Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Paul Emmanuel is a South African artist who produces incised drawings, outdoor installations and prints (particularly intaglio etchings and manière noire lithographs). These focus on the representation of male bodies and experience. Having begun his career as a collaborative printmaker, since 2002, his work has become more ambitious as well as critically acclaimed. In 2010, his most recent body of work, Transitions, was exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. I propose that Emmanuel represents the male body as a presence that either is not easily seen or that actively disappears or erases itself. Its subjectivity, and the viewer’s engagement with it, may be characterised as one of intimacy, exposure, loss and vulnerability. Emmanuel’s work may be said to question conventions and ideals of masculinity while, at the same time, refusing any prescriptive interpretation. To develop this proposition, I examine specifically Emmanuel’s incising drawing technique that ‘holds open’ transitions in male lives. In these liminal moments, Emmanuel represents men as ‘seen’ to change state or status, thereby exposing the ongoing process of building masculine identities. Equally elucidatory is Emmanuel’s imprinting of his own body, which, in his use of “traces” that reveal the vacillation between presence and absence, makes contingently ‘visible’ this gendering process, and has particular implications for the expression of subjectivity in a contemporary South African context.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the interaction between art and contested notions of Hong Kong identity by examining recent installations that employ the red, white and blue-striped plastic fabric, locally known in Hong Kong as red-white-blue (紅白藍). The red-white-blue fabric has, in recent years, become a signifier of the collective identity of Hong Kong people and of the ‘Hong Kong spirit’, with specific reference to the traits of the working class in the 1960s. The repeated articulations of this material in artworks show that there are certain qualities in this material with which local people identify. This study examines how installation works that employ this material question and revise notions of Hong Kong identity, and suggest its plurality and mutability. Works of local artists including Stanley Wong (a.k.a. Anothermountainman), Kith Tsang, Doris Wong, Siu King Chung and Tim Li are discussed in detail. Accounts of installations that employ red-white-blue often offer a limited interpretation of such works, paying insufficient attention to formal qualities and assuming a fixed and unitary notion of Hong Kong identity. The thesis argues that this paradigmatic cliché about Hong Kong identity is also expressed in the red-white-blue works of Stanley Wong to the extent that they evoke nostalgia and neglect contemporary social reality. The prevalence of such readings of red-white-blue-inspired works of art has veiled the complexity of works that interrogate Hong Kong identity from a diversity of perspectives. The contribution of this thesis is to remedy that situation, and provide a comprehensive account of key red-white-blue installation works.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64). / As a South African artist I am in power to influence some manner of change, through my art, to the structure of national thought and hence national identity. Through my live art installation TOTANDERKUNTUlT, I offered South Africans the opportunity to engage in the cathartic process of resolution and reconciliation through dialogue. The aim of this dialogue is to engender a new method of practice for a non-racialised approach to the development of an integrated cultural identity that South Africans can work towards. I am not proclaiming to have this identity defined. I am positing saamtrekking as a method of practice for an identity that can be practiced by all race, colours and creeds of South Africans. Saamtrekking is a coming together, it is the acknowledged acceptance of some manner of change towards transformation. It requires acknowledgement in order to be practiced, the subject must practice acts of transformative behaviour in order to transform.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-284). Also available on the Internet.

Constructing Voices is a narrative case study exploring the experiences of young women as they participated in a major public art performance project. I followed the process and production of Turning Point and Under Construction over the course of one year. Under the direction of American performance artist and educator Suzanne Lacy, this Vancouver, Canada based art project and performance sought to empower participating young women; to help them fin their voice and to provide them with a forum so that they might challenge and alter public perception and stereotypes of young women in the mass media. Seven young women from Turning Point and three local organizers, including the project and performance producer, have offered their narratives to inform this study. Together, they take us behind the scenes of a huge and complex community art project and performance. Their stories help us find meaning amidst the contradictions inherent in art productions of this magnitude. I approach this inquiry from a constructivist paradigm, informed by postmodern feminism. Through this research I call for a collaborative art practice which is reflexive, critical and egalitarian - one in which power is shared and where representation is determined by those whose lives are displayed. To inform our future artistic and educational practices, we need to turn to those pedagogical frameworks that best correspond to the intended goals of the projects. In the case of Turning Point and Under Construction, we need to look to feminist, emancipatory and performance art pedagogies. Only by informing our practices in this way, can these projects provide the opportunity for individuals to achieve a heightened engagement with their world - to learn through currere. In this narrative case study, we hear from young women at turning points in their lives. They believe what they say has value and should be heard by others. Performance art has the potential to be a rich site for learning so long as the process is congruent with the goals of the art project. As art educators we can respond to these narratives in our practices by providing environments for learning where participants/learners can find their own ideas and voices while expressing themselves in personally meaningful ways.

My research investigates the habitual, the non-monumental, the mundane, the ordinary and the everyday. I conceive of this as those moments in life that are not socially or culturally recognised as important. Traditionally, such moments have not been considered worthy of documentation and have been omitted or overlooked by mainstream media. This exegesis examines the importance of the everyday and considers how to make it conspicuous. Historically, these moments have been identified with the feminine, in that much theoretical and artistic work has emerged exploring women's experience of the everyday and testifying to its importance. Three spheres in particular have attracted critical interest: namely the body, the domestic and personal identity. For example, in 1966 Yoko Ono's 'No 4 (Bottoms)' brought the issue of the body and its banality onto centre stage by showing an endless parade of bottoms. In 1975, Chantal Akerman's film 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles', showed the everyday routines of a self-contained housewife. More recently, numerous artists have explored the politics of identity. Sadie Benning has made numerous videos that show the mundane and also reveal her personal identity, by exploring large and especially small scale details. / While conventionally newsreels and big budget documentaries have focused on 'big' events, one of the arenas that have investigated the everyday is experimental film and video. My exegesis gives a brief historical overview of this genre. Testimony in this media is often used as a voice to express the everyday. My journal entries (testimonies) deal with everyday experiences, and are interspersed throughout my exegesis. They are also the main threads in my videos. In my studio work, I use movement and dance to express in an abstract manner issues about the everyday, which include personal identity, more specifically issues of illness and sexuality / My research draws on a variety of sources including: 1970's feminist artists and filmmakers (Chantal Akerman and Martha Rosler). Many artists who were involved in the women's movement used their bodies in various art forms including performance art to make radical statements about domesticity and feminism. Contemporary artists' depiction of personal identity that mostly informed my work (in particular, queer identity) are: experimental queer film and media makers Sadie Benning, Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien and William Yang. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-284).

The seventeenth century saw a large increase in family-related portrait materials, including group family portraits, family portrait collections, and family memorial albums. In this thesis, I contend with the meanings and functions of family portraits created in the Netherlands in an attempt to illuminate the motives behind the rise in the number of portraits of the family during this period. I focus on the ways in which Dutch families utilised portraiture as a vehicle for constructing personal and national identity. In an age of extraordinary economic success, religious tension, and political upheaval, portraits of the members of the expanding Dutch ‘middle class’, who had the means and the desire to commission them, reveal a conscious inclination to define and substantiate a fashioned identity as the new urban elite of a Republic in the making. My study assesses family portraits as sites where identity and changing notions of selfhood were envisioned and performed. The shifting notions of ‘family’, and the increasing popularity of commissioning portraits seems to signal attempts to configure and imagine their relationship to Dutch society. I propose that the amount of portraits related to the family commissioned alongside an exploration of and struggle with identity is a symptom of the anxiety surrounding politics, religion, and social changes, for which the family often served as a metaphor. New perspectives on portrait theory and identity, especially those of Ann Jensen Adams and Joanna Woodall, contributed to the shaping of this thesis, particularly as a means to comprehend how portraits functioned in the lives of families. There are four chapters that make up the body of this thesis. In each chapter, I focus on specific works of art chosen for their suitability in highlighting certain concepts and anxieties about identity and the family in its cultural context at their extremes.

Constructing Voices is a narrative case study exploring the experiences of young women as they participated in a major public art performance project. I followed the process and production of Turning Point and Under Construction over the course of one year. Under the direction of American performance artist and educator Suzanne Lacy, this Vancouver, Canada based art project and performance sought to empower participating young women; to help them fin their voice and to provide them with a forum so that they might challenge and alter public perception and stereotypes of young women in the mass media. Seven young women from Turning Point and three local organizers, including the project and performance producer, have offered their narratives to inform this study. Together, they take us behind the scenes of a huge and complex community art project and performance. Their stories help us find meaning amidst the contradictions inherent in art productions of this magnitude. I approach this inquiry from a constructivist paradigm, informed by postmodern feminism. Through this research I call for a collaborative art practice which is reflexive, critical and egalitarian - one in which power is shared and where representation is determined by those whose lives are displayed. To inform our future artistic and educational practices, we need to turn to those pedagogical frameworks that best correspond to the intended goals of the projects. In the case of Turning Point and Under Construction, we need to look to feminist, emancipatory and performance art pedagogies. Only by informing our practices in this way, can these projects provide the opportunity for individuals to achieve a heightened engagement with their world - to learn through currere. In this narrative case study, we hear from young women at turning points in their lives. They believe what they say has value and should be heard by others. Performance art has the potential to be a rich site for learning so long as the process is congruent with the goals of the art project. As art educators we can respond to these narratives in our practices by providing environments for learning where participants/learners can find their own ideas and voices while expressing themselves in personally meaningful ways. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate