On October 11, 1963, artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg held the event “Leben mit Pop: Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus” (Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism) at the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf, Germany. Many scholars have treated this event as an image, useful only in outlining the trajectories of the later successful careers of Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, and Sigmar Polke. Few have attempted to contextualize this event in its social, historical, and political settings or to consider its effects on and relationship to the audience at the event. In this thesis, I resituate “Living with Pop” in terms of its experiential effects and its socio-historical context and extend my investigation of “Living with Pop” to the contemporaneous paintings and drawings of Richter, Lueg, and Polke. I argue that their artworks, which parody and question domestic tropes of the postwar era, reveal the complexities and ambiguities underlying the notion of West Germany’ s Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle.” I examine how Polke, Richter, and Lueg explored artistic and national identities, a postwar culture of consumerism, contemporary modes of communication, and theories of culture and aesthetics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. To investigate the relationships between artistic creation, artistic identity, and contemporary daily life, I use domestic design exhibitions, advertisements, the journal Magnum, and a few select texts on contemporary society and culture by Jürgen Habermas and Theodor W. Adorno as relevant sources. / text

Pour respecter les droits d’auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse a été dépouillée de certains documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal / Nous définissons l’« hétérogénéité stylistique » comme la cohabitation synchrone de styles hétérogènes dans un corpus individuel, particulièrement visible dans un médium unique. Une telle cohabitation est avérée dans les productions d’artistes aussi divers que le Tintoret, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia et Gerhard Richter, que nous abordons ici comme autant de cas d’étude. L’hétérogénéité stylistique, inégalement distribuée dans le champ de la production artistique et généralement mal identifiée par l’histoire de l’art, pose des problèmes de définition et d’interprétation qui sont directement liés aux fondements méthodologiques de cette discipline (en raison même de l’histoire complexe de la notion de style). Ainsi, l’histoire de la réception critique de l’hétérogénéité stylistique, de la Renaissance à aujourd’hui, fait ressortir les nombreux enjeux idéologiques qui ont variablement déterminé le processus de son identification et de son interprétation. À une époque où l’on peut cerner plus clairement les enjeux que soulève l’hétérogénéité stylistique, il devient possible d’entreprendre une analyse structurelle et contextuelle de ce dispositif esthétique, à partir d’une série de faits historiques et de modèles épistémologiques (tels que l’histoire de la subjectivité, l’évolution des techniques de production, de gestion et de diffusion de l’art et de l’information, etc.). / We define « stylistic heterogeneity » as the synchronic cohabitation of heterogeneous styles within an artist’s body of work, rendered particularly visible when appearing in a single medium. Such a cohabitation may be observed in the works of artists such as Tintoretto, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia and Gerhard Richter, which are used here as case studies. Stylistic heterogeneity, being unevenly distributed throughout the field of art production, is generally not correctly identified by art history. Indeed, the difficulties encountered in trying to define and interpret this particular phenomenon may be linked to the methodological foundations of the discipline (and more specifically to the complex history of the notion of style). The history of stylistic heterogeneity’s critical reception, from the Renaissance to the present, underscores the numerous ideological underpinnings that have conditioned the processes of its definition and interpretation. Now that the issues raised by stylistic heterogeneity can be assessed with greater clarity, a new structural and contextual reading of this aesthetic apparatus may be undertaken, based on a series of historical facts and epistemological models (such as the history of subjectivity, the evolution of techniques for art and information’s production, management and dissemination, and so on).

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the degree of Masters of Arts in Fine Arts (MAFA) Johannesburg, 2017 / This dissertation aims to examine Gerhard Richter and Serge Nitegeka’s artistic practices, in order to understand and identify how artists can potentially use space as a medium and contextualise my own practice within this realm. I position the conventions and principles of space through reference to French theorists’ Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault. The thesis begins with a brief overview of the window as a painterly motif and spatially familiar everyday device in the introduction. In the first chapter, I explore the surface and reflection of the medium of glass, the colour gray, the monochrome, as well as the pictorial, in Gerhard Richter’s Eight Gray (2002). The second chapter examines the role of the frame or line in Serge Nitegeka’s Black Lines (2012), as an environment of experience that relies on painted diagrams and the illusion of perspectival space. The third chapter observes a shift in the manner in which Richter and Nitegeka experiment and extend their practices through an engagement with the mirror and the door, respectively, as ways of exploring the threshold. Finally, I discuss my own practice and reflect on the exhibition Through the Extent (2015), which was submitted as the practical component of this research. / XL2018

Drawing from my archival research on the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the urban guerrilla movement active in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland from the 1970s, my dissertation works through the RAF to speculate about the compulsion towards self-representation inherent to subjectivity. Such compulsion proffers an urgent and recurrent imperative to speak what cannot be said or to conjure what does not exist. This work argues that the perils and the failures of such enunciation, in the face of its compulsory demand, are felt not only in speech but in choreographies of subjectivity performed in aesthetic convolutions of space, gesture, and intonation. These convolutions are subject-forming material productions, rather than reflections or echoes of a pre-existing coherent subject, and trouble the notion of self-representation to the extent that they produce and re-produce the self. While the body is formed by culture, it consistently circumvents the limits of the genres that govern speech communication, therefore, my work is concerned with tracing a mise en scne of self-production by emphasizing non-textual elements. The forms that this circumvention can take exceed the involuntary cry, gesture, uneven breath, or facial expression to include uses of space space that is implicated in the bodys formation but the public legibility of such circumventions is not guaranteed. This work aims to refunction the RAF's declaration of the body as a weapon to the body as a medium for communication and to approach the aesthetics of a body (anti)language that extends beyond the particularities of the urban guerrilla project to the situation of mundane subjectivity that repeatedly calls for enunciation. My dissertation is a performative text that deploys formal interventions such as collage, assemblage, photography, and interleaved texts meant to intrude upon the reader that target instrumental language use. To illustrate that the ongoing production of subjectivity of the urban guerrilla is not alien to that of the politically recognizable citizen, my work contemplates practices of contemporary art and the production of material objects of signification that engage in practices of citation and disguise the incoherence of our acts.

The aim of this thesis is to study Viking Eggeling’s artwork Diagonal Symphony together with Eggeling’s own art theoretical writings. This method of reading Eggeling’s art theoretical writings with the aim to try and create a deeper understanding of his art and especially Diagonal Symphony is a new approach in Eggeling’s art historical discourse. The thesis starts with a description of how the field of art history has understood Eggeling and his art primarily through art historical research aimed at Hans Richter. I then argue that the method of understanding Eggeling’s art through his own art historical writings is a way to create an independent understanding about Eggeling’s art away from it’s explanatory relation with Richter. To understand and to analyze the relation between Eggeling’s art and art theoretical writings the thesis theoretical viewpoint are a system theoretical one with a special focus on cybernetics and the terms feedback and control. The thesis then establish that Eggeling, in his art and art theoretical writings, tried to compose his own method for creating the form figures we can see appearing in Diagonal Symphony and that this method of creating form was a way for Eggeling to control his creativity and to build up a structured system of forms. The study then concludes with the statement that Eggeling worked with the movie and the scrolls Diagonal Symphony as artistic material formations of a system of forms called Diagonal Symphony and that the system of forms called Diagonal Symphony is the result of Eggeling’s systematic method to generate form in a structured and organised way.

This project explores the intersection of postwar German history, visual art, and left-wing terrorism. More than thirty years have now passed since the German Red Army Faction’s (1970-1998) most spectacular violent campaign—the so-called “German Autumn” of 1977—and yet the organization continues to elicit a variety of cultural responses from many artists. Interestingly, many films, texts, and visual artworks featuring the Red Army Faction (RAF) as their subject focus heavily on the group’s charismatic founders and on the German state’s vigorous efforts to suppress them and their successors, and yet these works pay comparatively scant attention to the individuals whom the RAF murdered. In light of this observation, I argue that the German Left’s cultural memory of the RAF was and still is marked not only by a significant ambivalence concerning the RAF (especially the founders) and the German state, but also the victims. As a means of elucidating this ambivalence, I offer close “readings” of two works of visual art that debuted at different moments in the years following the German Autumn. Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1988) is a photorealist series that invites viewers to consider the lives and especially the deaths of the RAF’s principal members, while Hans-Peter Feldmann’s photo compilation The Dead 1967-1993 (1998) presents a sobering chronology of individuals killed either directly or indirectly as a result of the German leftist counterculture, including terrorist violence, without making an immediate distinction between perpetrators and victims. Within the framework of the larger RAF cultural memory, the works of Richter and Feldmann thus help clarify some of the causes and effects of the German Left’s suspended resolution regarding RAF terrorism. / text

The objective of my thesis is to extend the scholarship on colour in painting by focusing on how it is employed within the structuring framework of the orthogonal grid in the paintings of three contemporary artists, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin and Gerhard Richter. Form and colour are essential elements in painting, and within the “essentialist” grid painting, the presence and function of colour have not received the full discussion they deserve. Structuralist, post-structuralist and anthropological modes of critical analysis in the latter part of the twentieth century, framed by postwar disillusionment and skepticism, have contributed to the effective foreclosure of examination of metaphysical, spiritual and utopian dimensions promised by the grid and its colour earlier in the century. Artists working with the grid have explored, and continue to explore the same eternally vexing problems and mysteries of our existence, but analyses of their art are cloaked in an atmosphere and language of rationalism. Critics and scholars have devoted their attention to discussing the properties of form, giving the behavior and status of colour, as a property affecting mind and body, little mention. The position of colour deserves to be re-dressed, so that we may have a more complete understanding of grid painting as a discrete kind of abstract painting. Each of the three artists I have examined here employed colour and grid in strategies unique to their work and its purposes. Ad Reinhardt arrived at his 1960s “black” paintings out of a background that included strong political beliefs, resistance to the dominant strain of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, and a deep interest in eastern religions and Buddhism. Agnes Martin shared Reinhardt’s interest in Buddhism and eastern religions, but chose to move toward the light in the atmospheric colour of her paintings, speaking of the quest for perfection of the mind in her writings and interviews. Gerhard Richter’s colour charts, a longstanding major subset of the vast range of this prolific artist’s work, speak to a need to go beyond his love of painting to the ungraspable substance of colour itself. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 12:34:58.813

Nous définissons l’« hétérogénéité stylistique » comme la cohabitation synchrone de styles hétérogènes dans un corpus individuel, particulièrement visible dans un médium unique. Une telle cohabitation est avérée dans les productions d’artistes aussi divers que le Tintoret, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia et Gerhard Richter, que nous abordons ici comme autant de cas d’étude. L’hétérogénéité stylistique, inégalement distribuée dans le champ de la production artistique et généralement mal identifiée par l’histoire de l’art, pose des problèmes de définition et d’interprétation qui sont directement liés aux fondements méthodologiques de cette discipline (en raison même de l’histoire complexe de la notion de style). Ainsi, l’histoire de la réception critique de l’hétérogénéité stylistique, de la Renaissance à aujourd’hui, fait ressortir les nombreux enjeux idéologiques qui ont variablement déterminé le processus de son identification et de son interprétation. À une époque où l’on peut cerner plus clairement les enjeux que soulève l’hétérogénéité stylistique, il devient possible d’entreprendre une analyse structurelle et contextuelle de ce dispositif esthétique, à partir d’une série de faits historiques et de modèles épistémologiques (tels que l’histoire de la subjectivité, l’évolution des techniques de production, de gestion et de diffusion de l’art et de l’information, etc.). / We define « stylistic heterogeneity » as the synchronic cohabitation of heterogeneous styles within an artist’s body of work, rendered particularly visible when appearing in a single medium. Such a cohabitation may be observed in the works of artists such as Tintoretto, Sébastien Bourdon, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia and Gerhard Richter, which are used here as case studies. Stylistic heterogeneity, being unevenly distributed throughout the field of art production, is generally not correctly identified by art history. Indeed, the difficulties encountered in trying to define and interpret this particular phenomenon may be linked to the methodological foundations of the discipline (and more specifically to the complex history of the notion of style). The history of stylistic heterogeneity’s critical reception, from the Renaissance to the present, underscores the numerous ideological underpinnings that have conditioned the processes of its definition and interpretation. Now that the issues raised by stylistic heterogeneity can be assessed with greater clarity, a new structural and contextual reading of this aesthetic apparatus may be undertaken, based on a series of historical facts and epistemological models (such as the history of subjectivity, the evolution of techniques for art and information’s production, management and dissemination, and so on). / Pour respecter les droits d’auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse a été dépouillée de certains documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Th. Univ. Fribourg Suisse, 2007. / Bibliogr. Index.

Submitted by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2018-07-17T18:47:50Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertacao_Loren_Cristine_Ferreira_Cuadros.pdf: 4331024 bytes, checksum: 6f0813758e58cdd14dc44163a7ad1238 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2018-07-17T21:24:48Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertacao_Loren_Cristine_Ferreira_Cuadros.pdf: 4331024 bytes, checksum: 6f0813758e58cdd14dc44163a7ad1238 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-17T21:24:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertacao_Loren_Cristine_Ferreira_Cuadros.pdf: 4331024 bytes, checksum: 6f0813758e58cdd14dc44163a7ad1238 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-12-21 / Sem bolsa / O artista plástico alemão Gerhard Richter tem causado certa controvérsia com sua abordagem do Holocausto que utiliza a técnica da pintura abstrata. Uma de suas obras mais recentes, “Birkenau”, tem como pano de fundo as fotografias tiradas pelos prisioneiros judeus que integravam o Sonderkommando em 1944. Alguns críticos acusam o trabalho de Richter de esconder a verdade de Auschwitz. Por sua vez, o romance “Tudo o que tenho levo comigo”, da escritora romeno-alemã Herta Müller, é constituído por uma série de imagens poéticas que são produto da visão pictórica de seu narrador, Leo Auberg. Aos dezessete anos, o jovem romeno é deportado para um gulag após a ocupação de seu país pelas tropas soviéticas e encontra na observação da beleza dos elementos de seu cotidiano no campo de trabalhos forçados uma forma de resistir à violência física e psicológica a que é submetido. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo sugerir que em vez de encobrir os horrores dos campos de concentração e de trabalhos forçados, a estetização presente nas obras de Richter e Müller evidencia a crueldade dos crimes cometidos pelos nazistas e soviéticos. / The German artist Gerhard Richter has caused some controversy through his use of the abstract painting technique to approach the Holocaust. One of his most recent works, “Birkenau”, uses as its background images the photographs taken by some of the Jewish prisoners who were part of the Sonderkommando group in 1944. Some critics accuse Richter of hiding Auschwitz’s truth. On its turn, “The Hunger Angel”, a novel by Romanian-born German author Herta Müller, consists of successive poetic imagery arising from the picturesque vision of its narrator, Leo Auberg. At the age of seventeen, the young Romanian is deported to a gulag after the occupation of his country by Soviet troops and finds in observing the beauty of the elements of his daily life at the forced labor camp a way of resisting the physical and psychological violence to which he is subjected. This research project aims to suggest that instead of concealing the horrors of the concentration and forced labor camps, the aestheticization found in Richter's and Müller's works emphasizes the cruelty of the crimes committed by the Nazis and Soviets.