Over the past several years I have been on a quest to locate a world beyond the one I’ve been presented. I am interested in the history of atomic particles - like everything that radiates off of a monument (both literally and those things that are metaphorically reified) - invisible things, and the ways in which these things insect beyond our knowledge systems. This inquiry takes many forms. Mine is a conceptually based practice linked to record keeping and time, and the ways in which these concepts find plurality within our culture; or more pointedly, the importance that we attach to “time” and “the record”, as they relate to our “legacies”, “cultures”, or “the canon”; our histories and the ahistorical, the prehistorical, fantasies, the things that never happened but could’ve, imagined futures and parallel universes.

An exploration of the mythologized narratives that the work and lives of Conceptual artists Bas Jan Ader, Ana Mendieta, and Francis Alÿs have created and inspired. By virtue of their biographies, the fetishization of their personalities, and the ways in which this anecdotal information can be read in their work, mythologized narratives have been constructed, allowing for a prolonged interest existing within and without the confines of the art world. These mythologies come together as part of the oral tradition of the art world, a chronicling of narratives that incites continued interest for future generations.

The films of Quentin Tarantino have held a significant influence on modern cinema, and therefore on cinema studies. As such, studies on the social and philosophical implications of his work have appeared over the years, mostly in regards to content. However, with the exception of references to his use of cinematic violence, studies of his technique—i.e., his cinematic style—have been rare, and rarer still have been studies of the social implications that arise from the patterns of his style as well as those his subject matter. The following thesis seeks to use the concept of Auteur Theory—specifically, that Tarantino is the primary artist of the films directed by him—to propose that a specific artistic style conveys a specific worldview: namely, that the artistic choices made by the director, in content and technique, can and do convey a viewpoint regarding “real life” and the world. Specifically, this work will culminate in analyzing and determining tenants to be gleaned from the Tarantino canon regarding issues of justice, both on an individual and societal basis. With his focus on crime—again, both societal and individual—Tarantino makes commentary on societal breakdown; the audience’s emotional support (or lack thereof) for characters and their actions corresponds with identification, and therefore draws real-life parallels. Such refers to the concept of “Realism”, which will be discussed in detail. Further, Tarantino’s trend of recycling elements from prior films refers to artistic “Postmodernism”—use of “pastiche” and sampling to create a “new” work. The thesis will analyze the value and meaning of the major samplings in Tarantino’s films—particularly in regards to genre--and concludes that, far from a simple conglomeration, a Tarantino “Genre-Blender” forms a cohesive whole, oriented towards specific impact of the audience. From the above two issues of Realism and Postmodernism in art, and establishing the existence of a cohesive artistic vision in Tarantino’s work, this thesis identifies patterns in such that identify specific viewpoints on questions of “Good”, “Evil”, and “Justice”. Key to this is the dichotomy between objective principles and subjectivity in human interaction amid the applications of principles. Tarantino’s work conveys a belief in certain objective tenants; however, the applications that arise through interaction cause complications, arising through human limitations in perspective. The ultimate purpose of this study is to link studies of social implications of film to not merely content, but in choices in cinematic style. It is a contribution at once to studies of film and to studies of artistic theory (in particular Realism and Postmodernism), using both to analyze how a specific, popular, mainstream artist reflects a worldview through the sensibilities that are channeled in creating his works.

While focusing on high fashion and architecture, this thesis explores an aesthetic transition between the early 20th century’s “modern” style and the later 20th century style of “deconstruction.” We believe the style of “deconstruction” revolutionized visual metaphors for modern gender identity through the manipulation and experimentation of surfaces. These metaphors were accomplished through transformation relationships between surface, structure, and ornament. This study exclusively uses examples from women’s fashion and building façades for its analysis

Si el siglo XX creó una extendida conciencia sobre las variantes de la intertextualidad en la ficción literaria, hoy enfrentamos transformaciones en la naturaleza de la ficción y sus relaciones con otras formas discursivas y/o creativas como el arte, y con la misma realidad, que es posible designar con el concepto de ficción extrema. Desde “Don Quijote” o “Las meninas” hay incursiones en la metaficción y/o autorrefecividad. Pero a partir de las vanguardias modernistas y de modo creciente en los estertores de la postmodernidad nos abocamos a un singular tipo de hipertextualidad que desbordando lo literario se apropia de prácticas artísticas (o lo contrario) como recurso para la transposición de sus ficciones, no sólo de uno a otro campo, sino para su inserción en la realidad: la ficción extrema. Max Aub (España 1903-México 1973), Leonora Carrington (Inglaterra 1917-México 2011) y Enrique Vila-Matas (España 1958), radicalizaron este tránsito o filtración de los imaginarios artísticos y literarios subvirtiendo las delimitaciones entre —pintor catalán Jusep Torres Campalans, junto con sus obras pictóricas, creadas como sombra o doble de Picasso. Así insertó su existencia en ciertos dominios del cubismo como un modo de meta-crítica artística. Carrington asumió un doble animal que transitó entre cuentos y cuadros y se inscribió en la memoria del surrealismo. Vila-Matas narró su “Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil” como un doble del espectro Marcel Duchamp —a su vez asaltado por otros— que reescribe la memoria del dadaísmo de tal modo que ha llegado a ser confundida con un ensayo. La revisión de las estrategias de la ficción extrema en estos autores junto con las de otros contemplados en el epilogo —Mario Bellatín, y los artistas Liliana Porter, Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, Ana Tisconia, Rubén Torres Llorca y Carlos Amorales— arroja nueva luz sobre sus obras, enriquece los estudios transatlánticos y revela la movilidad y multiplicación de la identidad y los deslizamientos de la ficción en la realidad como signos de tránsito a la altermodernidad.

...Since identifying Eagles as at least one of the artists of the 1812 Collection, I have discovered that his specific tour of the Lakes, the route he followed and the scenery conveyed in his images, deviated from the conventional tours in that Eagles was in search of what he regarded as a poetical landscape rather than a traditionally picturesque one. In other words, Eagles sought to capture more than an aesthetically pleasing scene as a picturesque image would, he endeavored to capture the soul of the scene and the 1812 Collection is evidence that Eagles practiced the artistic principles he so often espoused. As such, the 1812 Collection offers further implications for Eagles's body of work, his aesthetic, and his strong criticisms of the changes he witnessed in landscape art during his lifetime. In this essay, I therefore propose demonstrate not only how the 1812 Collection is in critical conversation with the picturesque tradition, but also how Eagles's sketches, like his writings and criticisms, expressed his own guiding aesthetic on discovering the poetry of nature instead of a strictly picturesque aesthetic. In doing so, I hope to restore Eagles's reputation as an artist and art critic as well as reveal the historical importance of the recently rediscovered 1812 Collection.

Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein may appear unrelated to one another at first glance. We have an impoverished upstate New Yorker versus relatively comfortable Californian, bisexual romantic nomad versus lesbian monogamist, nihilist versus life-affirming enthusiast, and agnostic-atheist versus secular Jew. When they are referenced together (which happens rarely), it is usually in the context of their Parisian exploits. But a closer look reveals more vital affinities. Both writers remain problematically situated in the modernist canon. Both were inspired by visual art. Both struggled to get published during their lifetimes. Both disassociated themselves from mainstream feminist movements, preferring subtler, more idiosyncratic ways of questioning the status quo. Both held a sustained interest in the queer and, as this dissertation seeks to demonstrate, imagined that theme in original ways—Barnes, through loss; Stein, through phenomenology. Writing out of the spirit of Christian martyrdom, Barnes revels in queer suffering and its transfiguring potential: queers extravagantly lose (themselves), fail, and suffer, yet such ordeals aren’t without value. The first half of my dissertation, thus, appraises Barnes’ “queer negativity” in general before pondering how its masochistic energies push against those authorities that would negate the queer. Chapter One analyzes Barnes’ mythical-seeming transgendered figures who encounter profound failure, despite the imaginative freedom emanating from their ahistorical surroundings. Barnes’ sense of queer failure intensifies in Chapter Two, where same-sex desire invokes the abject by symbolically collapsing psychic boundaries between lovers and refusing reproductive futurity. Both chapters contextualize the moral inversion that becomes the focus of Chapter Three: how does such nihilism tragically ennoble the queer and endow it with insurgent impulses? Without taking a self-consciously queer activist stance, Barnes draws on what Gilles Deleuze would later enunciate as an inverted affect regime: the power of punishment to enforce repressive sexual regulations through pain and hence to bridle perversion becomes inverted when punishment opens the portal to pleasure, when pleasure relocates to sites of perversion. If Barnes writes as a romantic martyr, Stein looks at the queer through a phenomenologist’s eyes. The reciprocity between social conditioning and consciousness, in particular, remains an urgent concern throughout her career. To be “queer,” one often breaks away from a lifetime of habituated orientations toward sex and gender. But queerness cannot wholly bracket the norms that have been left behind. It exists in relation to what it queers. Foregrounding this discussion, Chapter Four examines how Stein’s modernism, phenomenology, and queer criticism intersect. Chapter Five investigates how “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” “Many Many Women,” and The Making of Americans reorient us from the “straight” and narrow. Yet this reorientation remains partial. Not all heteronormative biases can be shed, as is evident in The Making of Americans’ classist undertones running through its “singular” queer vision. The sixth chapter further tests the limits of reorientation as such. Ida’s Ida desperately wants to live a queer life, but discovers that she cannot if she approaches queerness as a radically separatist ideal. A solipsistic universe where she can entirely withdraw from society through sleep, silence, or soliloquy remains a fantasy. Ida’s internal conflict, in turn, mirrors Stein’s struggle to enact aesthetic modes that prove just as impossible to practice, being devoted to eliminating memory, emotions, personal identity, and social awareness.

Partindo do exame dos pressupostos do realismo formal no romance, a dissertação pretende demonstrar como a desconfiança do narrador beckettiano quanto aos fundamentos que sustentam a voz em primeira pessoa e a estrutura ficcional do romance, observada desde Molloy e Malone Morre, dá lugar ao exame dos fundamentos relacionados à constituição da própria noção de subjetividade e desdobra-se em reflexões de natureza linguística em O inominável. Momento em que a hipótese de que é na linguagem e pela linguagem que o homem se constitui como sujeito, formulada pelo linguista Émile Benveniste, será desenvolvida considerando a dimensão trágica da experiência do eu. Com efeito, parte da tarefa da desta dissertação consiste em demonstrar a pertinência do trágico em O inominável, com o propósito de aprofundar a discussão teórica sobre a narrativa do século XX. / From an examination of the formal assumptions realism in the novel, the dissertation aims to demonstrate how distrust of Becketts narrator at the grounds that support the voice in first person and the fictional structure of the novel, observed since Molloy and Malone Dies, giving rise to the investigation of the grounds related to the constitution of the notion of subjectivity and unfolds in linguistic nature reflections in The Unnamable. Moment when the hypothesis that it is in the language and by the language that humans is constituted as subject, formulated by the linguist Émile Benveniste, will be developed based on the tragic dimension of the experience of \"I\". Indeed, part of the task of this dissertation is to demonstrate the relevance of the tragic dimension in The Unnamable, in order to deepen the theoretical discussion of the twentieth centurys narrative.

Esta pesquisa se dedica a questões conceituais da arte contemporânea implicadas na proposição intitulada Estruturação do Self, desenvolvida pela artista brasileira Lygia Clark entre 1978 e 1988, que se coloca num limite ambíguo entre a arte e a terapia. Por meio de perspectivas críticas é possível analisar determinados aspectos daquela experiência, seus desdobramentos, territórios e paradigmas, de modo a compreender melhor suas contribuições ao pensamento artístico contemporâneo. Esses aspectos dizem respeito à recepção estética da obra e sua relação com determinados públicos da arte; às maneiras de pensar e fazer arte; ao seu tempo; às possíveis aproximações com outros campos de conhecimento, tais como filosofia e psicologia; aos lugares em que a arte se apresenta (museu, galeria, ateliê, clínica); às questões éticas e políticas que movimenta; à produção crítica. Em suma, trata-se de perceber o que há de contemporâneo no trabalho de Lygia Clark e de revisitar o próprio pensamento artístico a partir dele. / This research engages in conceptual issues of contemporary art implicated in the entitled proposition Structuring of the Self, developed by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark between 1978 and 1988, which puts itself in an ambiguous boundary between art and therapy. Through critical perspectives it is possible to analyze certain aspects of that experience, its development, territories and paradigms in order to better understand its contributions to the contemporary artistic thought. These aspects concern to the aesthetic reception of the work and its relation to a certain public of art; to the ways of thinking and doing art; to its own time; to the possible approaches with other areas of knowledge, such as philosophy and psychology; to the places where the art is presented (museum, gallery, atelier, clinic); to its ethical issues and policies; to the critical production. In short, it is about realizing what is of contemporary in the Lygia Clark\'s work and, from it, to review the artistic thought itself.

The current culture of commodity fetishism that surrounds both modern art and tattoos are disproportionately a part of the perpetuation of an artificial sense of society and community. It promotes the notion that by simply by inking the deeper layers of their skin or by spending millions on a painting that somehow one becomes elevated and enters an elite space, or club, of people like them.