In 1964 Clement Greenberg suffered his greatest setback as the critical arbiter of modern painting. The "Post Painterly Abstraction" exhibition he had helped to organize at the Los Angeles Museum of Art was critically demolished, definitively shattering the myth of invincibility surrounding Greenberg's modernism, an aesthetic which had been a powerful influence in the United States and Canada in the post-war period. For many contemporary critics, the early to mid-1960's is the period in which a stultified and institutionalized modernism was finally usurped by an approach to culture that was less elitist and more socially engaged. The new cultural model that was taking shape within the Kennedy Administration's vision of the New Frontier sought to remotivate a sense of "national purpose" within the United States to counter the nation's preoccupation with consumerism and affluence. The pragmatic liberal concept of culture sought to rework the relationship between work and play in order to promote a new relationship between individualism and civic virtue. The impetus to re-shape the boundaries between art and society under the New Frontier was a direct response to the political and military challenge posed by the Soviet Union in the late-1950s, especially after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the inability of the Eisenhower Administration to respond to the anxieties generated by the intense superpower rivalry. This international environment also exacerbated the ongoing tensions between Canada and the United States, culminating in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis . Canadian Prime Minister Diefenbaker delayed in responding to the U.S. alarm over the presence of Soviet medium range nuclear weapons in Cuba, and the political firestorm that followed this delay highlighted the frictions that had developed in the unequal bilateral relationship between the United States and Canada after World War Two. While the Cold War was approaching its ultimate showdown, Greenberg was proceeding to a geographical margin of North America — Saskatchewan — to participate in the Emma Lake Artists' Workshops. Ironically, while Greenberg was extolling the virtues of Canadian abstract painters such as Art McKay and Kenneth Lochhead, going so far as to argue that the Saskatchewan abstract painters were New York's only competition, Los Angeles was asserting itself as New York's cultural rival . As a consequence of the phenomenal post-war growth of the military - industrial complex in the American Southwest, a fierce rivalry was developing with the traditional bases of power in the Northeast. The Southwest, and Los Angeles in particular, was the major beneficiary of the accelerated defense spending resulting from the heightened tensions of the Cold War in the 1950s. Partially in response to a regional dispute over military appropriations, the economic and cultural elites of Southern California sought to counter the pragmatic liberal agenda of the Kennedy Administration by promoting Los Angeles as the Second City of American Art. Greenberg's "Post Painterly Abstraction" exhibition was intended to draw attention to the Los Angeles cultural renaissance and the maturing of the city's independent cultural identity. Thus, Greenberg's sojourn to Saskatchewan at the height of the Cold War and during a crucial period of his formulation of his theory of modernist painting after abstract expressionism provides the focus for an examination of the status of modernism in the early 1960s, especially in the context of U.S.-Canadian relations and interregional rivalry between the Northeast and the Southwest. This thesis seeks to explain the complex cultural and political dynamic of modernist painting in the United States in the Cold War years of 1957 to 1965 and the effect of this dynamic on the development of Canadian modernist painting. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

My study is a theoretical intervention of the South African contemporary visual art of Mary Sibande. It focuses on the figure of Sophie representing the maid in three series; namely, Sophie-Elsie, Sophie-Merica, and Sophie-Velucia. The study applies Frantz Fanon’s thought to the understanding of the figure of Sophie while emphasising the themes of naming, the human subject, and presence-absence. The theoretical framework of this thesis is a decolonial epistemic theory, which is used as a lens to understand Fanon’s political thoughts. I argue that the themes of naming, human subject, and presenceabsence are inherent in Fanon’s thought. These thematic areas give a better understanding of the existential questions of the figure of Sophie in the antiblack Manichean world. It is important to unpack the figure of Sophie as a Manichean figure who represents the crossing of two different worlds – the white world and the black world, Africa and Europe. The study highlights the importance and relevance of reviving Fanon’s thought concerning decolonial contemporary African art and establishing other tools of interpretation necessary to understand decolonial aestheSis. The thrust of this thesis is to deploy decolonial epistemic theory as a theoretical framework to the Fanonian understanding of the figure of the three Sophies that embody the modern/colonial predicament of the figure of the maid and blackness. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / Ph. D (Art)

The history of video art has tended to be told through a narrow lens, one that understands video as a single, coherent medium, or as defined by a single political project: an opposition to broadcast television. This thesis proposes instead to look at “actually existing video”, a methodology adapted from music scholar Benjamin Piekut that looks at the concrete variety of forms that video took at particular moments and in particular places, and in the hands of particular people. Such an approach does not seek to predetermine what video is, but rather insists on video’s heterogeneity. This thesis applies this methodology by outlining the contours of what I call, following critic Jud Yalkut, “the alternative video network”. This network was an open-ended assemblage of people, instruments, practices and shared ideas that, in the 1960s and early 1970s, embraced video as a means of engaging with the politics of technology. It included the New York-based figures Nam June Paik, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Aldo Tambellini, Juan Downey and the Raindance collective (especially Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny), and a contingent from the West Coast and Canada including the collectives T.R. Uthco, Ant Farm, Image Bank and General Idea. Its ideas and practices were circulated at places like The Kitchen in New York and the Everson Museum in Syracuse (under the guidance of curators James Harithas and David Ross), and in the publications Radical Software (edited by Korot and Gershuny) and FILE (edited by General Idea). Ultimately, I argue that this network, which assembles a variety of different art histories, and social and theoretical concerns, was unified by a shared engagement with the central problem of Cold War US discourse: how to integrate humans with the new electronic technologies that proliferated in the US in the wake of World War Two. The alternative video network analyzed the dominant solutions to this problem, and offered their own alternatives.

O ESPAÇO COMO OBRA: Ações, Coletivos Artísticos e Cidade é uma reflexão a respeito dos processos de criação e impacto social das ações dos coletivos artísticos Contrafilé, Frente 3 de Fevereiro e Política do Impossível de São Paulo e GAC de Buenos Aires, que começaram a atuar em meados dos anos 1990. A dissertação foi desenvolvida a partir de diversas vozes, que se complementam e entrecruzam: uma voz narrativa, que vai apresentando descobertas feitas em minha atuação como artista no espaço urbano e que surge de uma dimensão local, inclusive íntima, chegando a uma voz mais \"reflexiva e acadêmica\"; vozes da grande mídia; as vozes dos próprios trabalhos artísticos apresentados; vozes dos coletivos, quando são utilizados como referências teóricas; e, por último, vozes de pensadores que de alguma forma influenciam o meu pensamento e o do movimento cultural do qual fazem parte as práticas urbanas aqui analisadas. O intuito é compreender como as intervenções urbanas, ao mesmo tempo, resultam e geram uma rede de afetos e significados e evidenciam a emergência de uma subjetividade política contemporânea que passa, necessariamente, por discutir e concretizar políticas de representação, relação, subjetivação e modos de vida alternativos aos impostos pelo neoliberalismo. Interessa, portanto, pensar como acontece e toma corpo a potência crítica situada deste tipo de resistência, configurando formas atuais do fazer político no contexto específico e complexo da cidade como escala e espaço referencial. O estudo se desenvolve como uma investigação ativa e participante de diversos trabalhos realizados pelos coletivos e através da qual me interessa observar essas ações/intervenções em seu poder disruptivo, ou seja, em sua capacidade de presentificar acontecimentos que de alguma forma desestabilizem representações sociais e sensações prévias. E que, ao evidenciar a possibilidade de fazê-lo, trazem à tona um saber circulatório que difunde a imagem produzida em situação representação direta e a experiência do \"público\" como obra. / The Space as theWork:Actions, Art Collectives and City is a reflection on creation processes and social impact of actions carried out by art collectives Contrafilé, Frente 3 de Fevereiro and Política do Impossível dfrom São Pauloe, as well as GAC Buenos Aires. These collectives have began work in the 1990\'s. The dissertation stems from multiple voices, which cross over and complement each other: a narrative voice that unravel discoveries made in my work as an artist in the urban space, emerging from a local and also intimate dimension, arriving at a \"more reflexive and academic\" voice; voices of the mainstream media; voices of the works studied; voices of the collectives, when they are mobilised as theoretical refeb rences and, lastly, voices of the thinkers who somehow influenced my thinking and voices of the cultural movement of which the urban practices under scrutiny are part of. The aim is to understand how the urban interventions at once result from and generate a network of affects and meanings, as they render evident the emergence of a contemporary political subjectivity. This subjectivity necessarily involves discussing and carrying out a politics of representation, relation, subjectivation and modes of life alternative to those imposed by neoliberalism. Under this light, the dissertation seeks to think how the critical potency situated in this kind of resistance can be embodied and takes place at all, configuring current forms of political making, in the specific and complex context of the city as scale and as referential space. This study developed as an active and participating investigation of several works carried out by the collectives. I seek to observe the actions/interventions in their disruptive power, i.e., in their capacity to render present events that somehow destabilise social representations and previous sensations. And which, as they evidence the possibility of being carried out, they bring to the surface a circulatory knowledge that diffuses the image produced in situation direct representation and the experience of the \"public\" as work.

O ESPAÇO COMO OBRA: Ações, Coletivos Artísticos e Cidade é uma reflexão a respeito dos processos de criação e impacto social das ações dos coletivos artísticos Contrafilé, Frente 3 de Fevereiro e Política do Impossível de São Paulo e GAC de Buenos Aires, que começaram a atuar em meados dos anos 1990. A dissertação foi desenvolvida a partir de diversas vozes, que se complementam e entrecruzam: uma voz narrativa, que vai apresentando descobertas feitas em minha atuação como artista no espaço urbano e que surge de uma dimensão local, inclusive íntima, chegando a uma voz mais \"reflexiva e acadêmica\"; vozes da grande mídia; as vozes dos próprios trabalhos artísticos apresentados; vozes dos coletivos, quando são utilizados como referências teóricas; e, por último, vozes de pensadores que de alguma forma influenciam o meu pensamento e o do movimento cultural do qual fazem parte as práticas urbanas aqui analisadas. O intuito é compreender como as intervenções urbanas, ao mesmo tempo, resultam e geram uma rede de afetos e significados e evidenciam a emergência de uma subjetividade política contemporânea que passa, necessariamente, por discutir e concretizar políticas de representação, relação, subjetivação e modos de vida alternativos aos impostos pelo neoliberalismo. Interessa, portanto, pensar como acontece e toma corpo a potência crítica situada deste tipo de resistência, configurando formas atuais do fazer político no contexto específico e complexo da cidade como escala e espaço referencial. O estudo se desenvolve como uma investigação ativa e participante de diversos trabalhos realizados pelos coletivos e através da qual me interessa observar essas ações/intervenções em seu poder disruptivo, ou seja, em sua capacidade de presentificar acontecimentos que de alguma forma desestabilizem representações sociais e sensações prévias. E que, ao evidenciar a possibilidade de fazê-lo, trazem à tona um saber circulatório que difunde a imagem produzida em situação representação direta e a experiência do \"público\" como obra. / The Space as theWork:Actions, Art Collectives and City is a reflection on creation processes and social impact of actions carried out by art collectives Contrafilé, Frente 3 de Fevereiro and Política do Impossível dfrom São Pauloe, as well as GAC Buenos Aires. These collectives have began work in the 1990\'s. The dissertation stems from multiple voices, which cross over and complement each other: a narrative voice that unravel discoveries made in my work as an artist in the urban space, emerging from a local and also intimate dimension, arriving at a \"more reflexive and academic\" voice; voices of the mainstream media; voices of the works studied; voices of the collectives, when they are mobilised as theoretical refeb rences and, lastly, voices of the thinkers who somehow influenced my thinking and voices of the cultural movement of which the urban practices under scrutiny are part of. The aim is to understand how the urban interventions at once result from and generate a network of affects and meanings, as they render evident the emergence of a contemporary political subjectivity. This subjectivity necessarily involves discussing and carrying out a politics of representation, relation, subjectivation and modes of life alternative to those imposed by neoliberalism. Under this light, the dissertation seeks to think how the critical potency situated in this kind of resistance can be embodied and takes place at all, configuring current forms of political making, in the specific and complex context of the city as scale and as referential space. This study developed as an active and participating investigation of several works carried out by the collectives. I seek to observe the actions/interventions in their disruptive power, i.e., in their capacity to render present events that somehow destabilise social representations and previous sensations. And which, as they evidence the possibility of being carried out, they bring to the surface a circulatory knowledge that diffuses the image produced in situation direct representation and the experience of the \"public\" as work.

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