The purpose of the study was to examine the status of contemporary fiber as an art form and to identify critical factors affecting its continued development.An extensive search of available literature was conducted. From this search, coupled with the researcher's extensive personal involvement with fiber, populations were identified and questionnaires were designed.Three pertinent but different populations, consisting of fiber artists, college/university and art school heads, and museum, gallery, and textile directors/curators were selected to receive the questionnaires. The questionnaires were designed to reflect the similarities and differences of the population.Data were treated to comparative percentages, valid percentages, cumulative percentages, frequencies, and Chi-Squares. Four major concerns were identified and discussed. They are:1. Fiber as Fine Art2. The Importance of Content and Message Orientation in Fiber3. The Problem of Plurality and Fiber4. The Need for a Critical Language Relative to FiberFindings and Conclusions1. The division between fine art and crafts still exists. Therefore, the division also exists for fiber art, which is part of the crafts discipline.2. Most individuals are not in favor of limiting the parameters of what constitutes fiber art in order to help gain a clearer understanding of what fiber art really is.3. There does not appear to be a critical language for fiber art except that which is technique, method, or materials based.4. The opinion of whether fiber art should be message or statement oriented is divided. Some were in agreement while others were not. In addition, some of the respondents answered with "sometimes."

This dissertation analyses the convergence of primitivism and nationalism in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century French and Russian art. The discourse of primitivism has yielded a number of critical studies focusing on the artistic appropriation of aesthetics derived from "tribal" arts, Asian arts, medieval icons, outsider art, and peasant arts and crafts. Within that scholarship, modern European art that appropriates the aesthetics of folk arts and themes of the peasantry is frequently considered to be representative of national identity and myth. The artistic elucidation of the peasantry as emblematic of national identity combined with their incorporation into primitivism produces a tension that complicates the conventional, binary structure of the discourse. It is therefore necessary to examine artistic expressions of national myth and the peasantry's absorption into the primitivist discourse, as this indicates a critical point at which issues of nationalism and primitivism converge. In the cultural realm, that juncture is located in the artistic idealisation of peasant cultures, which is indicative of a mythical state of being from which national identity could be rearticulated. / The myth of the peasantry as developed in nineteenth century European thought centres around the premise that rural populations were an unchanging element of society whose traditional customs, religious beliefs, and modes of production contrasted sharply with the accelerated changes in urban culture. A critical examination of selected paintings by the French artist Paul Gauguin (1848--1903), the Russian Neoprimitivist Natalia Goncharova (1881--1962), and the French Fauve painter Othon Friesz (1879--1949) within their specific, social contexts reveals the ways in which the modern, artistic maintenance of the rural myth elucidates current political and social issues of nationalism. This underscores the peasantry's symbolism within the nation as representative of a national, collective consciousness and ancestry. The peasantry's incorporation into the primitivist discourse and the cultural articulation of the rural myth are revealed in the paintings The Vision After the Sermon (1888), Yellow Christ (1889), Fruit Harvest (1909), and Autumn Work (1908). The paintings and their respective social contexts situate the peasantry both as constructions within the primitivist discourse and symbols of national identity, thereby disrupting the structure of alterity upon which primitivism is predicated.

Introduction: We, i.e. contemporary Western man, live in a society which has increasingly embraced Science and Technology as the ultimum bonum. The Machine, i.e. Science and Technology, has come to be seen as an impersonal force, a New God - omniscient, omnipotent: to be worshipped and, alas, also to be feared. This mythologem has come to pervade almost every sphere of our lives in a paradigmatic way to the extent where it is hardly ever recognized for what it is and hence fails to arouse the concern it merits. While some of the more perceptive minds - such as Erich Fromm, Rufino Tamayo, Carl Gustav Jung, Konrad Lorenz and Arthur Koestler, to mention but a few - have started ringing the alarm bells, the vast majority of our species seem to plunge ahead with their blinkers firmly in place (more or less contented as long as they can persude themselves that these blinkers were manufactured according to latest technological and scientific specifications). Man’s uniquely human powers - his creative intuition, his feelings, his moral and ethical potential, have become sadly neglected and mistrusted. Homo sapiens – “homo maniacus” as Koestler suggests? - is now at a crossroads: he has reached a point where the next step could be the last step and result in the annihilation of man as a species. Alternately, avoiding that, there is the outwardly less drastic but essentially equally alarming possibility of men becoming robots, while a third alternative has yet to be found. While it does appear as if a lot of young people, noticeably among students, have started reacting against the over mechanization of life, these reactions often tend to follow the swing-of-the-pendulum principle and veer towards the other extreme, throwing out the baby with the bathwater and falling prey to freak-out cults in a kind of mass-irrationalism, rejecting science and technology altogether. Artists who by their very nature perhaps are particularly sensitive - in a kind of seismographic way - to the currents and undercurrents of their age, have become aware of the effects of science and technology on our way of living, and many of them have in one way or another taken a stand in relation to the position of man in our highly technological world. Looking at the art produced over the last four decades, it is truly astonishing to what extent our changed world reflects in our art - a world and a Weltbild very different from that of our ancestors even just a few generations ago. The purpose of the present study is to survey some of the observations and commentaries that painters and certain kindred spirits from the sciences over the last few decades have offered, in the hope of, if not answering, at least defining and posing anew some of the questions that confront us with ever-increasing urgency.

One of the most frequently repeated questions of our time is what is art? Since we have become conditioned to the idea that ''significant art - a much overworked modern term - belongs to the revolutionary avant-garde, artists carry their search for the new at all costs into the field of non art. P.1

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梁嘉賢. / "2007年8月". / 論文(藝術碩士)--香港中文大學, 2007. / 參考文獻(leaves 46-48). / "2007 nian 8 yue". / Abstract also in English. / Liang Jiaxian. / Lun wen (Yi shu shuo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2007. / Can kao wen xian (leaves 46-48). / Chapter (一） --- 前言：一覺之間的疑 惑 --- p.1 / Chapter (二） --- 知覺：傳統的定義與印 象 --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- 神聖的規範 / Chapter 2.2 --- 印象與符號 / Chapter (三） --- 超越真實：傳統影像的再現與接 收 --- p.8 / Chapter 3.1 --- 眼前的傳統 / Chapter 3.2 --- 真實以外 / Chapter 3.3 --- 符號慣性 / Chapter (四） --- 相遇：當代藝術形態中的混雜模 式 --- p.17 / Chapter 4.1 --- 從二元到多元的混雜 / Chapter 4.2 --- 文化超市 / Chapter (五） --- 再探：從混雜藝術中重拾傳統的意 義 --- p.25 / Chapter 5.1 --- 傳統精神融合其他媒介，擴展傳統藝術思想 / Chapter 5.2 --- 以傳統元素審視傳統 / Chapter 5.3 --- 利用傳統的文化價値確立個人身分 / Chapter 5.4 --- 傳統作爲創作材料的一部分 / Chapter (六) --- 結論 --- p.40 / Chapter 6.1 --- 創作者的起點 / Chapter 6.2 --- 混雜藝術的位置 / Chapter 6.3 --- 危與機的邊緣 / 參考書目 --- p.46 / 附錄 --- p.49

While ambitious art museums, biennials, galleries, curators, and critics promoted early Colombian conceptual art and its antecedents as being part of the latest international art trends, the intrepid iconoclasts who created it were not at all interested in being au courant or international. Far from it, their primary focus was on addressing local issues and audiences. They had an ambivalent relationship to institutions, taking advantage of internationalization, which was part of a strategy for cultural and economic development. But these artists did so in order to insert their own tactics emerging from, and dealing with, the realities of underdevelopment. Artists such as Antonio Caro, Jorge Posada, and Efraín Arrieta--developing approaches first introduced by antecedents like Bernardo Salcedo, Feliza Bursztyn, and Beatriz González--sought to open the viewers' eyes to the concrete experience of the here-and-now through the use of usually banal and often ephemeral materials and techniques. They focused critically on social issues--nationalism, education, imperialism, agrarian inequity, governmental policy, and political organization. In taking on specific, timely, and usually local matters dealing with culture, politics, the economy, and social organization, they sought to upset the prevailing conditions outside as well as inside the realm of art. Even the introduction of new forms and ways of producing art should be seen as an ideological rather than a formal exercise since it constituted a cultural assault against the Colombian ruling class. This art, then, was political: it was motivated by beliefs regarding the public affairs of a country. I argue that early Colombian conceptual art was a visual means of exposing institutional strategies of control. I show how this art partook of the spirit of participation which marked the late 1960s and early 1970s in Colombia and in the world. In the process, I add to the understanding of this tumultuous period in world history, since my study is an example of the complex processes of cultural production in an age of globalization. / text

'(De)contextualising Buddhist Aesthetics' is a practice-led artistic research project focusing on the interchanging transition between Buddhist and artistic practices. Essentially inspired by the concept of vipassana meditation, I created a series of performances involving repetitive actions centring on the tasks of re-arranging readymade objects into multiple precarious configurations. Many exercises challenge the laws of gravity and other physical limitations of objects, as well as encouraging the learning experience through the process of trial and error. During the course of mindful observation of the performing body and objects, the mental state gradually gains moments of stillness and silence, which approach the meaning of emptiness (suññata) in Buddhism. Repeated failures generate intermittent feelings of exhaustion and disappointment, which naturally become part of the progress, and can be personally used to develop insight into the notions of impermanence and the non-self derived from dhamma (Buddhist teachings). The video and photography documentations were edited and altered to generate a visual experience that echoes my thoughts and feelings developed during the proceedings; these moving images later inspired other series of hand-made artworks, including collages, drawings and paintings on paper and canvas, exhibited as part of the installations. Various techniques were applied so these objective components resonate a comparative experience of uncontrollability and controllability: dynamic and stillness, fast pace and slow rhythm, abstract and representation. Some two-dimensional pieces are transformed to three-dimensional and their displays keep changing from location to location, and from time to time, in conjunction with an unstable state of the mind. All artworks were created in various formats and interrelate and inform each other. They act together as evidence of the endless journey of artistic learning, which also mirrors the concept of self-learning in Buddhist meditation.

The erosion of traditional French academic methods of picture-construction, and the eclipse of hierarchical subject-matter, ensured the emergence of a diversity of new painting styles in France by 1900 and the possibility of even more drastic departures from tradition in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Picasso, from 1900 to 1914.

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Masters of Technology in Fine Art Degree, Durban University of Technology, 2017. / The aim of this research is to investigate the exploration of transience in the work of selected artists. This study used qualitative, practice-led research methodology. This research is practice-led as my art making plays an integral part in guiding my research. Process philosophy provides the theoretical underpinning and contextual framework for this dissertation. I focus on both contemporary artists and philosophers who explore the notion of transience. As my selected artists and I use paper as a predominant medium, I look at how paper is an ideal choice of material through which to explore themes of transience. The selected artists that I investigate include Peter Callesen (1967-), Mia Pearlman (1974-), Jodi Carey (1981-) and myself. Through this research I have found that artists expressed similar sentiments to that of process philosophers centuries before these theories existed, and continue to do so today. This validates transience as a relevant form of visual enquiry. Through the exploration of transience by contemporary thinkers and the selected artists, I briefly examine the scope of interpretations and possible meanings of transience. The investigation into paper as an art medium supports its appropriateness as a means to explore themes of transience. The exploration of the selected artists’ work highlights the various aspects of transience as a concept based on both subject matter and medium. This research resulted in a body of work, exhibited in partial fulfilment of the Master of Technology Degree in Fine Art. / M