Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, Dept. of Art and Design, University of Alberta. "Spring 2010." Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on April 27, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, Dept. of Art and Design, University of Alberta. "Spring 2010." Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on April 27, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

My investigation of women artists and their status in society today as a result of the feminist movement, revealed issues which, I felt, were multifaceted. This necessitated an exploration of many aspects in order to arrive at a fairly satisfactory conclusion as to whether the revolt and the aggression on the part of the feminists had borne any fruit, either generally in everyday life, or artistically. It has proved most stimulating and informative. I think that the need to assess oneself as a woman, working within a male-dominated creative environment is a very necessary process and one which has been most beneficial to me. The subsequent research revealed that a radical, thematic change had occured within the feminist movement at the start of the Eighties; a fact of which, till recently, I was largely unaware. What I discovered was that the militant, feminist approach of the Sixties and Seventies had given way to a more realistic involvement brought on partly by the economic recession and the effects as well of earlier feminist movements, leading to a relaxation on the part of the younger generation. The Violence had faded. Hard times curbed the excesses of the movement and took it along the road to practicality. Dovetailed to this and seeming to run concurrently was the phenomenon of the demise of the Modern Art Movement. These changes described were not only artistic and feminist, but cut right across the board. involving all facets of life. To take one as an example. the political with conservatism reinstating itself in America not merely as an alternative but as a worthwhile direction in itself. Other issues included the sociological, historical, biological, and cultural; all closely interwoven and therefore requiring some generalisations at times. Previous to becoming involved with my topic, I had been reacting to pre-conceived ideas laid on me as a student in the Sixties and Seventies - a militant, aggressive approach acquired as a protective shield, to deal with the masculine environment which denigrated in varying degrees mine and fellow female artists work, sometimes overtly, sometimes subconsciously. This discrimination, is usually denied as ever having existed by the men involved. It shows a lack of awareness of what, we, as female art students, were subjected to. This is one of the main reasons why I undertook this subject; partly out of interest and perhaps partly as some sort of catharsis.

Dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Masters Degree in Technology: Fine Art in the Department of Fine Art, Durban Institute of Technology, 2006. / This study will investigate and critically evaluate the reconstitution of African women’s spiritualities in the context of the Amazwi Abesifazane project. This project forms part of the endeavours of Create Africa South, a Non Governmental Organisation situated in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, which was initiated by the artist Andries Botha. It encourages women, post trauma, to ‘re-member’ themselves by creating memory cloths of embroidery and appliqué reflecting on their experiences in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa. This interdisciplinary study theorises that it is an archive that speaks about African women resisting destructive forces and reconstituting their spiritualities through the therapeutic effects of creativity. The study will not include research into the many other activities undertaken by Create Africa South. Rupture is implied in the use of the word ‘reconstitution’. Reconstitution encompasses the act of constituting again the character of the body, mind and spirit as regards health, strength and well-being of the women (McIntosh, 1970:261). In this study, spirituality is defined as the way in which the women in the Amazwi Abesifazane project reflect upon and live out their belief in God. The power of storytelling is examined from the perspectives of narratology, narrative therapy, sewing and orality/literary studies as resources for the women’s reclamation of their lives. Defining feminisms in South Africa is problematised by issues of race, class and culture. In a context of poverty, everyday survivalist strategies are the diverse forms of resistance seen in the Amazwi Abesifazane project. The women’s stories, cloths and interviews are triangulated as primary data. They are examples of the rich art of resistance against despair and are located in a paradigm of hope. In conclusion, I strongly call for government support in declaring the project a national archive. The multidimensional mediums of the Amazwi Abesifazane/ UbuMama projects nurture the women’s creativity and revitalise their spiritualities towards personal and national transformation.

This study is a practice-based exploration of the screen as a border site, where the concepts of division and encounter are performatively examined. My research strategy is shaped by applying autoethnographic performance strategies to the mediated space of the screen. Media materials (photos, videos and blog entries) are created with mobile media devices used in performative situations, offering a theoretical framework originating in practice. The main argument is that the screen is an assemblage site, where the notions of division and encounter can be artistically explored. Furthermore, the screen is explored as an object, as a metaphor and as an idea. By linking the Latour notion of “assemblage” with Colley’s exploration of the personal use of mobile screens (“autobiometry”), and Ettinger’s notion of “borderspace” as site of artistic encounter, the practices presented in this thesis are located in a field that blurs the boundary between the personal and art; autobiography and autoethnography; technology and identity. In so doing, this thesis expands on previous explorations such as “boundary event” (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1999); “soft mastery” (Turkle 1995); and “screen-reliant art” (Moldoch 2010;). In the performative media materials created for this thesis, the screen is explored through a “processual approach” (Bacon, 2006). This enabled me to examine the nature of interaction with the screen through embodied reflexive practice. This approach firmly places the work in the experiential or performative realm. Key practices that are discussed in this thesis include among others, an earth body performative project by Ana Mendieta (Cuba/USA) entitled Silueta series (1973-1980), a live art work by Tanja Ostojic (Serbia/Germany) called Looking for a husband with EU passport (2000-2005) and my own performative media pieces, Valid until… (2010) and The place where we were last together (2011).

The purpose of my graduate thesis creative project, Girl Is a Four-Letter Word: Gender Biased Imaqe and Language is to call attention to the subliminal messages about stereotypical female qualities and female role expectations transmitted through the use of our language. My focus is on classroom visuals and reading textbooks used in the 1950s and 1960s, which illustrate very separate paths of gender social development. I have created a series of twenty-two paintings, in which I have juxtaposed images inspired from old textbooks and mild four-letter words to illustrate double-entendre associations and implied sexual innuendoes in everyday language.The creative project began with extensive research to find examples of textbooks from the 1950s, to review the textbooks in the historical context of America's educational goals and to study artists who have investigated themes of language and meaning of images in their work. Specific artists researched who have explored these ideas historically include Rene Magritte, Jasper Johns and Barbara Kruger. The actual artworks of several abstract expressionists were examined closely because of a similarity in painting technique and style.The paintings produced for this thesis project were executed with oil paint on recycled stretched canvases. Thick paints were applied straight from the tube and layered in thick impasto. The composition of all paintings include a vignetted image or isolated object in the center of the canvas with a label placed below, similar to the format of flashcards used for learning to read. The image and words together create a relationship pointing out blatant gender-biased associations, displayed with tongue-in-cheek humor. / Department of Art

Contemporary debates in anarchism, particularly the conceptual debates sparked by the development of post-anarchism and those surrounding the emergence of the anti-globalization movement, have brought an old question back to the table: what is anarchism? This study analyzes the canonical representations of anarchism as a political movement and political philosophy in order to reflect on the ways in which that critical question, 'what is anarchism?' has been answered in mainstream literature. It examines the way that the story of anarchism has been told and through a critical review, it discusses an alternative approach. For this purpose, two seminal canon-building texts, Paul Eltzbacher's The Great Anarchists, and George Woodcock's Anarchism have been identified and their influence is discussed, together with the representations of anarchism in textbooks describing political ideologies. The analysis shows how assumptions, biases, and hidden ideological perspectives have been normalized and how they have created an official history of a political movement. In challenging the official account, this study highlights the exclusions and omissions (third world anarchists, women anarchists, queer anarchism and artistic anarchism) that have resulted in the making of the core. The question of how to tell the story of anarchist past carries us to the shores of postmodern history where theoreticians have been discussing the relationship between past and history and the politics of representation. The anarchism offered in this study demands an engagement with a network-like structure of information rather than a linear, axial structure. Consequently, this study aims to show several layers of problems in the existing dominant historical representation of one of the richest political ideologies, anarchism; and then to discuss ways of representing the past and especially the anarchist past, to seek an answer to a principal question: what is anarchism?

This research surveys ideology and iconology in the presentation of the autobiographical and biographical female nude as envisioned by American women artists in the painting, drawing and printmaking media from 1969 to 1983. Contemporary dialogue by critics, artists and feminists on the definition of feminine content led to the articulation of the undraped nude torso as the central icon of the study. This static icon was pushed through a variety of styles into multi subtleties of iconology. The female nude by women artists is autobiographical even in biography emphasizing self-identification and authenticity. General constraints were placed on the survey the definability or explicit articulation of the female torso as opposed to suggestive imagery, the time frame in which the nude was created, and the chosen media for study. Art historical methodology was employed to descriptively examine image and intent of the nude presentations in references through time as well as visual traditions of symbology. This survey began at the turn of the century for historical background to emphasize the greater proliferation of the nude from 1969 to 1983. There were limitations specifically associated with the earlier time frame (1900-1969)--the lack of art educational opportunities for the female student, the socio-political climate dealing with the acceptability of the nude, and a very general lack of attention from the publishing market towards women artists. Six artists were identified: Lillian Genth, Romaine Brooks, Margarite Zorach, Isobel Bishop, Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois. The coalescence of socio-political circumstances around 1969, allowing for the greater incidence of the female nude occasioned the selection of 1969 as a perimeter of research. Within 19 69-1983 a greater number of artists and a far greater number of works were evident, seventeen in all, including Alice Neel, Marisol, Mary Frank, Nancy Spero, Joan Brown, Sylvia Sleigh, Martha Mayer Erlebacher, Mary Beth Edelson, Joan Seminel, Jillian Denby, Daphne Mumford, Juanita McNeeley, Martha Edelheit, Shirley Gorelick, Janet Culbertson, Anita Steckel, and Pat Steir. The amazing diversification of the work presented is united by the female nude icon which by subtle visual manipulation and compositional placement offers ideology which expands the Twentieth century definition of female.

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My thesis is centered on poetics of the body in contemporary feminist art. Poetics, understood as the languages, materials and forms of composition, underscores the symbolically and socially mediated body so rendered, rather than its biological, anatomical, or otherwise 'natural' definition. A feminist poetics is at once a politics, and a creation, of language. I proceed through a close reading of a number of artworks by Canadian artists. These works 'resist' representation, foregoing a biologically grounded figuration to propose in more allusive terms the psychic and conceptual impulses through which the body is apprehended or might be imagined. / Influenced by the writings of Luce Irigaray on the structural isomorphism between logos, the phallus, and a privileged masculine model of subjectivity, the thesis investigates the construction within feminist art of alternative and contestatory poetics of the body potentially productive of other knowledge-effects. / Situating my investigation within the context of numerous 'figurations' of the subject that have emerged in recent feminist theory, I propose that feminist art practices provide a corollary contribution, in material form, to the theoretical project of thinking 'difference' beyond dualism. / I identify three modalities of practice that 're-make' the body/embodiment vis a vis a 'phallomorphic' model of identity, unity, self-sameness: (a) the body in/of language, as the imbrication of the two identified by Julia Kristeva through the category of the semiotic; (b) morphologies of the body as the imaginary body produced through an interweaving of the body's form, psychic dispensations and social/symbolic inscriptions; (c) constructed spatialities in which the material spaces of exhibition sites become enacted metaphoric spaces, and foreground the potential and import of spatial representations in the production of personal and social experience. / I argue that the forms, materialities and spatialities specific to visual art can serve to constitute analogues for the materiality of the body. The thesis considers the artworks as embodiments: at once material, textural and spatial 'bodies' of art. / Interdisciplinary in scope, this thesis brings together visual and textual sources drawn from contemporary art and the literatures of feminist (and) poststructuralist theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory and the field of art history and criticism.