The Slovenian painters’ collective IRWIN, founded in 1983 in Ljubljana and co-founder of the NSK (i.e. Neue Slowenische Kunst) organization, has been engaged in a series of projects of active and concrete intervention in social and historical contexts in the decade that redefined the status of art in Eastern Europe. Ever since IRWIN confronts the art world with the EAST ART MAP (EAM), a map of artworks from Eastern Europe between 1945 and 2000, various provocative questions come up: regarding the selection within curatorial practice, the intrusion of artists in the field of art theory and historiography, the gap between the apparent dominant Western and assumed backward Eastern art market or – not least – the challenge of the participative integration of art observers and users. The interview with Miran Mohar and Borut Vogelnik focuses on the issues raised within the EAM project that are surfacing in current projects like the NSK State in Time (since 1992) and its diversifications, questioning the challenge of participation back to the 1990ies till now.

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-126).

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-126).

The research reported in this dissertation centers around John Irwin's recent book, The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society (1985)', and provides a data informed critique of his study. It examined the records of people booked and incarcerated in jails varying in size and other characteristics in order to evaluate Irwin's conclusions that were made from his study of inmates at one jail in San Francisco County, California. The research portion of this dissertation was a comparative study of six Northwest jails in Multnomah County, Oregon and Skamania County, Washington and the varying characteristics of 1,306 jail prisoners incarcerated in them. Drawing upon inmate records, it was possible to obtain a charge distribution of the population selected for study as well as pertinent findings on other variables of age, gender, race, location, time incarcerated in the six detention locations, and disposition of charges. Most important to this study was the issue of crime severity for which a Statutory Seriousness Scale (SSS) was designed. The scale was based on the revised codes (criminal laws) of Oregon and Washington. Irwin put forth the argument that jails are occupied predominantly by a rabble class of inmates who have committed mostly petty crimes or no crimes at all. He defined the rabble class as those who are detached and disreputable persons who do not fit into conventional society and are irksome and offensive lower class members. It is not so much Irwin's definition of rabble that is at issue, rather, it is his contention that the nation's jails are populated predominantly by persons whose "crime" is that they are "offensive," rather than lawbreakers involved in serious criminal acts. According to Irwin, the primary function of the police is to manage, by various means, this disreputable underclass. The data gathering procedures used by Irwin were not entirely satisfactory, casting doubt on the accuracy of his claims. Accordingly, additional inquiry into jail populations is in order. The data uncovered in the present study suggests that, contrary to Irwin's thesis, many people arrested, booked, and jailed as a result of committing fairly serious crimes. This conclusion was true for the six jails and the 1,306 persons whose records were studied. The research suggests that Irwin's argument is not true for jails everywhere and that jails here do not seem to be filled mainly with persons whose primary problem is their offensive behavior. Instead, jails house a majority who have committed fairly serious acts of lawbreaking.

No description available.

This thesis studies the style of Native American portrait photographs of William S. Soule (1836-1908), John K. Hillers (1834-1925), and William E. Irwin (1871-1935), who worked in Oklahoma from 1869 to 1904. The examination of the three men's work revealed that each artist had different motivations for creating Native American portrait photographs, and a result, used a distinct style. However, despite the individual artistic styles, each artist conformed to Native American stereotypes common during the nineteenth-century. The thesis includes a discussion of the history of the area, photographer biographies, a stylistic analysis of the photographs, and how the images fit into American Indian stereotypes.

La pensée du vide anime les spiritualités de l’Extrême-Orient ; vide du taoïsme, vide du bouddhisme et leur rencontre dans des synthèses diverses. Elle est au cœur de l’art des lettres. Les artistes contemporains chinois ont reçu l’influence de l’art moderne occidental et, depuis une trentaine d’années de l’art contemporain ; certains d’entre eux ont su interroger cette matière nouvelle à l’aide d’une pensée clairement nourrie par la tradition. Loin d’être synonyme d’absence, le vide dans ces démarches rejoint une acceptation d’un réel lui-même soumis à la respiration du monde. Huang Yongping et Cai Guoqiang offrent deux exemples d’une approche où la question de l’identité et du dialogue avec l’Occident trouve son dépassement dans une stratégie récusant le dualisme qui prévaut habituellement dans ce genre de débat. Le monde occidental a été pour sa part fasciné depuis des siècles par l’art et par la pensée de l’Extrême-Orient. Le vide y a souvent pris les couleurs du néant dans un sens négatif (Hegel, Schopenhauer et Nietzsche). D’autres sources cependant sont venues enrichir l’ouverture à cette pensée. On ne citera ici que l'inspiration du bouddhisme zen si importante dans l'après-guerre (les publications récentes de Jacquelynn Baas, de Helen Westgeest et des auteurs rassemblés à l'occasion de l'exposition américaine The Third Mind en témoignent). Les artistes que j'ai retenus ici : Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Robert Irwin, ont chacun un rapport original avec ce corpus d’images, de notions et d’expériences sans ignorer des apports proprement occidentaux. / Eastern spirituality is driven by thought about emptiness : that of Taoism and of Buddhism and their coming together in various syntheses. It is at the heart of the art of scholars. Contemporary Chinese artists have been influenced by Western modern art and, for the last thirty years, by contemporary art. Some of these artists have succeeded in using thought nourished by tradition in order to examine this new field. Far from being synonymous with absence, emptiness in these processes corresponds to an acceptance of a reality itself subordinated to the breathing of the world. Huang Yongping and Cai Guoqiang provide two examples of an approach in which the questions of identity and of dialogue with the West find its overcoming in a strategy disclaiming the dualism which usually prevails in this kind of debate. The Western world has been fascinated by the art and thought of the East for centuries. Emptiness has often been treated as nothingness in a negative sense (Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche). Other sources, however, have made us more open to the thought about emptiness. The inspiration of Zen Buddhism is only one example : recent publications by Jacquelynn Baas, Helen Westgeest and the authors gathered together by the American exhibition The Third Mind, all bear witness to its importance in the post-war period. The artists that I have selected here, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein and Robert Irwin, each have an original relationship with this corpus of images, concepts and experiences without ignoring the specifically Western contributions.

This thesis presents a theoretical and historical account of how artists have responded to politics of democracy since the late-1980s. Three questions guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: why, during its apparent apotheosis in recent years, have numerous artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? Secondly: how have artists undertaken this critique? Thirdly, and most importantly: what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy that they critique? Particular case studies of art from Europe help us to address these questions, for Europe has been an important crucible for vociferous, and often fraught, arguments about democracy in recent aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses. The first chapter of this thesis rigorously contextualises these discourses in relation to historical mobilisations of democracy since the Iron Curtain??s collapse. Relying on writings by Pat Simpson, Slavoj ??i??ek, Alain Badiou and Mario Tronti, I chart the significant imbrications of political ideology, philosophy and what I call ??aesthetics of democratisation?? from the end of European communism, through the democratisations of postcommunism to the militarised democratisations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Notions of democracy shift and change during this period, becoming what ??i??ek calls a problematic ??transcendental guarantee?? of assumed values and self-legitimation. These shifting values in turn propel the concurrent critiques of democracy that are the subjects of the five subsequent chapters: Ilya Kabakov??s ??total?? installations; Neue Slowenische Kunst??s mimicry of the nation-state during the 1990s; Thomas Hirschhorn??s large-scale works from the late-1990s onwards; Christoph B??chel and Gianni Motti??s collaborative ventures; and the co-operative practices of Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Through examination of the artists?? installations and voluminous writings, and based primarily on archival research and interviews, this thesis examines how their aesthetic politics emerge from the remobilisation of nonconformist art histories, through self-instituted contexts and alternative models for art production, exhibition and interpretation. These models, I argue, counter our usual understandings of art practice and its politics in Europe. They cumulatively assert ??postsocialist aesthetics?? as an impertinent, yet urgent, prism through which to analyse contemporary art.

Syftet med uppsatsen har varit att undersöka hur mening kan skapas utifrån en upplevelse av den amerikanska konstnären Robert Irwins verk, Scrim Veil – Black Rectangle – Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, när det uppfördes på Whitney Museum 2013. Åtta recensioner bildar underlag för undersökningen där de partier som på något sätt hanterar hur recensenterna skapar mening av verket valts ut för närläsning. Metoden som använts för textselektion utgår från Mieke Bals koncept som Bal förklarar som ett alternativ till metod i sin bok Travelling Concepts. Uppsatsen tar teoretiskt spjärn mot Ludwig Wittgensteins begrepp språkspel och duckrabbit, (aspektväxling) som de beskrivits i Filosofiska undersökningar, publicerad 1953, samt gestalten som bildar figur-grund, en inom gestaltpsykologin utvecklad perceptionsteori. Uppsatsen visar på att mening har skapats av verket genom att det framträder, det förvandlar sig till en händelse, något som Rudolf Arnheim beskriver som An event in space, i sin bok Art and Visual Perception – A Psychology of the Creative Eye från 1954. Uppsatsen visar också på hur förförståelse genom bild eller text med stor sannolikhet påverkar upplevelsen av ett verk. Samtidigt är det svårt att avgöra om denna förståelse, med hänseende till uppsatsens material, är något som skapats innan verket upplevts eller är något som recensenten tagit till sig och adderat i samband med att recensionen skrivits. Två recensioner tenderar att ställa sig i vägen för det verk som de är tänkta att beskriva.

This thesis presents a theoretical and historical account of how artists have responded to politics of democracy since the late-1980s. Three questions guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: why, during its apparent apotheosis in recent years, have numerous artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? Secondly: how have artists undertaken this critique? Thirdly, and most importantly: what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy that they critique? Particular case studies of art from Europe help us to address these questions, for Europe has been an important crucible for vociferous, and often fraught, arguments about democracy in recent aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses. The first chapter of this thesis rigorously contextualises these discourses in relation to historical mobilisations of democracy since the Iron Curtain??s collapse. Relying on writings by Pat Simpson, Slavoj ??i??ek, Alain Badiou and Mario Tronti, I chart the significant imbrications of political ideology, philosophy and what I call ??aesthetics of democratisation?? from the end of European communism, through the democratisations of postcommunism to the militarised democratisations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Notions of democracy shift and change during this period, becoming what ??i??ek calls a problematic ??transcendental guarantee?? of assumed values and self-legitimation. These shifting values in turn propel the concurrent critiques of democracy that are the subjects of the five subsequent chapters: Ilya Kabakov??s ??total?? installations; Neue Slowenische Kunst??s mimicry of the nation-state during the 1990s; Thomas Hirschhorn??s large-scale works from the late-1990s onwards; Christoph B??chel and Gianni Motti??s collaborative ventures; and the co-operative practices of Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Through examination of the artists?? installations and voluminous writings, and based primarily on archival research and interviews, this thesis examines how their aesthetic politics emerge from the remobilisation of nonconformist art histories, through self-instituted contexts and alternative models for art production, exhibition and interpretation. These models, I argue, counter our usual understandings of art practice and its politics in Europe. They cumulatively assert ??postsocialist aesthetics?? as an impertinent, yet urgent, prism through which to analyse contemporary art.