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Since the East Texas area has many minerals in the categories which yield semiprecious stones of commercial value--jasper, wood agate, wood opal, and silicified stone, the author undertook this study to determine: (1) the extent which these minerals could be utilized as sources for gems; (2) the equipment necessary for cutting and polishing the stones; and (3) the techniques for finishing the gems.

Aldo Crommelynck (1931-2008) a animé l'atelier Crommelynck à Paris de 1956 à 1986, en compagnie de son frère Piero, puis a travaillé seul entre Paris et New York en partenariat avec Pace Editions, jusqu'en 1998. Sa collaboration avec les peintres modernes, dont Picasso à Mougins, a inauguré une carrière internationale auprès d'une quarantaine d'artistes contemporains. Sa maîtrise de l'eau-forte s'est intégrée au milieu artistique international, entre Paris, Londres et New York, dans un contexte profitable au marché de l'art. Son nom est associé à un mouvement de retour à la taille­douce qui coïncide avec le goût des artistes issus du Pop pour le travail de la main et pour la figuration du quotidien. D'autres, issus du minimalisme et du néo-expressionnisme, verront en lui le dépositaire d'un certain métier de la gravure identifié à Paris. Cette thèse entend déterminer ce que fut le «style Crommelynck», dans toutes ses dimensions. / Aldo Crommelynck (1931-2008) run the Crommelynck studio, in Paris from 1956 to 1986, with his brother Piero, and then worked alone between Paris and New York in partnership with Pace Editions until 1998. His collaboration with modem painters, including Picasso in Mougins, preceded his international career with forty or so contemporary artists. His mastery of etching well integrated into the artistic world of Paris, London and New York, in a context profitable to the art market. His name is associated with the revival of printmaking in the United States that coincided with the taste of the artists coming from Pop Art for handmade creation and for the representation of daily life. Others, who came afterwards, impregnated with Minimalism or Neo-expressionism, saw him as the repository of a certain etching craft identified with Paris. This thesis intends to determine what was the « Crommerlynck style » in all its dimensions.

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While McCarthy studies have emphasized elements of the sacred in his writing, this thesis adds a new historical perspective and synthesis to reading paradigms of Cormac McCarthy. The Crossing combines the patterns of the ancient pre-Hebraic genre of the desert sublime with the basic formula of the American Western genre to interrogate McCarthy's question of whether in the postmodern moment one can still divest oneself in the desert and find access to the sublime. In an era of an invisible or absent God where post-humanist thought erases the anthropocentric supremacy of human over animal and the earth itself, the one constant in the desert sublime genre is the physical reality of the desert itself. Thus, McCarthy's recourse is to infuse the desert sublime with contemporary ecological thought. In the desert Billy Parham encounters other desert dwellers who share with him shards and traces of belief while Billy also learns bodily from the material experience of his physical sojourn. Billy is a nascent postmodern saint whose journeys into the desert reveal to him the ecotheological principle of the interconnectedness of all things as a natural physical law that undergirds the spiritual truth guiding ethical behavior. Billy arrives at a point of radical transformation that teaches him the necessity of choosing compassion, affiliation, simple service, and humility in a world of interconnected beings and living forms.

Collage is presented as an allegoric art-form sui generis, considering allegory itself as an open-ended form of art. The research provides a suggestion to a different understanding of collage i.e.: as a catalyst for a search for structure and semiotic relationships in an attempt to overcome a constant disordered expansion of an intertextual web and hermeneutic possibilities; and as an open work, providing multi-layered meanings. As an open work collage is typified by the prominent role of its "readers", its ambiguity and the infinite net of references it summons. Collage may be conceived as a bridge between modernism and postmodernism, structuralism and post-structuralism; as a model for constant innovation and suppleness; as a stimulator for meta-artistic questions, acceptance of "soft" universals and reevaluation of the role of the Other within an artwork. Works by Jasper Johns, Michal Na'aman, Dina Hoffman and myself exemplify these ideas. / Visual Arts / M.A. (Visual Arts)

This dissertation is intended as an investigation into the art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.The aim of thisinvestigation is to assess the possibility that the art produced by Johns and Rauschenberg during the 1950s and 1960s constitutes a transition from modernism to postmodernism in the visual arts in America. This dissertation is introduced by means of a broad outline of relevent developments within the visual arts during the1950s and 1960s in America. This outline also contains explanations of modernism and postmodernism and looks at how these terms are presented throughout this text. In the outline I describe how Johns and Rauschenberg can be identified with a shift that occurred in the visual arts in America during the mid 1950s away from two prominent modes of painting within modernism, namely' action' painting, as described by Harold Rosenberg (1982:28), and Clement Greenberg's 'American-type' painting (1973:208). Both Johns and Rauschenberg actively produced art during the 1970s and 1980s the period in which postmodernism is generally regarded to have been most prominent. However, in an attempt to assess the possibility that their art is transitional from modernism to postmodernism, this investigation focuses upon a selection of artworks produced during the 1950s and 1960s. I intend to discover whether or not these works signalled a departure from modernism and if they did, at what point this occurred and what the specific nature of this departure was. These works are examined from conceptual, formal, iconographical, stylistic and technical viewpoints. Throughout this dissertation I attempt to describe how Johns and Rauschenberg anticipated and embraced various postmodem tendencies that have subsequently emerged in the arts and other related disciplines. Parallels are drawn between the artworks of Johns and Rauschenberg and the disciplines of architecture and literary theory. These parallels are drawn with the intention of aligning Johns and Rauschenberg's attitude towards making art in the 1950s and 1960s with a relatively widespread mood in literary theory, philosophy and the social sciences concerning the inability of these disciplines to deliver totalising theories and doctrines, or enduring answers to fundamental dilemmas and puzzles posed by objects of inquiry, and a growing feeling, on the contrary, that chronic provisionality, plurality of perspectives and incommensurable appearances of the objects of inquiry in competing discourses make the search for ultimate answers or even answers that can command widespread consensus a futile exercise. (Boyne and Rattansi 1990: 12). / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

Collage is presented as an allegoric art-form sui generis, considering allegory itself as an open-ended form of art. The research provides a suggestion to a different understanding of collage i.e.: as a catalyst for a search for structure and semiotic relationships in an attempt to overcome a constant disordered expansion of an intertextual web and hermeneutic possibilities; and as an open work, providing multi-layered meanings. As an open work collage is typified by the prominent role of its "readers", its ambiguity and the infinite net of references it summons. Collage may be conceived as a bridge between modernism and postmodernism, structuralism and post-structuralism; as a model for constant innovation and suppleness; as a stimulator for meta-artistic questions, acceptance of "soft" universals and reevaluation of the role of the Other within an artwork. Works by Jasper Johns, Michal Na'aman, Dina Hoffman and myself exemplify these ideas. / Visual Arts / M.A. (Visual Arts)

Ceramics has always existed on the fringes of craft and high art. The purpose of this thesis project is to elevate clay beyond the traditions of craft by examining the historical use of clay and the everyday object. My research looks specifically at works by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Jasper Johns in order to examine the origin of displaying the massproduced object and reflecting upon it’s validity as high status art object. In this project I am also interested in infrastructural systems within modern architecture-- plumbing, wiring, heat ducts vents-- with a specific focus on systems lurking inside walls and how these function to influence architectural space. With the advent of modern plumbing, concealing these elements was adopted as the new standard and still exists today. Through the presentation of defamiliarized handmade objects, my exhibition presents the appearance of manufactured material through the serial manipulation of scale, surface and quantity. The result reveals a clay piece that renders the material unrecognizable providing the viewer with a new view on the object's tradition. / v, 47 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm