Art and Dance: Sediments, Segments, and Movement (A&D) is a series of photographs that studies dance movement, with the added element of flour to exaggerate and exhibit motion. A&D captures the different styles of dance out of their usual context, so that the actual movement becomes the central focus. This paper on the other hand provides the academic foundation for the artwork. It traces the history of dance photography as a genre. It not only sheds light on the photographic techniques that were used, but also how dance photography has evolved as an art form in its own right. The paper also presents my inspiration for the project and explains how those sources have influenced my images.

This dissertation offers a reconsideration of the uses of photography under the aegis of Conceptual Art between 1966 and 1973 by analyzing the ways photography challenged epistemological limits, and, despite the claims regarding the medium’s inherent indexicality, emphasized experience over exactitude, and doubt in place of certainty. By focusing on four American practitioners, I argue for the “benefit of the doubt;” in other words, for the value of disbelief and hesitation, marking the reorientation of art at this time towards critical methods which oppose all orthodoxies, including but not limited to formalist dogmas, and instead are committed to the denial of autonomy in favor of understanding meaning as infinitely contingent. The dissertation is divided among four key case studies, including Mel Bochner (n. 1940), Bruce Nauman (n. 1941), Douglas Huebler (1924-1997), and John Baldessari (n. 1931). Each chapter argues for the unique contribution of photography in relation to conceptual art practices, while also situating the projects of these individual practitioners within the broader history of the medium of photography. I explore specifically the concepts of seriality, transparency and theory in Bochner; performance, “worklessness,” and failure in Nauman; portraiture, mapping and impossibility in Huebler; humor, didacticism, choice and chance in Baldessari. This project looks back continuously to significant precursors, in particular the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), as a means of engaging the status and function of art after the Readymade, particularly as concerns de-skilling, disinterest, affirmative irony, and nominalism, as well as the dialectic between inclusivity and inconclusivity.

If everything human is pathetic, being a kind of sorrow packaged in humor, then I am fascinated with making artwork about the human condition that breeches pathos and hilarity. I propose to trace my motivation and research that have coalesced to create this thesis exhibition, shame is an exposure, to contemporary discourse regarding abject art. The motivation behind this exhibition seats itself in narratives excorsizing my own neurosis regarding intimacy, exposure, and shame. Through the exploration of photography and sculpture installation, using found objects, abject narratives spring into surreal life in a magic sort of realism. These works bear witness to uncanny, abstracted, spaces highlighting real human pathos, and vulnerability.

This dissertation offers a reconsideration of the uses of photography under the aegis of Conceptual Art between 1966 and 1973 by analyzing the ways photography challenged epistemological limits, and, despite the claims regarding the medium’s inherent indexicality, emphasized experience over exactitude, and doubt in place of certainty. By focusing on four American practitioners, I argue for the “benefit of the doubt;” in other words, for the value of disbelief and hesitation, marking the reorientation of art at this time towards critical methods which oppose all orthodoxies, including but not limited to formalist dogmas, and instead are committed to the denial of autonomy in favor of understanding meaning as infinitely contingent. The dissertation is divided among four key case studies, including Mel Bochner (n. 1940), Bruce Nauman (n. 1941), Douglas Huebler (1924-1997), and John Baldessari (n. 1931). Each chapter argues for the unique contribution of photography in relation to conceptual art practices, while also situating the projects of these individual practitioners within the broader history of the medium of photography. I explore specifically the concepts of seriality, transparency and theory in Bochner; performance, “worklessness,” and failure in Nauman; portraiture, mapping and impossibility in Huebler; humor, didacticism, choice and chance in Baldessari. This project looks back continuously to significant precursors, in particular the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), as a means of engaging the status and function of art after the Readymade, particularly as concerns de-skilling, disinterest, affirmative irony, and nominalism, as well as the dialectic between inclusivity and inconclusivity.

If there was ever a question about the subject of this work, I had only to return to the landscape. There was a strangness, a newness, an inevitability to those urban spaces around the city that insisted on my attention. Those landscape, often called suburban, of subdivision homes, strip plazas, malls and big box stores, of arterial roadways and parking lots, ascendant since the middle of the twentieth century, have overwhelmed their host cities and now claimed urban dominance in North America. My interest in the sprawl landscapes started with the homes that occupy them. Sprawl is made up mostly of housing. The essence of this circumferential city of sprawling growth is the home. If there is a unifying element in the wildly-different suburbs built over the last two centuries, it is that they are wrought on the foundation of the suburban home. The idea of the home as centre of the suburb didn’t take root until after the war, when the lack of affordable housing became a matter of national concern. In Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life, Dolores Hayden argued that by the 1950s, the American suburban house had become a private utopia. The home -- something separate from its neighbours and separate from its community, an ideal in and of itself - is both the beginning and the essence of sprawl. In 1950 the average size of a new home was 800 square feet, 1,500 in 1970, 2,190 in 19981. The home as a symbol of the American, Canadian, indeed the industrialized dream, took hold in the-postwar environment and bore the offspring we call sprawl. Although the sprawl landscape is inextricably connected to the single family home, it has evolved into a post industrial cityscape, a place that is in fact, but not in feel, urban. What is the nature of this strange place? How and why does it differ from the industrial urban landscape? And what are the phenomena that propel the building of this place. I set out to understand this landscape by looking for its proponents, but in the end couldn’t fi nd any. I didn’t talk to anyone - see, hear, or read anything - that explained the changes in the landscape as a function of an urban ideology or even a choice. Duany Plater-Zyberk argue that “[w]e live today in cities and suburbs whose form andcharacter we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federal policy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile2”. Most of the literature - books, websites, government and non government studies - bemoan the expansion of the sprawl landscape, and criticize our inability to plan our way out of it. The sprawl landscape, the landscape characterized in large part by the subdivided tract homes is, virtually, without a social or cultural advocate. It is a place that seems to have been built for everyone, without anyone advocating on its behalf. From homes to highways, the landscape, whose photographs make up this work, was for me, the discovery of a place with which I was almost too familiar to see. The images bear witness to the changing urban condition; they are a documentation of our rural spaces as they are annexed by the sprawl that, like a wave, has rolled over virtually every major city in North America.

If there was ever a question about the subject of this work, I had only to return to the landscape. There was a strangness, a newness, an inevitability to those urban spaces around the city that insisted on my attention. Those landscape, often called suburban, of subdivision homes, strip plazas, malls and big box stores, of arterial roadways and parking lots, ascendant since the middle of the twentieth century, have overwhelmed their host cities and now claimed urban dominance in North America. My interest in the sprawl landscapes started with the homes that occupy them. Sprawl is made up mostly of housing. The essence of this circumferential city of sprawling growth is the home. If there is a unifying element in the wildly-different suburbs built over the last two centuries, it is that they are wrought on the foundation of the suburban home. The idea of the home as centre of the suburb didn’t take root until after the war, when the lack of affordable housing became a matter of national concern. In Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life, Dolores Hayden argued that by the 1950s, the American suburban house had become a private utopia. The home -- something separate from its neighbours and separate from its community, an ideal in and of itself - is both the beginning and the essence of sprawl. In 1950 the average size of a new home was 800 square feet, 1,500 in 1970, 2,190 in 19981. The home as a symbol of the American, Canadian, indeed the industrialized dream, took hold in the-postwar environment and bore the offspring we call sprawl. Although the sprawl landscape is inextricably connected to the single family home, it has evolved into a post industrial cityscape, a place that is in fact, but not in feel, urban. What is the nature of this strange place? How and why does it differ from the industrial urban landscape? And what are the phenomena that propel the building of this place. I set out to understand this landscape by looking for its proponents, but in the end couldn’t fi nd any. I didn’t talk to anyone - see, hear, or read anything - that explained the changes in the landscape as a function of an urban ideology or even a choice. Duany Plater-Zyberk argue that “[w]e live today in cities and suburbs whose form andcharacter we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federal policy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile2”. Most of the literature - books, websites, government and non government studies - bemoan the expansion of the sprawl landscape, and criticize our inability to plan our way out of it. The sprawl landscape, the landscape characterized in large part by the subdivided tract homes is, virtually, without a social or cultural advocate. It is a place that seems to have been built for everyone, without anyone advocating on its behalf. From homes to highways, the landscape, whose photographs make up this work, was for me, the discovery of a place with which I was almost too familiar to see. The images bear witness to the changing urban condition; they are a documentation of our rural spaces as they are annexed by the sprawl that, like a wave, has rolled over virtually every major city in North America.

If everything human is pathetic, being a kind of sorrow packaged in humor, then I am fascinated with making artwork about the human condition that breeches pathos and hilarity. I propose to trace my motivation and research that have coalesced to create this thesis exhibition, shame is an exposure, to contemporary discourse regarding abject art. The motivation behind this exhibition seats itself in narratives excorsizing my own neurosis regarding intimacy, exposure, and shame. Through the exploration of photography and sculpture installation, using found objects, abject narratives spring into surreal life in a magic sort of realism. These works bear witness to uncanny, abstracted, spaces highlighting real human pathos, and vulnerability.

The work presented in this thesis explores the idea of embracing, interpreting, and utilizing preexisting art work as source material for new investigations that address the changing relevance of appropriation and self-portraiture in today's culture. By recreating these paintings with photography, 'mistakes' in the form of conflicting perspectives, multiple viewpoints, and impossible lighting situations were discovered and addressed. In addition, RGB levels and color channels for both the original image and the recreated photograph were analyzed to compare overall brightness and bright spots. The photographs in this series provide new insights into the emotional content of paintings throughout the vast range of art history by placing one's self into the metaphorical shoes of 'the girl in the painting.'

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.