Thesis (M.A. (Hons.)) -- University of Western Sydney, 2003. / "A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Honours) Creative Arts, December 2003" Includes bibliography.

Through a detailed analysis of a selection of works produced between 1999 and 2003 by the South African artist Berni Searle, this thesis explores the need to theorise a corporeal viewer in the process of interpreting art works. Such an approach is particularly necessary when dealing with an artist such as Searle because her work, which deals predominantly with the theme of identity, appeals not only to conceptual but also to experiential and corporeal understandings of identity. Searle incorporates the viewer into an experience of her own identity through a physical identification that the viewer feels in relation to her work. For viewers this means that they are made aware of how their own identity in the moment of interpretation is contingent on visual, mental and physical components. In order to develop this argument the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is drawn on. These two theorists are very useful for an argument of this nature because both interpret identity as a construction involving an enfolding between the mind and, via the act of vision, the body of the subject. Through an inclusion of the corporeal element in interpretation, this thesis also offers a critique of interpretive theories that would reduce analysis to an interaction between eye and mind by analyzing how the viewer's body participates in the act of looking.

This dissertation explores the impact of Bushman images, and the writings of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (working with the Breakwater Bushmen) on three art works of Pippa Skotnes. They are The Return III (1988), For //Kunn (1993) and Heaven’s Things (1999). It is argued that Bushman imagery, being the result of shamanic trance activities is characterised by imagery, which mammals universally share. The use of the same imagery by the Surrealists in the twentieth century arises not from an intimate interaction with the spirit realm/dream world but from the European longing for an altered reality. Skotnes appropriates Bushman imagery in her prints, narrating the tragic fate of the Bushman. She laments the loss of the transcendental relationship between Man and the Universe. The exploitation, adoption and marketing of Bushman imagery by the tourist industry marks the distinction between her respectful treatment and the materialism of South Africans. / Visual Arts / M.A. (Visual Arts)

Des voix en voie. Les femmes, c(h)oeur et marges des avant-gardes étudie le dense réseau de relations établies par quelques figures féminines qui ont inspiré des projets et des recherches au sein des avant-gardes historiques dans le panorama français du début du XXe siècle. La présente étude s'intéresse à des femmes – Sonia Delaunay, Claire Goll, Marie Laurencin, Hélène d'OEttingen, Valentine de Saint-Point et Elsa Triolet – qui ont travaillé de concert avec les représentants majeurs des avant-gardes émergentes, en donnant naissance à des projets et à des collaborations à travers l'Europe. Ces femmes artistes prolifiques, qui ont en commun le multiculturalisme et le pluristylisme, sont très actives dans le panorama artistique et littéraire du début du XXe siècle. Des traces de leurs travaux peuvent se retrouver dans les correspondances, les manuscrits, les mémoires et d'autres documents, édités et inédits, qui constituent le corpus de la thèse. La documentation ici présentée est un témoignage de la capacités des auteures à mettre en place des stratégies de communication pour une reconnaissance méritée de leur production sur la scène nationale et internationale. Le travail présente trois parties, chacune décrivant, expliquant et analysant la matière, dans le but de retracer les parcours – les voies – de ces quelques créatrices, pour en faire enfin ressortir les voix. Les annexes comprennent des documents originaux et une chronologie qui liste les travaux examinés, avec ceux des principaux chefs-de-file des avant-gardes. / Voices on the way. Women, heart / choir and fringe of the avant-garde explores the thick network of relations established by some female characters who have inspired projects and researches within the historical avant-garde in the French panorama of the early twentieth century. This study examines women – Sonia Delaunay, Claire Goll, Marie Laurencin, Hélène d'OEttingen, Valentine de Saint-Point and Elsa Triolet – who have worked closely with the main leaders of the emerging avant-garde movement, giving rise to projects and cooperations across Europe. These fecund female artists, who share multiculturalism and multilingual abilities, are the most active in the literary-artistic landscape of the early twentieth century. Traces of their works can be found in correspondence, excerpts, memoirs and other documents, both published and unpublished, that create the corpus of the thesis. The documentation presented here is a valid testimony to the authors' ability to put in place communicative strategies for an adequate recognition of their work into the national and international scene. The work is subdivided in three parts, each describing, explaining and dissecting the subject, in order to retrace the ways of these creators, to hear their voices at last. The appendix includes original documents and a chronology listing the examined works, together with those of the main exponents of the avant-garde movement.

This thesis interrogates the ways in which the body-centred practices of women film artists embrace the materiality of direct animation in order to foreground gendered, subjective positions. Through the researcher's own creative practice, it investigates how this mode of film-making, in which the artist works through physical engagement with the film materials and the material processes of film-making, might be understood as feminine and/or feminist. Direct animation foregrounds touch as the primary sense. Its practices are process-based and highly experimental, because images are made through the agency of the body operating within restrictive parameters, making results difficult to predict or control with precision. For these reasons, direct animation has not been embraced by mainstream, narrative-focused, studio-based models of production, unlike other forms of two and three dimensional animation. It has remained a specialist area for the individual artist and auteur, and, to date, there is a paucity of commentary about direct animation practices, and what exists has been dominated by male voices. In order to develop ideas about the ways in which women represent themselves in an expanded film-making praxis that is focused on the body and materiality of process, this PhD inquiry, encompassing a body of films with written contextualisation, is situated in the context of the direct animation practices of three artists (Caroline Leaf, Annabel Nicolson, and Margaret Tait); and informed by conceptual frameworks provided by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. This thesis proposes, via interaction between these three axes of research, that women film artists, operating independently, are able to create a female imaginary that represents women and is recognised by them, by constructing positions of practice outside the dominant symbolic modes of patriarchy, which evolve through the maternal body and the materialities of the feminine.

Properzia De’Rossi (1490-1530) première sculptrice de la Renaissance italienne naquit vers 1490 à Bologne et mourut en 1530. Elle suscita un grand intérêt non seulement pour ses qualités d’artiste mais aussi pour avoir transgressé les rôles traditionnels de la femme. Nous la connaissons grâce à Giorgio Vasari qui dans la première édition des Vite de 1550, lui consacre une biographie, seule femme à figurer parmi les cent trente-trois biographies d’artistes rassemblées par l’historiographe. Dans la seconde édition de 1568 Vasari accompagnera Properzia De’Rossi de trois autres femmes artistes peintres encore en vie et productives en 1568 : Plautilla Nelli, religieuse, Lucrezia Quistelli et Sofonisba Anguissola aristocrates. Properzia De’Rossi est « hors norme » : ni religieuse ni aristocrate ; elle exerce la sculpture en professionnelle. L’unique œuvre connue avec certitude est son célèbre bas-relief de Joseph et la femme de Putiphar. Œuvre autobiographique d’après Vasari qui suggère le scandale d’une femme mariée ayant un jeune amant. Sa mort précoce en 1530, alors qu’elle est demandée par le pape Clément VII venu à Bologne pour le couronnement de Charles Quint, dramatise sa mort au sommet de sa gloire. Elle travailla sur le chantier prestigieux de San Petronio avec des sculpteurs renommés. Le XIXe siècle l’a perçue comme une héroïne romantique, elle perdit peu à peu son identité de sculptrice. Le XXe siècle la considère comme pionnière dans un monde professionnel masculin. Notre approche, à la croisée des chemins historiques, artistiques et littéraires tente de donner une vision complète de cette artiste talentueuse, dotée d’une forte personnalité, célèbre pour avoir su braver les interdits et exercer son métier de sculptrice. / Properzia De’Rossi (1490-1530) first great sculptress of the italian Renaissance, was born in Bologna around 1490 and died in 1530. She arouses a great interest not only for her artistic qualities but also for having infringed the traditional roles of the woman. She owes her fame to Giorgio Vasari, who in the first edition of Le Vite, 1550, devoted a single biography to her, the only woman to appear among the one hundred thirty three biographies of artists gathered by the historiographer. In the second edition of 1568, Vasari will add three other women painters alive and professionally active in 1568 : the nun Plautilla Nelli, the aristocrats Lucrezia Quistelli and Sofonisba Anguissola. Properzia De’Rossi is outstanding : neither nun nor aristocrat, she practices the sculpture as a professional sculptor. The only single work known with certainty is her famous bas-relief Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. An autobiographical work according to Vasari, who suggests the scandal of a married woman having a young lover. Her premature death in 1530, as she was called by pope Clement VII in Bologna for Charles V’s coronation, dramatizes her death at the height of her glory. Famous in Bologna, she worked with renowned sculptors in San Petronio. The nineteenth century perceived her like a romantic heroin : in love and unhappy. She lost little by little her identity of sculptress. The twenteenth century might see her as pioneer of female work in a male professional environment. Our study at the crossroads of historical, artistic and literary approaches attempts to give a comprehensive vision of this talented artist with a strong personality, famous for having broken the taboos in order to work as a sculptress.

La communauté des maîtres peintres et sculpteurs parisiens a connu une importante évolution entre les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. La création de l’Académie royale en 1648 correspond à un temps de bouleversement : l’ancien et le nouveau corps se joignent alors, et tentent de cohabiter dans une même structure. La fin du XVIIe siècle correspond à l’essor de la population de la maîtrise, à la publication des listes de ses membres, ainsi que des statuts, dans une remise en ordre globale de la communauté. C’est donc une corporation forte d’une nombreuse population et bien organisée qui obtient en 1705 une déclaration de Louis XIV lui permettant d’ouvrir une école de dessin fondée sur le modèle vivant. La toute nouvelle Académie de Saint-Luc peut s’installer durablement dans le paysage artistique de la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Installée dans des nouveaux locaux dont elle se porte acquéreuse, rue du Haut-Moulin en la Cité, elle transforme considérablement ses statuts, en accordant une place importante en son sein à un corps d’artistes, chargés d’assurer l’enseignement de l’école. Les années 1750 à 1775 sont des années où les évènements se précipitent, pour l’Académie de Saint-Luc. Des expositions, suivies du public, permettent de faire connaître nombre de ses membres, et d’inscrire la petite académie dans les débats artistiques du milieu du XVIIIe siècle. Le perfectionnement de l’école d’après le modèle, permet dans les années 1765-1775 de reconnaître davantage encore un statut propre pour les artistes, au sein de la communauté. L’évolution est donc spectaculaire sur plus d’un siècle, et témoigne d’une adaptation remarquable de la vieille corporation, qui a su assimiler ainsi un fonctionnement académique à l’organisation hiérarchique d’une communauté de métier. / The community of Parisian master painters and sculptors went through important evolutions between the 17th and 18th centuries. The creation of the Royal Academy in 1648 corresponds to a time of upheaval: the old and the new profession then came together and tried to coexist within the same structure. In the late 17th century, the population of the maîtrise increased and the list of its members as well as its statutes were published, in an overall re-ordering of the community. Thus, in 1705, the guild was strong in numbers and well-organised when it obtained a declaration from Louis XIV allowing it to open a drawing school based on live models : the brand-new Academy of St Luke became established in the artistic landscape of the early 18th century. It purchased new premises on rue du Haut-Moulin-en-la-Cité. From there, it significantly altered its statutes, giving an important role to a body of artists who was put in charge of teaching within its school. In the years 1750 to 1775, things moved faster for the Academy of St Luke. Several well-attended exhibitions put members of the Academy of St Luke on the map and involved the small academy in mid-18th century artistic debates. The improvement in the life-drawing school in the years 1765-1775 led to an even better recognized status for artists within the community. Over more than a century, this spectacular evolution shows the remarkable adaptation of the old guild, which thus managed to integrate its academic functioning to the hierarchical organization of a professional community.

This dissertation investigates the materiality of performative sculpture in the Americas during the long 1970s through artists Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) and Senga Nengudi (1943). United in their disenchantment with second-wave feminism, Buchanan and Nengudi are situated art-historically in the expanded fields of (post)minimalism, conceptualism, and the Black Arts Movement. These artists realize their objects by sourcing non-traditional artmaking materials within what this dissertation conjures as a haptic imaginary—an intervening corrective to both the second-wave feminist and postmodern art imaginaries of the 1970s. Their materials expose the limitations of the visual and offer alternate models of knowing. For Buchanan’s frustulum series (1978-81), poured concrete, and later, tabby concrete, memorializes the textures of architectural sites to honor experiences of labor and displacement. Tabby concrete, a compound binding agent made of sand and lime, is a localized, inexpensive material that was often used by enslaved people in the southern United States, especially in coastal states like Georgia, which provide access to massive deposits of lime-rich oyster shells. Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. series (1977) of pliable pantyhose and sand are anthropomorphic objects originally meant to be activated; they mimic bodily expansion, endurance, and fatigue. Pantyhose, made mostly of nylon, the world’s first fully synthetic fiber, are the product of decades of scientific and economic development, whose intertwined history with World War II offers a springboard to understand the potency of Nengudi’s experiments with the garment. The artists’ materials become sites of investigation into memory, place, body, erotics, and precarity. By offering new epistemological methods of engagement that retaliate against the hegemony of the visual through their twinned interests in ruins for Buchanan, and remains for Nengudi, the artists realize a new womanist politic. Buchanan and Nengudi deploy, respectively, tabby concrete and pantyhose with sand to transmit historical and embodied knowledge. It is precisely through the activated sensorium of touch—imagined and physical—that the past is transmitted and materialized.

“A Howling in the Paperwork” explores the relationship between ethnography, archival practice, and experimentalism in the work of twentieth century women artists whose syncretic ambitions lead them on a geographical itinerary to and through the greater Caribbean. This dissertation proposes a special synergy between artists with “scattered” bodies of work, in perpetual search of the right form for their creative energy, and the space of the Caribbean with its history of genocides, migrations, and displacements. I focus on women artists, in particular, to foreground the relationship between social precarity and aesthetic innovation. The flight from one technique to another has a push as well as a pull, as women artists have been excluded or expelled from institutional homes for their work, including the university. In the absence of reliable support, the artists I consider come to rely on and refine rigorously subjective methods that prefigure the necessary crisis of objectivity, especially in the social sciences, that would enter mainstream discourse decades later. But even as the artists I consider foreground their own bodies, lives, and communities in their work, they engage diasporic theories of spirit possession, inheritance, and collective creativity that amount to implicit—and sometimes explicit—critiques of the artist as self-contained auteur. Whether or not “there is something strongly feminine” in Caribbean culture, as Antonio Benítez Rojo suggests in The Repeating Island, the idea that there is places women in particularly charged relation to their own creative production in a Caribbean context. My project pays particular attention to the ways these artists attend to one another, taking up the detritus of those who came before as the raw material for new projects. For example, the Cuban-American émigré Ana Mendieta turns to the amateur anthropology of Lydia Cabrera as inspiration for the stone sculptures she carves in the caves of Jaruco, north of Havana, on a return trip to her home island. This relational consciousness does not establish a linear narrative of descent so much as it imagines a transhistorical collaboration in which I, too, participate. Alongside traditional methodologies of close-reading and archival research, I engage their work in more personal ways: I’ve traveled to the caves of Jaruco to visit the almost-ruined remains of Mendieta’s sculptures, I’ve translated Marigloria Palma’s poetry into English, and I’ve interviewed Julie Dash for a literary magazine. Much of the meaning of their work resides in its unmistakable invitation to collaborate in its development and dissemination: the second half of this dissertation considers my own inheritance of feminist practice in the context of Puerto Rican culture.

Située au croisement de plusieurs disciplines – anthropologie, sociologie, histoire de l’art,études féministes et sur le genre – cette thèse s’intéresse aux oeuvres, aux pratiques, aux parcours et aux discours des femmes artistes maori néo-zélandaises s’inscrivant dans le champ de l’art contemporain et vivant en milieu urbain. Ces artistes sont à l’origine de revendications politiques et d’affirmations identitaires singulières du fait de leurs multiples appartenances : leurs productions recèlent des références simultanées à leurs histoires individuelles, à leur statut de membres d’une minorité autochtone et d’une tribu, à leur condition de femmes et de citoyennes au sein de la nation néo-zélandaise.L’analyse des données obtenues après avoir mené une enquête de terrain d’un an en Nouvelle-Zélande en 2012-2013, des recherches complémentaires sur Internet et des échanges avec les artistes au retour du terrain permet de montrer comment ces dernières s’inscrivent dans le mouvement actuel d’affirmation maori. En effet, suite à la colonisation britannique du XIX e siècle, les Maori luttent toujours pour affirmer leurs droits. Dans ce contexte, l’art est utilisé par certaines femmes comme un puissant moyen de contestation et de promotion d’un changement social visant à la reconnaissance du mana wahine (pouvoir, prestige féminin). Ce travail révèle également que la pratique artistique leur offre l’opportunité de réaffirmer les liens les unissant au monde maori tout en leur permettant d’accéder à une certaine autonomisation et émancipation. Elles développent des stratégies originales pour affirmer leur créativité sans transgresser des règles toujours importantes pour les Maori. / At the intersection of several disciplines – anthropology, sociology, art history, and feminist and gender studies, this thesis deals with the works, practices, careers and discourses of New Zealand Maori women artists active in the field of contemporary art and living in an urban environment. Due to their many forms of belonging, these artists are behind specific political demands and identity affirmations: their work contains simultaneous references to the individual histories, their status as members of an indigenous minority and a tribe, and their condition as women and citizens of the New Zealand nation. The analysis of the data obtained after a fieldwork investigation in New Zealand carried out over a year from 2012 to 2013, of complementary research on the Internet and exchanges with artists when back from the field makes it possible to show how these artists are part of today's Maori assertion movement. For since British colonization in the 19th century, the Maori have continued to assert their rights. In this context, some women use art as a powerful means of protest and of promoting social change aimed at the recognition of mana wahine (women's power or prestige). This work also reveals that their artistic practice affords them the opportunity to reassert the ties linking them to the Maori world while at the same time enabling them to attain a certain empowerment and emancipation. They develop original strategies for asserting their creativity without transgressing the rules which remain important for the Maori people.