are answered by participatory art, just as they are answered by wider social trends. The primary Chaos patterns that can be observed are interconnection, phase change and feedback. This is not a matter of a linear influence of cause and effect. It is not that Chaos inspires certain characteristics which are then expressed in various social phenomena. Rather, encountering Chaos characteristics in daily life raises expectations that these characteristics will be encountered elsewhere. We are thus not speaking of a causative relation between Chaos theory and social phenomena. Rather, there is a complex pattern of escalation which encourages interaction, feedback and phase change in a dynamic, chiasmic system which itself can best be analysed as another Chaos phenomenon.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-138). / This thesis is an enquiry into the policies and practices that shaped the South African National Gallery in the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing on newspaper reports, the South African National Gallery's exhibition catalogues, pamphlets and annual reports, records of parliamentary debate and the crucial report of the Stratford Commission of 1948 the study has reconstructed a detailed history of the South African National Gallery. Established in 1871 as a colonial museum catering for a small part of the settler population of British descent, the museum came under pressure to accommodate the Afrikaner community after 1948. This did not mean that the liberal ethos at the museum disappeared, however. The South African National Gallery was strongly influenced by public pressure in this period. Public outrage over controversial art sales in 1947 led to the appointment of a commission of enquiry into the workings of the museum. At the same time, the head of the Board of Trustees, Cecil Sibbett, engaged the public on matters of Modern art. The museum's conservative and controversial Director, Edward Roworth was replaced in 1949 by John Paris who ushered in a new phase of development and management, encouraged the reconceptualization of South African art and reorganized the permanent collection. This initiative took place despite decreased autonomy for the Director and increased government imposition of Afrikaner Nationalist ideology. Nevertheless, the South African National Gallery avoided becoming a political instrument of the Apartheid regime.

This dissertation examines Weimar-era constructions of the salaried worker, or die Angestellten, as expressed in German photography and its dissemination in mass media through the theoretical lens of Siegfried Kracauer, who lived and worked as a cultural critic and journalist during this period in Germany. The Angestellten were the fastest-growing demographic within Germany during the 1920s, their numbers booming following the end of the First World War, before which they were but a fraction of the population. Their situation was closely tied to that of the turbulent economy, and as such they generally endured low incomes and redundancy within the salaried work place. Nevertheless, the salaried classes maintained a superficial connection to upper classes whose dignified appearances were imitated with ready-made clothing bought at department stores. Thus the Angestellten were economic equals to the proletariat, but ideologically maintained themselves as superior to blue-collar workers. The growing number of female white-collared workers, often regarded as synonymous with the New Woman, made up over one-third of the salariat population after the war. These working women particularly aided the surge of the salariat and subsequently such jobs at typists and secretaries became gendered as feminine, further exasperating unemployment numbers among male salariats. Despite the instability of employment and low incomes, the salaried type became a ubiquitous presence in Weimar media. Kracauer points out that this salaried type was one identified visually, and this image of the Angestellten was promulgated by the new media of photography. Kracauer’s analysis of the Angestellten suggests the salariat as “spiritually homeless” figures formed from commercial goods and fantasy aspirations influenced by film and media. Their identity is a façade obscuring nothing, and they remain blind to the severity of their circumstance because of the urban distractions that pull continuously at their attention. In this way, the salariat aligns with and is subject to Kracauer’s concept of the mass ornament, the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” that, if concentrated upon and analyzed, may reveal the circumstances of reality beneath the “surface glamour.” It is in this overlapping of Angestellten and mass ornament that this dissertation pivots, manifest in the Weimar-era photographs of salaried workers, their environments, and the commercial goods that help to define their mass-produced identities. I have chosen photographs from various contexts, including the street photography of Lyonel Feininger and Friedrich Seidenstücker, the typological portraits of August Sander, the photo essays of Sasha Stone, and the advertisements of Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern of studio ringl + pit. I argue that these photographs contain rhetorical potential as mass ornaments that, when analyzed through Kracauer’s theoretical approach, offer insights to the role of photography in salaried class construction of the Weimar Republic. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / 2019 / November 14, 2019. / Angestellen, class construction, Photography, Siegfried Kracauer, Weimar Republic / Includes bibliographical references. / Adam Jolles, Professor Directing Dissertation; Nathan Stoltzfus, University Representative; Lynn Jones, Committee Member; Lauren Weingarden, Committee Member.

Working across a range of media, the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad severs and re-wires the links between reality, history, narrative fiction, and photographic indexicality, often by intervening in the presumed socio-political implications or technical aspects of canonical photographic forms. Raad relies on fiction to tell stories based on truths, merging visual abstraction and photographic realism to point to a dimension of reality that the documentary image alone cannot grasp. While Raad's artistic project has typically been described as a fictional archive and thus a critique of history tout court, this dissertation aims to describe his work according to a revised rubric of realism. Drawing on the literature and theory of trauma, I argue that Raad constructs a new language to narrate the otherwise inaccessible history of Lebanon's civil wars. Raad's projects to date have engaged two core topics: the disastrous period of conflict in Lebanon (1975 to 1991) and the rise of a powerful global art market. Focusing primarily on The Atlas Group--which includes notebooks, videos, installations, and photographs--this dissertation analyzes Raad's use of photography to complicate the real events his works describe. Chapter One traces the combined effects of living through the early years of the civil war in Lebanon and Raad's emigration to and education in the United States, where he has lived since 1983. Chapter Two looks at the role of language in Raad's work--from elaborate narrative captions and lecture-performances to the invention of an entire cast of fictional characters. Chapter Three examines several Atlas Group projects via their interrogation of photography's historical conjunction of evidence and indexicality. Chapter Four continues this line of investigation, but does so from a seemingly opposite perspective, investigating Raad's use of fiction, which he melds with an embrace of formal abstraction to echo the conceptual abstraction deployed in his narratives. In my conclusion, I consider Raad's most recent series of artworks in relation to his involvement in the artist-run activist group Gulf Labor to address how his engagement with realism is directly bound up with the politics of the global art world. / 2024-04-30T00:00:00Z

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