<p> This dissertation examines the transformation of the South Indian city of Kanchipuram into a major cosmopolitan sacred center during the course of the eighth through twelfth centuries. In this pivotal five hundred-year period, Kanchipuram served as the royal capital for two major dynasties, the Pallavas and then the Cholas. Both dynasties sponsored the production of prominent sacred monuments built from locally sourced stone. These temples were crowned with pyramidal towers, adorned with sculpted and painted figures of deities amid groves and palatial landscapes, and elegantly ornamented with courtly Sanskrit and Tamil inscriptions. Over time, the temples functioned as monumental statements of power, sites of devotion, and municipal establishments where diverse social groups negotiated their claims to political authority and economic prosperity. In Kanchipuram, temples also played a crucial role in defining urban space by demarcating the city's center and borders, marking crucial junctions, and orienting the gods towards avenues, hydraulic features, and royal establishments. As religious monuments, they also fostered vibrant circuits of pilgrimage and travel that were integrated with a broader Indian Ocean network.</p><p> The dissertation argues that the construction of temples fundamentally shaped and reordered landscape. The four chapters, organized chronologically, address the expanding geography of Kanchipuram and its widening sphere of influence. The first two chapters trace the city's shifting contours and the emergence of a major pilgrimage route that led precisely through the urban core. The city was radically reconfigured around this new central road, which functioned as a processional pathway that created relationships between monuments both inside the city and beyond its borders. The third chapter reveals patterns of movement linking the city with its rural and coastal hinterland, and considers connections with Southeast Asia. Temples in more remote areas disclose links to Kanchipuram through their use of shared architectural forms, a standardized iconographic program, and inscriptions that detail economic and political ties to the urban hub. The fourth chapter focuses on colonial-era encounters with Kanchipuram and the city's role in the broader production of colonial knowledge. As a site of antiquarian interest and military history, Kanchipuram was subject to competing narratives about India. Whereas European officials and surveyors such as James Fergusson saw in the city's monuments India's past glory and inevitable decline, other travelers found no evidence of rupture or disrepair. I read these conflicting representations against the grain to expose Kanchipuram's continuity as a flourishing cosmopolitan center. The dissertation's goal is twofold. First, it documents Kanchipuram and maps its monuments spatially and chronologically in relation to each other, the city, and features of the natural environment. Second, it situates the temples within their ritual and civic functions as agentive establishments that both served and fostered a growing urban landscape.</p><p>

<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>

<p> The lengthy descriptions of tribute embassies in the Chinese dynastic histories have led to the widespread belief that the China-centered tribute system dominated the trade of pre-modern East Asia at all times. The tribute trade, however, was not the main form of trade between China and Japan. In the year 838 CE, the last Japanese embassy for nearly six centuries traveled to Tang-dynasty China (618-907). Until 1403, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu of the Ashikaga bakufu dispatched a delegation to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to resume formal diplomatic relations, the tribute trade was suspended. Even though sources are few and far between, this thesis demonstrates the Sino-Japanese trade flourished throughout these six centuries.</p><p> Buddhist trade&mdash;the commercial exchange of objects for Buddhist uses, with monks as participants&mdash;occupied a prominent position in Sino-Japanese trade between 838 and 1403. People living on the Japanese archipelago desired many continental goods, and meanwhile, Chinese consumers also sought many commodities from Japan. Some of the Japanese embassy members in the 838 delegation were already engaged in non-tribute trade, trying to purchase incense and medicines in the lower Yangzi region of China. Meanwhile, Japanese monks diligently collected Buddhist texts and ritual objects. Archaeological discoveries show that between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Japanese repurposed various Chinese daily utensils such as ceramic jars, porcelain boxes, and bronze mirrors for religious uses. At the same time, Chinese commoners acquired Japanese goods. In addition to fine products like pearls, China also imported bulky goods from Japan such as lumber for monastery construction and for coffins. </p><p> Religious networks and commercial networks gradually became integrated as monks traveled on merchant ships and transmitted trade information. Prestigious monasteries also actively collaborated with merchants, and the trust embedded in the religious network facilitated long-distance trade. The authorities in both China and Japan realized that the shared belief in Buddhism could act as a common ground to reduce friction. The emperors of the Song dynasty (960-1276) warmly welcomed pilgrim monks from Japan.</p><p> Although the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan (r. 1260-1294) launched two invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, the commercial and religious exchanges between China and Japan continued. The Mongol Emperor Chengzong (r. 1294-1307) dispatched a Zen master as his envoy to Japan, who stayed and taught in Kamakura. Ships named for Japanese monasteries brought sulfur and other goods to China and then returned to Japan with incense, medicines, ceramics, copper coins, and books. In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Kamakura became the center of the growing Zen Buddhist movement as well as a distribution center for continental goods.</p><p> The six centuries of commercial and religious exchanges between China and Japan left a clear legacy. When Ashikaga Yoshimitsu resumed sending tribute to the Ming dynasty in 1403, an eminent monk led the Japanese delegation. Unlike the tribute system before 838, the newly established tribute exchanges acknowledged the need for participants to make a profit. And after the resumption of the tribute trade in 1403, monks and monasteries continued to play a significant role.</p><p>

<p> The women of the Ndebele, an ethnic minority living in the rural North of South Africa, decorate their homes in colorful geometric paintings. This thesis retraces how Ndebele mural art was "discovered" by white South African modernist artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. By examining their paintings and photographs, it shows how their specialist interest contributed to Ndebele villages becoming popular tourist destinations during the apartheid era.</p><p> This thesis furthermore demonstrates how the format of the glossy coffee-table book facilitated global exposure and appreciation of the Ndebele "style," and eventually led to its commodification as an ethnic brand. Finally, it evidences that despite this appropriation, the designs of Ndebele women are part of a rich cultural heritage that continues to fascinate artists and designers worldwide.</p><p>

This dissertation examines the memorialization of dramatic action in seventeenth-century sculpture, and its implications for the representation of sanctity. Illusions of transformation and animation enhanced the human tendency to respond to three-dimensional images in interpersonal terms, vivifying the commemorative connotations that predominate in contemporary writing on the medium. The first chapter introduces the concept of seeming actuality, a juxtaposition of the affective appeal of real presence and the ideality of the classical statua that appeared in the work of Stefano Maderno, and was enlivened by Gianlorenzo Bernini into paradoxes of permanent instantaneity. This new mystical sculpture was mimetic, not because it depicted events narrated elsewhere, but imitated mutable, time-bound, spiritual activity with arresting immediacy in the here and now. No other form of image could so fully evoke the mingling of human immanence and divine transcendence that was the fundamental basis of sanctity. Chapters Two through Four closely analyze the sculptural construction hagiographic identities for Ludovica Albertoni, Alessandro Sauli, and John of the Cross, and their interplay with political, social, and religious factors. The discovery of connections between marble and wooden statuary further broadens our understanding of the expressive range of the medium. The homology between saintly and sculptural exemplarity reveals a far more dynamic, interactive, and rhetorical conception of the medium than is portrayed in early modern theoretical writings.

This dissertation tracks the exhibition design practices developed in and around the Independent Group (IG) from the late 1940s through the 1950s. A loose affiliation of artists, architects, and critics, the IG gathered at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in the early to mid-1950s to debate the aesthetic, socio-political, and techno-scientific forces of their present (key figures included Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson). Synthesizing science-fiction, Dada, theoretical biology, and cybernetics (among many other topics) within a single mode of research, IG members formulated a non-hierarchical model of the cultural “continuum” in discussions, presentations, and most importantly, collaborative exhibition designs. The dissertation contends that exhibition design provided the IG with a timely strategy for navigating the contradictory traditions of aesthetic and technical production that came together in Britain during postwar reconstruction, from interwar avant-gardes to emergent American technocracy. IG members realized that exhibition design was the one technique that could move fluidly between the phenomenological conditions of architecture and display and the technological networks of communication, image distribution, and scientific production structuring the “continuum.” The goal was to bring these circuits and spaces—gallery, factory, laboratory, office, home, cinema, television, street—to bear on bodily experience so they might first be lived, then studied and redesigned. Chapter 1 examines Hamilton’s Growth and Form (1951), arguing that the exhibition’s apparatuses for displaying images and models of organic processes materialized a looming shift in global power structures. Chapter 2 unpacks a “Brutalist” empiricism from Parallel of Life and Art (1953), a web of photographs of cultural and technical materials. Chapter 3 investigates Hamilton’s Man, Machine and Motion (1955), which was less exhibition armature than metallic machine of production. Chapter 4 considers IG participation in This is Tomorrow (1956), a collection of propositions for artistic integration. Here, the IG met spectators, not in the realm of bodily experience, but on the plane of fantasy. Chapter 5 examines Hamilton’s an Exhibit and Exhibit 2 (1957/59), proto-Conceptual projects testing whether forms of affect, play, and chance might be fabricated within production systems no longer requiring human operators. / History of Art and Architecture

Focusing on a small number of richly illuminated manuscripts produced in Cologne around the year 1000—and known to scholars since the early twentieth century as the so-called "painterly" group of manuscripts—this dissertation takes the close study of a well-defined group of objects as the starting point for an examination of issues central to broader histories of medieval art. A diptych-like pairing of miniatures with inscriptions, each of which is given a full page, constitutes a characteristic feature of these manuscripts. Because these inscriptions were written specifically to accompany the facing images, the manuscripts from Cologne afford us a rare glimpse of a discourse on art and image making in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as providing insights into how such miniatures were meant to be viewed. The first chapter establishes a theoretical framework for the project, which examines both the historical and the scholarly origins of the Cologne School. Moreover, the concept of a "painterly" style is scrutinized and its use is traced back to significant developments in German art-historical writing of the late nineteenth century. The second chapter—devoted to a remarkable, yet relatively unknown tenth-century gospel book in Milan—demonstrates how the manuscript's carefully-crafted pictorial program draws upon an impressive tradition of Carolingian poetry and epigraphy in order to instill a pointed moralizing lesson on its recipient. A closely related sister-manuscript, preserved today in Paris, forms the subject of the third chapter, which demonstrates how the designer of its program employed philosophical and dialectical terms—taken from the school texts of the day—in order to devise an ambitiously complex set of miniatures and inscriptions, centered on a contemplative engagement with the paintings. The dissertation concludes with a chapter on the more famous Hitda Codex, illuminated at the behest of a powerful abbess in the early eleventh century. Through an analysis of the manuscript's narrative program, the chapter details how both image and inscription coordinate the active engagement of the viewer—prompting a consideration of the ways in which the pairings function as allegories of introspection. Throughout the dissertation I aim to reconcile the innovative formal qualities of the miniatures with the unusual complexity of their accompanying inscriptions. As a consequence of this study, it can be demonstrated that in the painterly manuscripts from Cologne, the close intertwining of image and inscription results in sophisticated programs of illumination, which elucidate an unprecedented contemporary reflection on the nature of painting in age otherwise known for its scarcity of written sources on art. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation is a historical study of the life and work of French-Canadian architect and engineer, Ernest Cormier (1885-1980), who is considered to be among the most important Canadian architects of his generation, yet about whom relatively few scholarly studies exist. In light of the range of issues raised by Cormier’s work and their degree of importance to an understanding of Canadian culture at large during the first half of the twentieth century, this dissertation argues that no other architect operating in Canada during the interwar period made a contribution that touched on so many salient issues as Cormier did. A cosmopolitan figure who tapped into everything available to him, Cormier’s multidisciplinary practice spanned over five decades in his native city of Montréal, and reflects his synthesis of diverse influences, his role as an agent of cultural transfer, and his remarkable degree of savoir-faire in everything he undertook. Entrusted with important commissions at local, national and international levels, Cormier’s contribution merits further study both as a milestone in the development of architecture in Canada, and for what it reveals about the charged sociocultural dynamics of Montréal at that time, which was then the cultural and economic capital of the country. Cormier was particularly active during the interwar period, which was an important time in the advent of cultural modernity in the province of Québec, and in the development of a national consciousness among French Canadians. Focused primarily on the close study of two very different yet interrelated projects by Cormier that date from this period, this dissertation contends that the house he designed for himself (1930-31) and the main pavilion of the Université de Montréal (1924-43) are his most important works, both for what they reveal about his sustained commitments as well as for the innovative ways in which they address the conditions of modernity, and thus, critically illuminate the opportunities and constraints of their time and place. Heavily reliant on the study of archival materials alongside empirical analyses of the buildings, and readings from a range of interdisciplinary sources in order to take account of the work’s meaning and significance within and beyond architecture culture, a central leitmotif of this study is the theme of ‘construction’ construed both as a preoccupation internal to Cormier’s oeuvre and as a theoretical orientation driving my analysis of his work. In the first instance, the figure of the constructeur [constructor] is incorporated into Cormier’s professional title to better align himself with French architecture and engineering culture, particularly with the work of Auguste Perret, whom he greatly admired. As well, for Cormier, construction in the sense of building things, is inseparable from design, and finds sustained expression in his deep curiosity for how things are made, his investment in making at all scales across diverse métiers and media, and his exacting standards for all of his work to be well executed. Finally, keenly attendant to architecture’s communicative function, this dissertation examines the profound representational role played by the Cormier residence and the Université de Montréal in the construction of identity at the respective scales of the individual and that of a collective. / Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning

The Soviet political photomontage, as a turn “from faktura to factography,” is sometimes viewed as a compromise that the constructivists had to make to meet the aesthetic and informational needs of their new audience, the proletarian masses. I argue that it was an expansion of the constructivist paradigm, and that throughout the 1920s Soviet photomontage was not only feeding on the principles of analytical art, but in a sense became their ultimate expression. Gustav Klucis, a pioneer of the Soviet political photomontage, and the hero of my dissertation, stated in his theoretical writings, that photomontage is the form of analytical art. The hybrid genre of photomontage was in fact a result of the constructuvists’ search for an adequate form to interpret political reality. In the case of Klucis photomontage was anything but a direct and simple agitational genre. I prove that in Klucis’s agitational photomontage the radical constructivist form and the factographic material were organically intertwined. There was never a forced incorporation of ideology into an elaborate geometric construction. On the contrary, contemporary life and current political events captured by the artist-photographer’s camera, served as a catalyst for invention of new forms. I argue that the political photo-slogan-montage invented by Klucis emerged from his earlier experimental “small architecture” created in 1922: agitational kiosks, stands for slogans, podiums, and ‘radio-orators.’ I focus in particular on the series of Klucis’s constructivist photomontages of the 1920s: illustrations to Molodaya Gvardia, and the series of illustrations to Mayavovsky’s poem Lenin. The idea of depicting Lenin as iconoclast and the productivist artists’ ally in their project of rebuilding the entire world led Klucis to challenge the boundaries of his art. The Lenin series, one of the most complex examples of constructivist photomontage of the 1920s, demonstrates close affinities of photomontage with the avant-garde poetry of Mayakovsky, the constructivist theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold and set designer Liubov Popova, and Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde film. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

This thesis explores representations of medieval Russia in cultural and artistic works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an eye to the shifting perceptions of Russia’s cultural heritage demonstrated through these works. The thesis explores the history of medievalism as a field of study and interrogates the reasons that medievalism as a paradigm has not been applied to the field of Russian studies to date. The first chapter is an investigation of architectural monuments incorporating Old Russian motifs, following the trajectory of the “Russian Style” in church architecture, one of the most prominent and best-remembered forms of Russian medievalism. Chapter two explores the visual representation of medieval Russian warriors, bogatyri, in visual and plastic arts, and the ways in which this figure is involved in the national mythmaking project of the nineteenth century. The third chapter focuses on the Rimsky-Korsakov opera, The Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, investigating the ways that different medieval and modern elements come together in this work to present an aestheticized image of medieval Russia. In this analysis of diverse and far-ranging facets of Russian medievalism in the plastic, visual, literary and performing arts, the complicated relationship between medievalism and the prevalent discourse of nationalism is investigated, opening up new opportunities for scholarly intersections with other medievalisms – in Western Europe and beyond. / Slavic Languages and Literatures