This thesis explores the re-photography of contemporary artist, Richard Prince. Using Lacanian theories of the gaze and of the drive cycle, it attempts to establish desire as the central theme of Prince's work. It looks primarily at the Cowboys, Girlfriends, and New Portraits, in order to combat the dominant perception of Prince's work as critical commentary on contemporary consumer culture.

Yayoi Kusama is undoubtedly one of the most esteemed artists today, and yet she is continually written off as "crazy." Kusama's work draws not from insanity, but from her experiences with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and acts as a tool to both process and temper her obsessions and compulsions. In my own work, I reflect on the necessarily obsessive faculty of hand-drawn animation, in an effort to communicate the feeling of OCD.

Darbo vadovas: prof. dr. Ieva Kuizinienė Darbas parengtas: 2014 m. Vilniuje Darbo apimtis: 149 puslapiai su priedais, 3 lentelės, 12 paveikslų Darbo aktualumas: Jaunųjų menininkų problema šiandien yra ypatingai aktualizuojama. 2013 m. Viešosios politikos ir vadybos institutas atliko „Jaunų menininkų socialinės ir kūrybinės padėties Lietuvoje tyrimą“. Pastarasis parodė valstybės politikos fromavimo būtinumą, orientuojantis į pagalbą jaunųjų menininkų karjeros formavime. Pastebimas ir suaktyvėjusi meno edukacija jaunųjų menininkų kūrinių įsigijimo klausimais – 2014 m. – galerija „Vartai“ kartu su meno ir edukacijos centru „Rupert“ organizavo ketvirtąją „Art Mantica“ paskaitų ciklo pranešimą „Nuo meno mėgėjo iki kolekcionieriaus“. Pranešimą skaitė meno patarėja Francesca Ferrarini. Darbo tikslas: Išanalizuoti Vilniaus dailės akademijos vaidmenį, skatinant sėkmingą vizualiųjų menų studentų integraciją į šiuolaikinio meno rinką, pateikti siūlymus ir rekomendacijas, padėsiančias Vilniaus dailės akademijai siekti efektyvesnių rezultatų skatinant sėkmingą jaunųjų menininkų karjerą ir ugdant savivadybos gebėjimus. Darbo uždaviniai: 1. Išanalizuoti šiuolaikinio meno rinkos sąrangą. 2. Išanalizuoti Lietuvos šiuolaikinio meno rinkos specifiką. 3. Nustatyti jaunųjų menininkų integracijos į šiuolaikinio meno rinką problemtaiką Lietuvoje. 4. Atlikti kiekybinį Vilniaus dailės akademijos vizualiųjų menų studentų (tiek iš Vilniaus, tiek ir iš Kauno fakultetų) tyrimą – elektroninę apklausą... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Thesis supervisors: prof. dr. Ieva Kuizinienė Work prepared in Vilnius, 2014 Relevance of the work: 149 pages with appendixes, 3 tables, 12 pictures The relevance of the work: The nowadays-young artists’ issue is being especially underlined. In 2013 ‘Public Policy and Management Institute’ conducted a research analysing young artists social and creative status in Lithuania. It highlighted state policy’s necessity in forming young artists careers. It can also be observed that society is being educated regarding the acquisition of young artists’ pieces of works. In 2014 ‘Galerija Vartai’ alongside arts and education centre ‘Rupert’ organized the fourth ‘Art Mantica’ lecture series report: ‘From art lover to the collector’. The report was read by art advisor Francesca Ferrarini. Work tasks: 1. To analyse the structure of contemporary art market. 2. To determine the specifics of Lithuania’s contemporary art market. 3. To set the problems in Lithuania regarding young artists integration into the contemporary art market. 4. Perform a quantitative research on Vilnius Academy of Visual Arts students (both in Vilnius and Kaunas faculties) - an electronic survey. Employ the findings of the research to identify the challenges and opportunities associated with the students’ integration into the contemporary art market. 5. To perform a qualitative research analysing in-depth interviews with three different art market target groups: 1) Vilnius Academy of Arts staff and students; 2)... [to full text]

Contemporary cultural practices sometimes appear dispassionate, distant and clinical—committed to conceptualism or formalism. Yet works by Jacques Roubaud and Jacques Jouet (both members of the Oulipo, a group of experimental writers in France that use formal and mathematical constraints to generate new literary forms) suggest a complex relationship between epistemology and affect. This thesis argues that contemporary literary and artistic projects that appropriate the tropes of clinical procedure and experimental constraint, suggest alternative forms of knowledge that implicate the body and emotions of the experiencing subject. In these projects, affect and emotion travel through reason, logic, system and constraint and are transformed in the process. Therefore any analysis of forms of affect in these works must also consider the procedural and scientific aspect, that which makes them "projects". My research, drawing on recent work that places emphasis on affect, considers these projects as test cases often mediating between a series of dichotomies such as reason/emotion and mathematics/poetry. Curiously it is in the encounter with epistemological systems that the value of affect, embodiment and subjectivity is underscored, and this thesis interrogates the various ways that contemporary projects articulate affect almost despite themselves. By passing through a scientific impulse to inquire about and test the validity of epistemological systems, these projects underscore the role of affect in producing knowledge. This thesis insists on the continued importance of the Oulipo in contemporary culture and seeks to provide a larger, interdisciplinary context for oulipian experimentation by analysing similar works in the visual arts. This thesis has four chapters, each based on the materials that the projects themselves investigate: 1) numbers and mathematics, 2) lists, collection, and census-data, 3) itineraries and travel, 4) weather and meteorology. Projects bear witness to what the poet Lyn Hejinian has called the romance of science: its rigor, patience, thoroughness and speculative imagination (Mirage, 1983, 24) In so doing, these projects reveal forms of affect that only emerge through this 'weird science' as literary and artistic experiments.

This thesis analyses the representation of so-called human curiosities in recent visual art, by drawing a connection to historical practices of exhibiting 'monstrous' and deformed bodies within institutions such as freak shows, anatomical collections and medical museums. The last two decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in the histories of these institutions, particularly through the work of Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, Richard Sandell and Samuel J.M.M Alberti, whose research can be situated in interdisciplinary humanities fields such as disability studies, museology, history of science and literary and visual studies. Concurrently, a remarkable number of contemporary artists have also turned to the history and imagery of these spaces to explore the politics of display in exhibitions of non-normative bodies. This study addresses the critical gap between these two parallel domains of inquiry, drawing upon recent studies concerning historical exhibitions of monstrous bodies to analyse how contemporary artists have simultaneously confronted and extended these traditions through their artworks. In order to show that the very notion of 'monstrous bodies' is inextricably bound up in the curious display practices that frame them, I analyse the representation of human curiosities in the work of Zoe Leonard, Joanna Ebenstein, Diane Arbus, Mat Fraser, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Marc Quinn and John Isaacs. Each chapter examines a distinct institutional context – the anatomical collection, the freak show, the art gallery, and the contemporary medical museum – to investigate how these artists challenge the meanings conferred upon extraordinary bodies within each space, bestowing new significance upon these forms within the context of their various art practices. I argue that, by doing so, artists themselves can take on roles like curious collectors, freak show talkers and teratologists, revealing the potential for 'art' to act as yet another display framework that imposes a particular set of meanings onto anomalous bodies.

Museums are culturally constructed as places dedicated to tastemaking, preservation, historical record, and curation. Yet the contemporary isn’t yet absorbed by history, so as museums incorporate contemporary art these commonly accepted functions are disrupted. Through case studies, this thesis examines the successes and failures of three New York museums (MoMA, Dia:Beacon and New Museum) as they grapple with the challenging, perhaps irresolvable, tension between the contemporary and the very idea of the museum.

Between incurably degenerative illness and the graffiti which ignited the Syrian Civil War, YOUR TURN, DOCTOR complicates hope. When myths of revolution, of wellness, no longer console—love as measured in anything but loss. Within a multidisciplinary project how an increasingly painful embodiment intersects the material excess of capitalism is explored. Can objects function as a political demand, necessitating changes in the way the world is ordered? Who for? To understand one kind of oppression in necessary sterility and another in marginalization so profound blindness can result. That is to ask, how long must one be told they do not see a thing they see before they don’t, before transgressions become norms? A list of "Indulgences" modeled loosely after Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses outlines content. Five sections reference the five pillars of Islam— with each containing nineteen individual proposals. Nineteen serves as the common denominator for the mathematical structure of much of the text of the Quran.

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.

The basic, universal movement of the running body has been repeated and made visible in aesthetic, scientific, and political debates. Such debates of the body may depend on live movements in real space-time, movements articulated by motion capture devices, or movements that exercise in imagination: a head of state who uses the running body to manipulate his political subject, for example, or a series of images taken from an optical motion capture system that simultaneously represents and dissects movement patterns of the body in its swiftest motions, or a sound art installation that voices the familiar dynamics of running steps and heavy breathing. In each instance, the bodily practice of running is extracted from its seemingly unmediated everyday, placed instead within aesthetic methodologies and technologies to scrutinize the movement and its complex of meanings. This action is meant to reveal that real experience-that nonfictional movement, as it were-of the body running, to see into the rhetorical, cultural productions of our public, bodily realities. I begin this inquiry by defining the term "running body" and examining the manner in which that body was scientifically observed and aesthetically codified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, the running body is investigated in experimental choreography, visual arts, and political demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s. Thirdly, I will address the use of the actual running body within contemporary art exhibitions, as either an intervention or interruption to accustomed meaning-making within traditional spaces for art. At the dissertation's end will be an exploration of the running body as a critical method for reorienting the narrative of contemporary history with image technologies, art installation devices, and the moving body. This study demonstrates that if, at the very base of our existence, our bodies move the world and, in turn, the world around us moves our body, this same reciprocity can hold true in shaping historical consciousness and self-consciousness.

The problem of this survey is to ascertain the relationship between nine Texas art museums and contemporary art, defined for this study as art of the 1970s. The role of the museum and its involvement with contemporary art are also perceived in respect to the general public. The purpose of this study was (1) to visit nine Texas art museums and interview the director or curator of contemporary art, using a standardized questionnaire, and (2) to present and analyze the responses to the questionnaire. The eight questions comprising the survey were formulated to include both practical and philosophical related concerns. Therefore, the survey responses and final conclusions reflect a variety of issues ranging from the physical accommodation of diverse contemporary works to the more fundamental philosophical issue concerned with contemporary art's presence in the museum and the institution's function.