The American Panorama Company's cyclorama, The Battle of Atlanta, portrays an important battle during the Civil War. Representations of this engagement in photographs, illustrations, and history paintings presented isolated episodes, while cycloramas exhibited a sweeping narrative of the actual combat. These popular art attractions had a circular design that enabled artists to render a comprehensive view and exhibit characteristics of traditional history paintings. To ensure profits from its exhibition, the painters contemplated their potential spectators, avoiding antagonistic symbols. They considered contemporary attitudes concerning the war and created a composition that would foster the country's desire for reconciliation. The result was a portrayal of the battle that instructed its audiences on the heroic actions of both Union and Confederate soldiers amid the terrible circumstances of battle. Therefore, The Battle of Atlanta manifests a didactic narrative of the crucial engagement indicative of burgeoning public sentiment toward the Civil War during the 1880s.

Our conception of Paradise is derived from the Old Persian word pairidaeza, referring directly to a hidden, walled garden. Such a mythical garden protects its occupant from the extrinsic gaze of those less fortunate. Taqiyah involves the precautionary dissimulation of faith in a hostile environment. For persecuted developing sects in medieval Persian Islam, taqiyah became an important cultural practice. Such persecution gave rise to a production of artifacts whose significant meanings were disguised within complex compositions. Understanding the nature of these compositions provides insight into the nature of perception and its role in architectural experience. These artifacts contain projective anamorphic devices that distort vision and obscure interpretation. They demonstrate taqiyah through visual estrangement and temporal defamiliarization. The isolation and architectural deployment of these dissimulative devices can create a dynamic interactive environment that initiates the occupant with a continually changing understanding of the architecture through time.

As one travels about the Houston landscape, one is often bewildered by the rampant growth of spaces and their casual uses. Houston's growth over 100 years has produced a suburban metropolis that searches for its identity between temporary crowded spaces and empty lots. The traditional city remains in our minds as we experience a shriveled form of interior urbanism, primarily private and mostly exclusive. Rather than perceiving place as a physical environment, one encounters momentary conditions of place, the gathering of people. Stimulated by vacancies and remnants, Locus Moment acts as a perceptual device. Vital for a moment, this event attempts to shape our understanding of these vacancies. As Locus Moment remains in the mind as an afterimage, one is encouraged to search for the latent potential that exists within the Houston landscape.

Recent painting exhibits reveal an expanded definition of painting. Though it does not appear to fit within the category of painting, Mel Bochner's 48&inches; Standards is included in this expanded definition. Clement Greenberg's modernist criticism attempted to limit painting to its formal elements, which led to the rejection of painting in minimalist and conceptual art movements. Mel Bochner integrates methodologies used by conceptual art to oppose modernist painting in order to open painting to theoretical discourse. In works such as 48&inches; Standards, Theory of Painting, and Theory of Boundaries, he brackets out the material signifiers that allow us to recognize painting in order to investigate its structure. In this way, painting acts as 'the missing signifier' in these works and place them firmly within the category of painting.

By focusing on how bourgeois and feminist discourses intersect in the moralistic paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725--1805), I argue that Greuze's images manifest a thrust toward liberation from the ideological constraints of Father's Law and toward the advent of feminized ontology. Through the analysis of L'Accordee de village and La Malediction paternelle, I claim that the deconstruction of patriarchy and the return of the feminine are catalyzed in bourgeois economy by the monetary system. To support the significance of Greuze in the development of Realism, not only in art but also in literature, I posit Greuze as the precursor of Balzac. Informing my discussion by Jean-Joseph Goux's theory of the homology between the referential status of the sign, the Father, and the fiduciary system, I argue that Balzac's Realism, illustrating the milieu of commercial capitalism of the nineteenth century, exacerbate the loss of moral superiority of the paterfamilias. Although Greuze's work is profoundly embedded in the patriarchal ethic, the analysis of La Paresseuse italienne and La Mere bien-aimee provides evidence of the painters (not intended) feminist vision.

The main objective of the inquiry is to deduce the methods and techniques that were employed in the manufacture of the historically unique Shroud of Turin. By taking a more or less phenomenologically based stance, it is argued that this image could only have been produced by employing a photographically related technique. To this end, an examination is made of both the nature of the image, as well as all relevant documented evidence which supports the above stated hypothesis. In addition, practical experiments are conducted which employ the kinds of technology and apparatus known to have existed c 1250-1357 AD. The results of this investigation strongly support the notion that persons living c 1250- 1357 AD did in fact have the necessary technology to manufacture what could be termed a negative solargraphic image of a human subject. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1993.

This dissertation is a study in representation. More specifically, it is a study in the representation of art and of art history as melancholy representation. The latter is produced or opens up, because objects of art â pictures, images, or Bilder (read âlikenessesâ) â have a tendency to withdraw or turn away from view. Objects of art, which may be thought of as âthinking objectsâ or âliving imagesâ, that is, as quasisubjects, negate complete ownership. Like living things, objects of art are infinitely incomplete; they arise out of an ongoing process of becoming and disappearance. As such, our relationship with them may be said to be one of âmutual desireâ, want and lack. Moreover, as Michael Ann Holly (2002) has argued, the study of art history is bedevilled by lost, obscure, or obsolete objects; cloudy, shadowy, ghostly, even corpse-like objects that deny total acquisition or last words. It is in this sense that one can say art history â perhaps like any history â is a melancholic science. It is also from this melancholy perspective that this dissertation reflects, in various ways, on the imaging of history as catatastrophe or as catastrophic loss â as this is figured in the work of Walter Benjamin, Anselm Kiefer, and William Kentridge. How then do we write about art and the history of art, when the objects of our study are both too close and too far away, mutually absent and present â fleeting, yet seemingly permanent? How can one âimageâ the catastrophic debilitation of melancholic disavowal or death of self, without succumbing to its debilitating attractions? Following on from Max Penskyâs (2001) tracing of the historical image of melancholia as dialectical, the aim of this dissertation is to delineate a discursive space for perception and reflection; a critical space within which to think of the melancholic im-possibility of representation qua possession, as essentially negatively dialectical: futile and heroic, pointless and necessary. Finally, this dissertation asks: how can one write about the imaging of history as castastrophe, as this is figured from within different historical frameworks: that of an early twentieth century German-Jewish philosopher, a late twentieth/early twenty-first century German artist, and a late twentieth/early twenty-first South African-Jewish artist? How can one hope to relate their essentially melancholy work without becoming culpable of ahistoricity or even pastiche? No easy answers have been forthcoming during the writing of this dissertation. However, it is my delicate contention that reading and picturing their work in and as a melancholy constellation whose parameters shift depending on oneâs point of view, as opposed to submitting their similarities and differences to rigorous systematic analysis, has revealed surprising and enlightening elective affinities. In the final analysis, visual and philosophical analogy has the last say. And this seems fitting, especially where one encounters a writer and two artists whose thinking in images tirelessly challenge our thinking âlogicallyâ in words alone.

<p> In this thesis, I explore two works from Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., <i> A Public Message for Your Private Life </i>(1998) and <i>Mail Order Bride of Frankenstein</i> (2003), that take into account the histories and identities produced within Filipino/a American Communities. I use Sarita Echavez See and Emily Noelle Ignacio's theories on parody to analyze the performative aspects of M.O.B's artworks. According to See and Ignacio, parody can be utilized as a tool to simultaneously form solidarity within Filipino American communities. By examining these ideas, I argue that M.O.B. performs appropriated representations of their ethnic and assimilated cultures by using parody to critique and problematize often-misrepresented individual and cultural identities.</p>

<p>This dissertation, Loïs Mailou Jones, Diasporic Art Practice, and Africa in the 20th Century, investigates the evolving dialogue between twentieth-century African-American artists and Africa--its objects, peoples, diasporas, and topography. The four chapters follow the career of artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998) and focus on periods when ideas about blackness in an African-American context and its connection to Africa were at the forefront of artistic and cultural discourses. Chapter 1 traces African-American artists contact with African art during the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 examines Jones's use of Africa in her art produced at the start of her career (1920s -1940s) and repositions her in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements. Chapter 3 considers Jones's engagements with the African Diaspora via travels to France, the Caribbean, and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, voyages that I argue result in the creation of a Black Diasporic art practice predicated upon the act of viewing. Chapter 4 critiques the signifying grasp of Africa in African American art. By looking at Jones's turn to pastiche as an aesthetic choice and cultural commentary, the chapter argues that that the possibility of a seamless reconciliation of Africa in African American art is impossible. Where the limited scholarly discourse on the subject has emphasized a heritage-based relationship between Black artists and Africa, this project's cross-cultural approach is one of the first to consider the relationship between Africa and Black artists that goes beyond looking for African retentions in African American culture. In doing so the project also suggests an alternative to the internationalization of American artists in African, rather than European terms. Moreover, though Jones is broadly cited within African American art history beyond monographic considerations her work has yet to be critically examined particularly in regards to larger debates concerning blackness and the African Diaspora.</p> / Dissertation

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