This study constitutes the first critical history of dematerialization. Coined by critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in their 1968 essay, “The Dematerialization of Art,” this term was initially used to describe an emergent “ultra-conceptual” art that would render art objects obsolete by emphasizing the thinking process over material form. Lippard and Chandler believed dematerialization would thwart the commodification of art. Despite Lippard admitting in 1973 that art had not dematerialized into unmediated information or experience, the term has since entered art historians’ lexicons as a standard means to characterize Conceptual Art. While art historians have debated the implications of dematerialization and its actuality, they have yet to examine closely Lippard and Chandler’s foundational essay, which has been anthologized in truncated form. If dematerialization was not intrinsic to Conceptual Art, what was it? By closely analyzing “The Dematerialization of Art” and Lippard and Chandler’s other overlooked collaborative essays, this dissertation will shed light on the genealogy of dematerialization by contending they were not describing a trend limited to what is now considered Conceptual Art. By investigating the socio-historical connections of dematerialization, this dissertation will advance a more far-reaching view of the ideology of dematerialization, a cultural misrecognition that the world should be propelled toward immateriality that is located at the intersection of particle physics, environmental sustainability, science-fiction, neoliberal politics, and other discourses. This analysis then focuses on three case studies that examine singular works of art over a twenty-year period: Eva Hesse’s Laocoön (1966), James Turrell’s Skyspace I (1974), and Anish Kapoor’s 1000 Names (1979-85). In doing so, this dissertation will accomplish two objectives. First, it looks at how these works materially respond to the ideology of dematerialization and provide a means for charting how this cultural desire unfolds across space and time. Second, this dissertation contends that contrary to Lippard and Chandler’s prognostication, dematerialization—and immateriality—does not correlate to emancipation from capitalization. Rather, it will be shown that dematerialization, its rhetoric, and its strategies can actually be enlisted into the service of the commoditizing forces Lippard and Chandler hoped it would escape.

In 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds made its debut in Tate Modern, which promoted Ai to be one of the most famous and respected contemporary Chinese artists. This Conceptual art work has multiple layers of meanings, which all corresponds to the Western expectations for a successful contemporary Chinese artist. In fact, the Western art world has long held bias and stereotypes towards international artists. Ai chose to perform his personality to conform to the expectations and Western ideologies, which brought him international fame. On the other hand, other Chinese artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Zhou Chunya, don't totally agree with these Western ideologies, and therefore their fame in the society are less distinguished than Ai.

This dissertation traces the history of a diagram. The diagram shows four circles of gradually diminishing sizes, lodged one inside the other, like the layers of a circular or spherical body. For a group of artists, curators, architects, and activists centered around Moderna Museet in Stockholm between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, the diagram represented a new type of museum: a museological Information Center modeled on the computer, operating as a site for radically democratic social experiments. The four layers stood for different functions: information capture, processing, interface, storage; or, put differently: social spaces and media resources, workshop floors, exhibition facilities, collection. Through close readings of a series of exhibitions and institutional projects in Sweden, the US, and France, this dissertation follows the development of this diagram: its prehistory and formulation, its different implementations, and its direct and indirect effects. It studies Moderna Museet’s original, unrealized project for Kulturhuset in Stockholm, according to which the museum should project its dynamic energies across the city center, serving as a “catalyst for the active forces in society”. It discusses the museum’s confrontation with digital technologies in the late 1960s, through pioneering museological organizations such as the Museum Computer Network in New York. It analyzes the exhibition formats developed in correspondence with the notion of the museum as a “vast experimental laboratory” and a “broadcasting station”: the exhibition as critical information pattern, as tele-commune. And it studies the diagram’s afterlife as one of the models informing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, during that project’s early phases. The Exhibitionary Complex reads these endeavors and visions as attempts to devise a critical understanding of the exhibitionary apparatus in relation to new information environments and media systems. It sheds light on a largely forgotten aspect of the exhibitionary, museological, and cultural history of the late twentieth century, in Sweden and internationally. But it also seeks to establish new models for grasping the exhibition’s singularity and potentials as a cultural and media technological form, in relation to the emergence of new information networks, as they exert increasing control over social, cultural, and political existence. / Space, Power, Ideology

Esta pesquisa trata sobre os museus e refletimos acerca de alguns processos museológicos, mas tendo como base a Ciência da Informação e a Documentação. Desse modo, analisamos a partir do nosso ponto de vista as implicações existentes entre os conceitos de documento e informação, que muitas vezes são distintos ou mesmo contraditórios, e a arte contemporânea que é efêmera ou se desmaterializa. Há uma perda do vínculo da obra de arte contemporânea com o suporte tradicional que causa efeitos diretos em sua classificação, o que, por sua vez, afeta os sistemas de guarda das instituições. Passa a ser comum que algumas das obras sejam perecíveis e até mesmo tenham um ciclo de vida demarcado. Outras se mantêm \"vivas\" nas instituições que as guardaram, seja por possuírem um formato tradicional de pintura ou escultura, seja porque seus formatos são similares a estes, seja por serem objetos possíveis de serem armazenados e reapresentados posteriormente, seja porque perduram por meio de sua documentação. Assim, tentamos entender como os museus fazem para guardar, organizar e preservar a memória de obras de arte efêmeras. Constatamos que eles acabam não se encaixando muito bem na definição tradicional e que caminham para outras situações, outras tipologias, pois há uma produção artística voltada ao arquivo e não ao museu. Assim como as obras de arte efêmeras e sua condição documental afeta os debates artísticos, também incitam museus e arquivos a repensarem seus modus operandis. Concluímos, então, que, para resolver as problemáticas discutidas nesta pesquisa, é preciso concentrar o foco em uma solução que venha da junção dos saberes sobrepostos da Museologia e da Arquivologia, e essa é a proposta da CI. / This research treat about museums and we reflect on some museological processes, but based on Information Science and Documentation. Therefore, we analyze from our point of view the existing implications between the concepts of document and information, which are often distinct or even contradictory, and the contemporary art, that is ephemeral or dematerializes. There is a bond loss of the contemporary work of art with the traditional support that causes direct effects in its classification, which affects the custody systems of the institutions. It has become usual for some of the works to be perishable and even have a demarcated life cycle. Others remain \"alive\" in institutions that have preserved them, either because they have a traditional format of painting or sculpture, because their formats are similar to them, because they are objects which are possible to be stored and later re-presented, or because they persist through documentation. Thus, we try to understand how museums do to guard, organize, and preserve the memory of ephemeral works of art. We realized that they end up not fitting very well in the traditional definition and that they move towards other situations and other typologies, because there is an artistic production focused on the archives and not on the museum. Just as ephemeral works of art and their documentary condition affect artistic debates, they also incite museums and archives to rethink their modus operandis. We conclude that, in order to solve the problems addressed in this research, it is necessary to focus on a solution that comes from the junction of the superimposed knowledge of Museology and Archivology, and this is the proposal of CI.

Esta pesquisa trata sobre os museus e refletimos acerca de alguns processos museológicos, mas tendo como base a Ciência da Informação e a Documentação. Desse modo, analisamos a partir do nosso ponto de vista as implicações existentes entre os conceitos de documento e informação, que muitas vezes são distintos ou mesmo contraditórios, e a arte contemporânea que é efêmera ou se desmaterializa. Há uma perda do vínculo da obra de arte contemporânea com o suporte tradicional que causa efeitos diretos em sua classificação, o que, por sua vez, afeta os sistemas de guarda das instituições. Passa a ser comum que algumas das obras sejam perecíveis e até mesmo tenham um ciclo de vida demarcado. Outras se mantêm \"vivas\" nas instituições que as guardaram, seja por possuírem um formato tradicional de pintura ou escultura, seja porque seus formatos são similares a estes, seja por serem objetos possíveis de serem armazenados e reapresentados posteriormente, seja porque perduram por meio de sua documentação. Assim, tentamos entender como os museus fazem para guardar, organizar e preservar a memória de obras de arte efêmeras. Constatamos que eles acabam não se encaixando muito bem na definição tradicional e que caminham para outras situações, outras tipologias, pois há uma produção artística voltada ao arquivo e não ao museu. Assim como as obras de arte efêmeras e sua condição documental afeta os debates artísticos, também incitam museus e arquivos a repensarem seus modus operandis. Concluímos, então, que, para resolver as problemáticas discutidas nesta pesquisa, é preciso concentrar o foco em uma solução que venha da junção dos saberes sobrepostos da Museologia e da Arquivologia, e essa é a proposta da CI. / This research treat about museums and we reflect on some museological processes, but based on Information Science and Documentation. Therefore, we analyze from our point of view the existing implications between the concepts of document and information, which are often distinct or even contradictory, and the contemporary art, that is ephemeral or dematerializes. There is a bond loss of the contemporary work of art with the traditional support that causes direct effects in its classification, which affects the custody systems of the institutions. It has become usual for some of the works to be perishable and even have a demarcated life cycle. Others remain \"alive\" in institutions that have preserved them, either because they have a traditional format of painting or sculpture, because their formats are similar to them, because they are objects which are possible to be stored and later re-presented, or because they persist through documentation. Thus, we try to understand how museums do to guard, organize, and preserve the memory of ephemeral works of art. We realized that they end up not fitting very well in the traditional definition and that they move towards other situations and other typologies, because there is an artistic production focused on the archives and not on the museum. Just as ephemeral works of art and their documentary condition affect artistic debates, they also incite museums and archives to rethink their modus operandis. We conclude that, in order to solve the problems addressed in this research, it is necessary to focus on a solution that comes from the junction of the superimposed knowledge of Museology and Archivology, and this is the proposal of CI.

Orientador: Maria de Fatima Morethy Couto / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-10T21:25:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Zago_RenataCristinadeOliveiraMaia_M.pdf: 48022679 bytes, checksum: 638b1ca5a6beaceab85f0963934c9c4d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Resumo: Os Salões de Arte Contemporânea de Campinas aconteceram no Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campinas de 1965 a 1977, sendo posteriormente retomados, em duas edições, nos anos 1980. Inicialmente realizados nos mesmos moldes de um salão tradicional foram, ao longo de suas edições, modificando seu caráter e sua estrutura. O certame pretendia, além de mostrar a produção de arte emergente naquela época, discutir como deveria ser organizado um Salão de Arte. Tais eventos, que no início obtiveram pequeno destaque, aos poucos se transformaram em acontecimentos de grande relevância, procurados por artistas do Brasil todo. Podemos dividir as exposições em dois momentos: no primeiro, de 1965 a 1969, as obras eram inscritas nas categorias estéticas tradicionais. No segundo, houve uma grande preocupação dos organizadores da mostra em atualizá-la, assim como acontecia em exposições de mesmo caráter em outros locais do Brasil, como em São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro. O estudo faz um levantamento da trajetória destas exposições, realizadas nos anos 1960 e 70, procurando dar ênfase às diretrizes que as nortearam e ao tipo de arte que abrigaram / Abstract: The Campinas Contemporary Art Salons took place in the Campinas Contemporary Art Museum from 1965 to 1977, being afterwards resumed in two editions in the 1980s. Initially realized in the same moulds of a traditional salon, they gradually modified their character and structure in the course of its editions. Besides showing the emergent art production of that time, the initiative aimed at discussing how an Art Salon should be organized. Such events, which initially obtained little prominence, gradually became highly relevant happenings, attracting artists from all parts of Brazil. We can divide the exhibitions into two moments: in the first, from 1965 to 1969, the artworks were inscribed in the traditional aesthetic categories. In the second, there was a great concern from the show¿s organizers in updating it, as it was happening in exhibitions of the same kind in other venues in Brazil, such as São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro. The study surveys these exhibitions¿ trajectories, realized in the 1960s and 70s, highlighting the rules which guided them and the kind of art they sheltered. / Mestrado / Mestre em Artes

This dissertation highlights general problems of formation of visual literacy of the audience of contemporary art. The object of research is visual literacy in field of contemporary art. The subject of the research is problems of formation of visual literacy of the audience of cultural phenomenas. In the study of foreign and Russian experience in formation of visual literacy of the audience of contemporary art the author came to the conclusion that considerable role is played by comprehension of contemporary art as a specific socio-cultural phenomena, that determine necessity of the complex approach, that is based on communicative potential of contemporary art. / Данная диссертация освещает проблемы формирования визуальной грамотности зрительской аудитории современного искусства. Объектом исследования является визуальная грамотность в области современного искусства. Предметом исследования диссертации стали проблемы формирования визуальной грамотности зрительской аудитории объектов культуры.

<p>This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.</p> / Dissertation

In 2001 when this research commenced, there was little understanding in Saudi Arabia of the opportunities digital art could provide for artists, how it could be integrated with or used instead of painting, and the effects the enlarged vocabulary could have in communicating difficult social issues. As a result, this study aimed at filling a gap in knowledge through reviewing contemporary Saudi art. This, in turn, helped me to understand the position of my practice. The study also aimed at developing a means of expression in which traditional art can be combined with digital media and showing how this combination provides a new direction for Saudi art by raising awareness in Saudi Arabia about complex issues. In addition, the study aimed at determining the acceptability of this new form of art to artistically literate Saudi artists through gathering audience’s reactions to the developed artefacts. This study comprised of several stages: discovering the state of art in Saudi Arabia and where it fits into the global stage; documenting my journey as an artist and understanding my practice; the creation of the installation and its reception, all of which was documented in a reflective journal. Through reflecting on my practice, I transformed my work from simple traditional pieces of art to more complex installations concerning everyday gender politics. I interviewed 20 practicing artists, noting that the majority of their work used traditional forms of art rather than digital art. A week-long exhibition on gender differences in Saudi Arabia was held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The feedback from the exhibition showed that, although there is not a strong appreciation of digital art in Saudi Arabia, the audience was able to understand the different components of the installations and the underlying issues being portrayed. They were able to bring their own experiences to the situation and reflected on the installations accordingly. The study contributes to knowledge by providing a review of contemporary Saudi Artists as there is no significant literature that documents this in Saudi Arabia. It also contributes to knowledge by exploring and developing artefacts that incorporate different technologies and by showing that digital media and traditional art can be used together to articulate complex social issues arising in everyday Saudi life. Finally, it fills a gap in knowledge of how Saudi audiences engage with works that use a combination of traditional and new art to express such issues.

The sculpture of German-born American artist, Eva Hesse (1936-1970), presents many conservation challenges. Hesse’s experimentations with latex and fiberglass created stunningly innovative works of art in the late 1960s bringing these unorthodox materials into the world of fine art; but now these materials are creating major conservation problems. Her artwork is an extreme example of the conservation challenges of contemporary art. This thesis examines the challenges surrounding the conservation and replication of Eva Hesse’s large-scale latex and fiberglass sculptures. The latex and fiberglass materials that captivated Hesse are compromising the structural integrity of her large-scale sculptures today. Hesse’s art forces conservators to establish conservation practices specific to modern and contemporary art. Although replication pushes conservators to re-examine their usual practices and violates the standard notion of minimal intervention, the replication of Hesse’s sculptural works is necessary to represent her artistic vision.