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.

The dissertation explores how quality-judgments on works of art are created within the contemporary art world. The research starts with the examination of modernist art theories supported by the museum, and continues with the exploration of the impact of the art market on quality-judgments. Although the art market had already distorted the idea of quality, further contradictions and difficulties have risen within judgment-making after the 1960s due to the dematerialisation of the work of art. Art criticism should have been able to deal with this complexity, but it is demonstrated that art criticism is a subjective field and even if there is a universal theory on quality, it often fails when applied to the particular work of art. Throughout the dissertation it is demonstrated that although ‘good art’ is a subjective, power- and discourse-dependent concept, all art professionals seek something that is an inherent quality of the artwork. However, regardless of the existence of such inherent value, judgments on quality are constructed by and subjected to power-struggle. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Art History)

Thesis (MA (VA)(Visual Arts))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / This thesis aims to assess the extent to which the African curated exhibition, Dak’Art: Biennale de l’art africain contemporain , succeeds in subverting hegemonic Western representations of African art as necessarily ‘exotic’ and ‘Other.’ My investigation of the Dak’Art biennale in this thesis is informed and preceded by a study of evolutionist assumptions towards African art and the continuing struggle for command over the African voice. I outline the trajectory of African art from primitive artifact to artwork, highlighting the prejudices that have kept Africans from being valued as equals and unique artists in their own right. I then look at exhibiting techniques employed to move beyond perceptions of the tribal, to subvert the exoticising tendency of the West and remedy the marginalised position of the larger African artistic community.

Scenario House, a gallery based installation, is comprised of a room constructed as a ???family room??? within a domestic space, a television with a looped video work and a sound componant played through a 5.1 sound system. The paper is intended to give my work context in relation to the processes leading up to its completion. This is achieved through clarification of the basis for the installation including previous socio-political discourses within my art practice. It then focuses on ways that the installation Scenario House is based on gun practice facilities such as the Valhalla Shooting Club. Further it gives an explanation of the actual production, in context with other art practices. It was found that distinctions between ???war as a game??? and the actual event are being lost within ???simulation revenge scenarios??? where the borders distinguishing gaming violence, television violence and revenge scenarios are increasingly indefinable. War can then be viewed a spectacle where the actual event is lost in a simplified simulation. Scenario House as installation allows audience immersion through sound spatialisation and physical devices. Sound is achieved by design of a 5.1 system played through a domestic home theatre system. The physical design incorporates the dual aspect of a gun shooting club and a lounge room. Further a film loop is shown on the television monitor as part of the domestic space ??? it is non-narrative and semi-documentary in style. The film loop represents the mediation of the representation of fear where there is an exclusion of ???the other??? from the social body. When considering this installation it is important to note that politics and art need not be considered as representing two separate and permanent realities. Conversely there is a need to distance politicised art production from any direct political campaign work in so far as the notion of a campaign constitutes a fixed and inflexible space for intellectual and cultural production. Finally this paper expresses the need to maintain a critical openness to media cultures that dominate political discourse. Art practices such as those of Martha Rosler, Haacke and Paul McCarthy are presented as effective strategies for this form of production.

My dissertation investigates the concepts and techniques of “copying” and appropriation in contemporary Chinese art, which, despite its phenomenal growth, has seldom been credited as original. Critics either condemn the Chinese artists’ willingness to appropriate from others as a lack of individuality, or declare it as a peculiarly “Chinese” quality. This paper, instead, argues that the Chinese artists deliberately adopt such “copying” as a visual strategy, in order to reexamine the traditions they “borrowed”, to reflect on their own cultural status in the modern world, and to challenge the conventional concept of originality--namely, to show that originality is not created by irreducible individuality or mystified inspiration, but by the author’s choice as well as manipulation of contexts. This strategy, I argue, is essential to the proper evaluation and interpretation of contemporary Chinese artworks. The first two chapters of my dissertation focus on laying out the context from which this art grows. I review how the ideas, styles and institutional structures of western modern art were imitated, questioned and redefined by the Chinese artists, from 1978 to the present; I then examine the conceptual complexity of originality and “copying” in the theories of modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and in traditional Chinese art. The next two chapters focus on, respectively, calligraphy and photography in contemporary Chinese art, both of which contain the paradox between originality and “copying” in their very nature. The works of four artists, Xu Bing, Qiu Zhijie, Hong Hao and Zhao Bandi, are discussed in details. Xu's site-specific reproduction of “pseudo characters” manage to engage its targeted audiences, psychologically and physically; Qiu's obsessive yet futile copying of a canon of calligraphy returns the act of writing to its essence--a physical pursuit of one's spiritual state of being; Hong's photographic emulation of an ancient masterpiece suggests that painting may excel photography in its ability to portray a grand cityscape; Zhao’s simulacrum of pop culture paradigms enables him to evade political censorship, and to have an substantial yet ironic impact in a broader public sphere. Each of these works has made a unique contribution to the redefinition of artistic originality. / text

Scenario House, a gallery based installation, is comprised of a room constructed as a ???family room??? within a domestic space, a television with a looped video work and a sound componant played through a 5.1 sound system. The paper is intended to give my work context in relation to the processes leading up to its completion. This is achieved through clarification of the basis for the installation including previous socio-political discourses within my art practice. It then focuses on ways that the installation Scenario House is based on gun practice facilities such as the Valhalla Shooting Club. Further it gives an explanation of the actual production, in context with other art practices. It was found that distinctions between ???war as a game??? and the actual event are being lost within ???simulation revenge scenarios??? where the borders distinguishing gaming violence, television violence and revenge scenarios are increasingly indefinable. War can then be viewed a spectacle where the actual event is lost in a simplified simulation. Scenario House as installation allows audience immersion through sound spatialisation and physical devices. Sound is achieved by design of a 5.1 system played through a domestic home theatre system. The physical design incorporates the dual aspect of a gun shooting club and a lounge room. Further a film loop is shown on the television monitor as part of the domestic space ??? it is non-narrative and semi-documentary in style. The film loop represents the mediation of the representation of fear where there is an exclusion of ???the other??? from the social body. When considering this installation it is important to note that politics and art need not be considered as representing two separate and permanent realities. Conversely there is a need to distance politicised art production from any direct political campaign work in so far as the notion of a campaign constitutes a fixed and inflexible space for intellectual and cultural production. Finally this paper expresses the need to maintain a critical openness to media cultures that dominate political discourse. Art practices such as those of Martha Rosler, Haacke and Paul McCarthy are presented as effective strategies for this form of production.

This dissertation examines the history of the Durban Art Gallery from its founding in 1892 until 2004, a decade after the First Democratic Election. While the emphasis is on significant changes that were introduced in the post-1994 period, the earlier section of the study locates these initiatives within a broad historical framework. The collecting policies of the museum as well as its exhibitions and programmes are considered in the light of the institution 's changing social and political context as well as shifting imperatives within a local, regional and national art world. The Durban Art Gallery was established in order to promote a European, and particularly British, culture, and the acquisition and appreciation of art was considered an important element in the formation of a stable society. By providing a broad overview of the early years of the gallery, I identify reasons for the choice of acquisitions and explore the impact and reception of a selection of exhibitions. I investigate changes during the 1960s and 1970s through an examination of the Art South Africa Today exhibitions: in addition to opening up institutional spaces to a racially mixed community, these exhibitions marked the beginning of an imperative to show protest art. I argue that, during the political climate of the 1980s, there was a tension in the cultural arena between, on the one hand, a motivation to retain a Western ideal of 'high art' and, on the other, a drive to accommodate the new forms of people's art and to challenge the values and ideological standpoints that had been instrumental in shaping collecting and exhibiting policies in the South African art arena. I explore this tension through a discussion of the Cape Town Triennial exhibitions, organised jointly by all the official museums, which ran alongside more inclusive and independently curated exhibitions, such as Tributaries, which were shown mainly outside the country. The post-1994 period marked an opening up of spaces, both literally and conceptually. This openness was manifest in the revised strategies that were introduced to show the Durban Art Gallery 's permanent collection as well as in two key public projects that were started - Red Eye @rt and the AIDS 2000 ribbon. Through an examination of these strategies and initiatives, I argue that the central role of the Durban Art Gallery has shifted from being a repository to providing an interactive public space.

The dissertation explores how quality-judgments on works of art are created within the contemporary art world. The research starts with the examination of modernist art theories supported by the museum, and continues with the exploration of the impact of the art market on quality-judgments. Although the art market had already distorted the idea of quality, further contradictions and difficulties have risen within judgment-making after the 1960s due to the dematerialisation of the work of art. Art criticism should have been able to deal with this complexity, but it is demonstrated that art criticism is a subjective field and even if there is a universal theory on quality, it often fails when applied to the particular work of art. Throughout the dissertation it is demonstrated that although ‘good art’ is a subjective, power- and discourse-dependent concept, all art professionals seek something that is an inherent quality of the artwork. However, regardless of the existence of such inherent value, judgments on quality are constructed by and subjected to power-struggle. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Art History)

Orientador: Luciano Migliaccio / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-08T08:25:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Oliveira_HelderManueldaSilvade_M.pdf: 4912331 bytes, checksum: 5acaaa32d9e9543d03f7839664c88225 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Resumo: A origem deste estudo são as obras Marinha com barco (1895) e Paisagem com rio e barco ao seco em São Paulo 'Ponte Grande¿ (1895) de autoria de Giovanni Castagneto. Este se inicia com um breve histórico da pintura de marinha correlacionando a produção européia e brasileira. Em seguida, analisamos a produção do artista sob a prática da pintura de série, pois é possível identificar nas obras do pintor uma freqüente repetição de motivos. A partir disto avaliamos a série 'barcos ao seco¿ realizada pelo pintor ao longo de sua carreira e na qual incluímos as obras acima. Por fim, tratamos do período em que o artista expôs em São Paulo e as relações estabelecidas no ambiente cultural paulista. O trajeto foi necessário tanto para uma compreensão da produção paulista e de sua importância no meio artístico da cidade de São Paulo, bem como perceber o lócus do pintor no panorama da pintura de paisagem marinha e no meio artístico brasileiro do século XIX / Abstract: Giovanni Castagneto's Marinha com barco (1895) and Paisagem com rio e barco ao seco em São Paulo 'Ponte Grande' (1895) are the origin of this present study which begins with a brief story of seascape co-relating both the European and Brazilian productions. The following step consists on the analysis of the artist's production under the practice of his serial paintings due to the possibility of identification of a frequent repetition of motives in the painter's works. From this point, we evaluate the series 'barcos ao seco' released by the painter throughout his career and which includes the paintings mentioned previously. Finally, we focus on the period in which the artist exhibited in São Paulo and the relationship established in the cultural environment of the city. This course was necessary for a deeper comprehension of the painter's production in São Paulo as well as his importance in the forming cultural class. Therefore we intend, throughout the chosen paintings, to notice the importance of Castagneto in the both sea and landscape production context and in the Brazilian artistic class / Mestrado / Historia da Arte / Mestre em História da Arte

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1984 D52 / Master of Arts