This dissertation is a study of artistic projects that, in response to Spain’s transition into a neoliberal economy, renew the disruptive gesture of the avant-garde, from the country’s 1986 entry into the European Union, to the post-15M uprisings. To do so, I argue that Iberian artists revived strategies of sabotage typical of the 19th-century worker’s struggle, including power cuts, political infiltration, misappropriation of funds, and the destruction of property, to wield the art world’s contradictions against itself. Institutions sponsored these interventions precisely because in attempting to sabotage the art system, museums were able to marshal the idea of the artist’s freedom as a stand-in for Spain’s democratic identity, while also promoting art that fit the regime of spectacle driving the art market. Combining archival research and interviews with visual and cultural analyses of primarily conceptual art projects, each chapter focuses on a sociopolitical concern with Spain’s neoliberalization with which these artworks wrestle. The first chapter centers on imaginaries of technology given the country’s EU-imposed deindustrialization. One of the cases I examine is Catalan sound artist TRES Blackout (2000-16) concerts where he disconnected buildings from the grid, aestheticizing a pre- and post-industrial experience. The second chapter considers how the promotion of contemporary art was crucial for the State’s shift toward financialization, helping tourism and real estate markets’ development. These conditions, I argue, led to a new wave of institutional critique, questioning the museum’s social role. Among the works I analyze is Andalusian-Catalan visual artist Luz Broto’s architectural piece, Abrir un agujero permanente (2015), in which she bored a hole in the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and ran a workshop to change the museum’s bylaws for the hole to remain, without authorization, rendering institution making an artistic process in the vein of institutional critique. The third chapter addresses how artists found ways to counter the institution’s capture of cultural labor, such as Núria Güell’s manual, Cómo expropiar a los bancos (2013) —alongside others—on how to obtain bank loans and default on them. Through the lens of sabotage, we can see how artists pry open, in both symbolic and concrete ways, the increasingly nebulous relationship between labor and capital.

The path of Cuba’s cultural economy and patrimony deviated substantially during the “Special Period in the Time of Peace” (1991-1999), including the collapse of state sponsorship for the arts and the opening of the Cuban economy to foreign investment. This opening was slight but significant. Artists found themselves in a position where their work no longer solely existed as patrimony of the state but as personal methods of success and survival. My dissertation analyzes how three Black Cuban artists, René Peña, Belkis Ayón, and Elio Rodríguez, engineer and manipulate self-portraiture as a critical tool through which they can explore issues of belonging and place in connection to the Cuban national project. I attest that each artist positions representations of themselves, or their avatars, within their work to examine what it means to be Cuban, Black, and human. I begin my project by establishing how the figure of the White, hyper-masculine man has served as the ideal Cuban citizen following the revolution and independence. Cuban artists have explored themes of national identity and belonging since the mid-nineteenth century, in many instances reflecting on race and the presence of African descendants in Cuban society. The continued discourse on “racelessness” and the supposed eradication of racism in the country made the potential to be both Black and Cuban impossible. Official discourses on race after the 1959 revolution attempted to erase, and in many senses, whitewash, the historical legacy of racism in Cuba through the expressly public abolishment of discrimination and difference in Cuban society. An attempt to erase all forms of difference, or the visibility of difference, within Cuban society accompanied advances in equal opportunity to jobs, education, and housing for the Black Cuban community after the revolution. My project focuses on how Peña, Ayón, and Rodriguez contest the long-established hierarchy of race and gender in official cubanía [Cubanness] through visual discourses. I argue that the works of Peña, Ayón, and Rodríguez are not examples of a hybrid, creolized synthesis but instead working products of investigation and play. Considering identity as a process and project always in flux, I contend that these three artists use aesthetic strategies to represent Cubanness and Blackness as not mutually exclusive but simultaneously iterative and dynamic. Considering their artistic practices as performances of Blackness and self, I present these artists as critical interlocutors of the cultural moment. I argue that Peña, Rodríguez, and Ayón mobilize the Afro-diasporic conception of the self as external and multiple through their avatars as a form of self-fashioning. An avatar functions as a proxy for a person, acting as an extension of their self, traversing locations and discourses otherwise inaccessible to the primary self. Avatars blur the boundaries between the material and the virtual world and muddle the distinctions between subject and object, flesh and body. Peña, Rodríguez, and Ayón create portraits of their “other selves” to assert their subjectivity and personhood in realms that otherwise negate their presence. Through a close visual analysis of the work created by Peña, Ayón, and Rodríguez, I show how their use of alter-egos elucidates their experiences of the materiality of Blackness and the multiplicity of being. I argue that this is mainly present in the material processes inherent in the print-making and performative productions included in each. For example, in terms of color, Peña and Ayón use black and white critically, manipulating the various gray scales between the two tones to illustrate the many potentialities of cubanía. Rodríguez has interestingly moved into soft sculptural forms of blacks and whites, but the works discussed here use fixed colors to create a humorous play with traditional Cuban aesthetics. Each artist uses color differently, but through their processes, they imbue their works with a sense of materiality and personhood that is only possible through print. For these artists, the work’s creation becomes a performance of self-definition that parallels the many ways we perform race, nationhood, and belonging.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:12:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Cristina Echevengua Teixeira.pdf: 1093859 bytes, checksum: ba5e77af9a887c162c1c0ee69dca75bc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-11-09 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In Brazil, when one refers to official dance companies, what first comes up is the cultural journalism ignorance regarding the complexity they imply. What can be known about their operation if the media is silent, without informing the commitments arising from the fact their funding form is linked to laws and rulings that ignore their artistic nature? If the cultural journalism fails to explore the particular aspects of the power relationship between art and State manifested in the artistic existence of these companies, what does actually become public about them? This paper is based on the hypothesis of how successful the French model of official company, whose roots are connected to Louis XIV, was in Brazil, before the Portuguese colony, in the shows that took place here and before the critics at the times each one of these phenomena refers to, important allies to activate such victorious building. With Corpomídia Theory (KATZ; GREINER, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006) it was possible to leverage the hypothesis that official companies operate by communicating their colonial ideology (the monarchies of Central Europe in the XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries), and the political terms of their foundation at the places where they are established. This double connection is found in its very own operation structure. This hypothesis can be built when one understands the body in codependence with the environments, in an ongoing process of changes of both environments, as the corpomídia concept suggests. By articulating the post-colonial reflection made by Agamben (2004), Bhabha (2007), Buarque de Holanda (1995, 2010), Elias (1990, 1993, 2001), among other researchers devoted to the embeddedness of communication with culture, it was possible to research the situation of the 15 Brazilian official dance companies through the relationship between media and power. The purpose of the research was to show that, in order to change the current situation, it is necessary to provide media visibility to the dance-State relationship, taking into account the weak communication of these days. Interviews with the directors of these companies were carried out, as well as bibliographic review that added to the authors mentioned the research of Brazilian Federal Registers, and valuable historical documents found in the collection of Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), mainly at Bibliothèque-Musée de L Opéra, thanks to a four-month scholarship granted by CAPES / No Brasil, quando se fala sobre companhias oficiais de dança, o que primeiro aparece é a negligência do jornalismo cultural no que diz respeito à complexidade do que elas envolvem. O que se sabe sobre seu funcionamento se as mídias silenciam, sem informar sobre os comprometimentos advindos da sua forma de financiamento ser atrelada a leis e decretos que ignoram a sua natureza artística? Se o jornalismo cultural não explora os meandros da relação de poder entre arte e Estado, que se manifesta na forma de existência artística dessas companhias, o que, de fato, se torna público a seu respeito? Esta tese parte da hipótese de que o sucesso que o modelo francês de companhia oficial, de raízes ligadas a Luís XIV, teve no Brasil encontrou, na presença colonial portuguesa, nos espetáculos que aqui foram apresentados e nos críticos das épocas a que cada um desses fenômenos se refere, aliados potentes para o ativamento dessa construção vitoriosa. Com a Teoria Corpomídia (KATZ; GREINER, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006), foi possível alavancar a hipótese de que as companhias oficiais atuam comunicando a sua ideologia colonial (as monarquias centro-europeias dos séculos XVII, XVIII e XIX) e as condições políticas de sua fundação nos locais onde se estabelecem. Essa dupla vinculação encontra-se encarnada na sua própria estrutura de funcionamento. Essa hipótese pode ser construída quando se entende o corpo em codependência com os ambientes, em um processo permanente de transformações de ambos, como propõe o conceito de corpomídia. Articulando a reflexão pós-colonial de Agamben (2004), Bhabha (2007), Buarque de Holanda (1995, 2010), Elias (1990, 1993, 2001), entre outros teóricos dedicados à imbricação da comunicação com a cultura, tornou-se possível pesquisar a situação das 15 companhias brasileiras oficiais de dança por meio da relação entre mídia e poder. A pesquisa teve como objetivo evidenciar que para modificar a situação atual torna-se necessário dar visibilidade midiática para a relação dança-Estado, levando em conta a comunicação precária hoje existente. Foram realizadas entrevistas com os diretores dessas companhias, bem como uma revisão bibliográfica que agregou aos autores citados o vasculhamento de Diários Oficiais e documentos históricos preciosos encontrados nos acervos da Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), sobretudo na Bibliothèque-Musée de L Opéra, graças à uma bolsa-sanduíche de quatro meses concedida pela CAPES

This thesis offers a new policy history of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency responsible for providing grants to artists and arts organisations in the United States. It focuses in particular on the development of conservative perspectives on federal arts funding from the 1950s to the 1980s, and hence, illuminates the broader evolution of conservative political power, especially its limits. The most familiar narrative holds that the Endowment found itself caught up in the Culture Wars of the late 1980s when Christian right groups objected to certain federal grants, particularly to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait with Whip. This thesis, however, uncovers the older origins of conservative opposition to state support for the arts, analyses conservative conceptions of art, and illuminates the limited federal role the right sought to secure in the arts in the post-war period. Numerous studies have analysed the meanings and origins of the Culture Wars, but until now, scholars had not examined conservative approaches to federal arts politics in a historical sense. Historians have generally been too interested in explaining change to the detriment of examining continuity, but this approach under-emphasises the long-term tensions that underlie seemingly sudden political eruptions. This work also offers a deep account of the conservative movement and the arts world, an area that has so far been almost completely ignored by scholars, even though a focus on marginalised players is essential to understanding the limits of conservatism. In a general sense then, this thesis evaluates the range and diversity of the conservative movement and illuminates the overall odyssey of the right in modern America. In so doing, it provides a new insight into the ways we periodise political history and also invites a broader view of how we understand politics itself.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The studio glass movement first arose in the United States in the early 1950s, and was characterized by practitioners who wanted to divorce glass from its industrial associations and promote it as a fine arts medium. This movement began in a few cities in the eastern part of the country, and in Los Angeles, but gradually emerged as an art form strongly associated with the city of Seattle and the Puget Sound region. This research studies the emergence and growth of the studio glass movement in the Puget Sound region from 1970 to 2003. It examines how glass artists and Seattle's urban elites interacted and worked separately to build the support structures and "art world" that provided learning and mentoring opportunities, workspaces, artistic validation, audience development, critical and financial support, which helped make glass a signature Puget Sound art form, and the role that artist social networks, social capital, cultural capital and cultural policy played in sustaining this community. In particular, the research seeks to explore the factors that nourish a new art form and artist community in second-tier cities that do not have the substantial cultural and economic support structures found in the "arts super cities" such as Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. This study contributes to the growing literature on artist communities, and the roles played by social capital, cultural capital, urban growth coalitions and policy at different stages of community development. Results can assist policymakers in formulating policies that incorporate the arts as a form of community development.

No description available.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished