Inaug.-diss.--Munich. / Lebenslauf. "Quellenverzeichnis": p. 257-266.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1979. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-310).

<p> This thesis provides a revisionist history of Dutch artist Jan Dibbets's early practice. Jan Dibbets has not yet, been credited in art historical scholarship for his contributions in foregrounding visual experience within Conceptual practice. This thesis offers an additional narrative by suggesting a comparison between his early practice and the work being produced by European artists working in a tradition of visual perception. By studying the contemporary reception of Dibbets's work and Perceptual Abstraction, I argue how traditional art historical boundaries have obstructed a possible reading of this artist's practice.</p>

<p> This thesis analyzes the reception of the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker and the critical debates it has engendered. Walker's work has received a mixed reception over the past twenty years: while she has won prestigious awards and received international acclaim, her work also enrages many African American artists and scholars who accuse her of perpetuating racist ideologies and insensitively mocking the history of suffering endured by slaves. I trace three major points within the critical reception of the artist's work: a letter writing campaign in 1997 initiated by the artist Betye Saar; the 2009 publication of the book, <i>Kara Walker&mdash;No/Kara Walker&mdash;Yes/Kara Walker&mdash;?</i>; and the veiling of Walker's work in 2012 in a New Jersey public library. I argue how Walker's strategy of employing "negative imagery" challenges the viewer to critically engage racist stereotypes on complex multifaceted levels.</p>

<p> The introduction of Japanese art and culture to the Western world prompted a powerful response from an entire generation of artists, writers, and musicians, including a gifted American artist named Bertha Lum. Lum travelled to Japan in the early 1900s to train with Japanese masters in the design, cutting, and printing of woodblock prints. Lum was a passionate exponent of <i> Japonisme,</i> and a study of her work illuminates how this phenomenon manifested itself in American art and culture.</p><p> In cultural and artistic terms, <i>Japonisme</i> emerged as a selective interpretation of Asian culture, a conveniently constructed image that reinforced the ideals of many at the turn of the last century. For graphic artists like Lum, the example of Japanese art provided leverage against the weight of European classicism, championed the role of the decorative arts, exemplified exquisite handcraft, and epitomized an art of natural beauty and grace.</p>

<p> The rise of social practice art in Europe and North America since the 1990s has provoked a variety of critical alignments and contestations around multi-authored "post-studio" artwork, aimed at collapsing the boundaries between visual and performing art, and between art and everyday life. One of the most visible and impassioned contestations has centered on the value assigned by different critics to so-called convivial and antagonistic directions for social practice art. This project enters the debate on collaborative and participatory art by highlighting the commonalities between the turn away from spectatorialism in philosophy and the politically-driven, activist social practices coming out of the visual arts. Contending that the more salient problems under debate revolve around what art historian Grant Kester has described as "a series of largely unproductive debates over the epistemological status of the work," I focus on the way different epistemological frames impact the reception of convivial and antagonistic directions in art. With attention to the theory and criticism of Clare Bishop, Grant Kester, Shannon Jackson and Tom Finkelpearl, I examine how a variety of epistemological frames both reflect the work's values around social change, and also impact the critical lenses through which such values are communicated to the public through art criticism. While Bishop raises important questions around the limits of a turn against traditional art spectatorship and singular authorship of visual art, I claim that her view of a convivial tendency in social practice art overlooks key epistemological insights embodied in feminist standpoint theory and American pragmatist epistemology. I contend that John Dewey's view of knowledge as <i>transactional</i> captures the epistemological framing of some of the more socially ameliorative directions social practice work has taken in recent decades because Dewey rejects a view of knowledge that divides subjective entities from each other and from their wider environments. Bishop's traditional spectatorship model fails to capture the aesthetico-political ethos of an area of art that acknowledges the fragile contingency of standpoints. I show that the criticism of Kester, Jackson and Finkelpearl recognize this contingency and then enlarge their perspectives by bringing attention to feminist standpoint theory and pragmatist aesthetics and epistemology. I conclude by claiming that a more robust way of understanding the value of social practices in art recognizes that transactional and contingent standpoints demand an ethos rooted in the continuity of convivial and antagonistic features of aesthetico-political experience.</p>

<p> Research on Judy Chicago&rsquo;s <i>The Dinner Party,</i> (1974-79; completed with the assistance of more than 400 volunteers), is abundant and generally focuses on the monumental table of thirty-nine place settings acknowledging the contribution of women throughout Western history. Scholars have examined, praised and criticized the installation from various feminist and formal aesthetic perspectives. By contrast, this thesis considers what has essentially been overlooked until now, Judy Chicago&rsquo;s curatorial framework for the entire <i>The Dinner Party</i> exhibition experience. Using my own interviews with the artist, team members, and contemporary curators, as well as consulting the artist&rsquo;s installation manuals from Harvard University Archives, and examining the reception of the curation, I highlight the essential curatorial features that made <i>The Dinner Party</i> such an international phenomenon. The artist&rsquo;s curatorial elements were research-oriented, inclusive and activist-leaning with interactive, multi-media structures to achieve her feminist message. Considering <i>The Dinner Party</i>&rsquo;s current installation at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, my thesis argues that Chicago&rsquo;s successful yet overlooked methods offer the most proactive, critical and approachable curatorial presentation. The current installation that has been stripped of these curatorial elements, while perhaps institutionally practical, compromises much of the message and feminist intent. This study contributes to the field by focusing on this notable exhibition, providing discourse into Chicago&rsquo;s curating and offering considerations for contemporary curating practice, with the goal of contributing to the growing area of curatorial research focused on feminist artists and curatorial projects.</p>

<p> There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called <i> emergent narrative:</i> instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (<i>The Sims, Dwarf Fortress</i>), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, <i>Tale-Spin</i>). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction&mdash;emergent stories actually happen&mdash;and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure. </p><p> So, how can the pain of emergent narrative be alleviated while simultaneously maintaining the pleasure? This dissertation introduces a refined approach to the form, called <i>curationist emergent narrative</i> (or just <i> curationism</i>), that aims to provide an answer to this question. Instead of treating the raw material of simulation as a story, in curationism that material is <i>curated</i> to construct an actual narrative artifact that is then mounted in a full-fledged media experience (to enable human encounter with the artifact). This recasts story generation as an act of recounting, rather than invention. I believe that curationism can also explain how both wild successes and phenomenal failures have entered the oeuvre of emergent narrative: in successful works, humans have taken on the burden of curating an ongoing simulation to construct a storied understanding of what has happened, while in the failures humans have not been willing to do the necessary curation. Without curation, actual stories cannot obtain in emergent narrative. </p><p> But what if a storyworld could curate itself? That is, can we build systems that <i>automatically</i> recount what has happened in simulated worlds? In the second half of this dissertation, I provide an autoethnography and a collection of case studies that recount my own personal (and collaborative) exploration of automatic curation over the course of the last six years. Here, I report the technical, intellectual, and media-centric contributions made by three simulation engines (<i>World, Talk of the Town, Hennepin</i>) and three second-order media experiences that are respectively driven by those engines (<i>Diol/Diel/Dial, Bad News, Sheldon County</i>). In total, this dissertation provides a loose history of emergent narrative, an apologetics of the form, a polemic against it, a holistic refinement (maintaining the pleasure while killing the pain), and reports on a series of artifacts that represent a gradual instantiation of that refinement. To my knowledge, this is the most extensive treatment of emergent narrative to yet appear. </p><p>

Persistence of vision| Hamaya Hiroshi's Yukiguni and Kuwabara Kineo's Tokyo Showa 11-nen in the transwar era

<p> Conceptualized by Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas Jim&eacute;nez (known as Habacuc), <i>Exposici&oacute;n #1</i> [Exposition #1](or its more infamous moniker &ldquo;starving dog art&rdquo;)(2007) operates as a multifarious transgressive work of art. A main point of contention within the artwork is the rumored starvation of a dog during the course of artwork&rsquo;s exhibition. This thesis analyzes Habacuc&rsquo;s proposition within contemporaneous debates around participatory practices and Internet art. This examination is provided in order to present an alternative interpretation of the work relative to the divisive practices of the artist. Similar to other artists working with the period known as postinternet, Habacuc engages in a form of art that is counter-cultural, utilizing misinformation as a catalyst for his viral proposition. While Habacuc employs a strategy of critique throughout his varied oeuvre, <i>Exposici&oacute;n #1,</i> arguably his most complex work to date, wholly demonstrates his approach to the Internet as an intrinsically hybridized, political, and oppositional medium. Within the following chapters I focus on the types of participatory relations being produced within <i>Exposici&oacute;n #1</i> and Habacuc&rsquo;s authorial intent to challenge the principles of emancipation promised in the discourses around participation in art and the Internet as &ldquo;global village.&rdquo; </p><p>