Yayoi Kusama is undoubtedly one of the most esteemed artists today, and yet she is continually written off as "crazy." Kusama's work draws not from insanity, but from her experiences with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and acts as a tool to both process and temper her obsessions and compulsions. In my own work, I reflect on the necessarily obsessive faculty of hand-drawn animation, in an effort to communicate the feeling of OCD.

Darbo vadovas: prof. dr. Ieva Kuizinienė Darbas parengtas: 2014 m. Vilniuje Darbo apimtis: 149 puslapiai su priedais, 3 lentelės, 12 paveikslų Darbo aktualumas: Jaunųjų menininkų problema šiandien yra ypatingai aktualizuojama. 2013 m. Viešosios politikos ir vadybos institutas atliko „Jaunų menininkų socialinės ir kūrybinės padėties Lietuvoje tyrimą“. Pastarasis parodė valstybės politikos fromavimo būtinumą, orientuojantis į pagalbą jaunųjų menininkų karjeros formavime. Pastebimas ir suaktyvėjusi meno edukacija jaunųjų menininkų kūrinių įsigijimo klausimais – 2014 m. – galerija „Vartai“ kartu su meno ir edukacijos centru „Rupert“ organizavo ketvirtąją „Art Mantica“ paskaitų ciklo pranešimą „Nuo meno mėgėjo iki kolekcionieriaus“. Pranešimą skaitė meno patarėja Francesca Ferrarini. Darbo tikslas: Išanalizuoti Vilniaus dailės akademijos vaidmenį, skatinant sėkmingą vizualiųjų menų studentų integraciją į šiuolaikinio meno rinką, pateikti siūlymus ir rekomendacijas, padėsiančias Vilniaus dailės akademijai siekti efektyvesnių rezultatų skatinant sėkmingą jaunųjų menininkų karjerą ir ugdant savivadybos gebėjimus. Darbo uždaviniai: 1. Išanalizuoti šiuolaikinio meno rinkos sąrangą. 2. Išanalizuoti Lietuvos šiuolaikinio meno rinkos specifiką. 3. Nustatyti jaunųjų menininkų integracijos į šiuolaikinio meno rinką problemtaiką Lietuvoje. 4. Atlikti kiekybinį Vilniaus dailės akademijos vizualiųjų menų studentų (tiek iš Vilniaus, tiek ir iš Kauno fakultetų) tyrimą – elektroninę apklausą... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Thesis supervisors: prof. dr. Ieva Kuizinienė Work prepared in Vilnius, 2014 Relevance of the work: 149 pages with appendixes, 3 tables, 12 pictures The relevance of the work: The nowadays-young artists’ issue is being especially underlined. In 2013 ‘Public Policy and Management Institute’ conducted a research analysing young artists social and creative status in Lithuania. It highlighted state policy’s necessity in forming young artists careers. It can also be observed that society is being educated regarding the acquisition of young artists’ pieces of works. In 2014 ‘Galerija Vartai’ alongside arts and education centre ‘Rupert’ organized the fourth ‘Art Mantica’ lecture series report: ‘From art lover to the collector’. The report was read by art advisor Francesca Ferrarini. Work tasks: 1. To analyse the structure of contemporary art market. 2. To determine the specifics of Lithuania’s contemporary art market. 3. To set the problems in Lithuania regarding young artists integration into the contemporary art market. 4. Perform a quantitative research on Vilnius Academy of Visual Arts students (both in Vilnius and Kaunas faculties) - an electronic survey. Employ the findings of the research to identify the challenges and opportunities associated with the students’ integration into the contemporary art market. 5. To perform a qualitative research analysing in-depth interviews with three different art market target groups: 1) Vilnius Academy of Arts staff and students; 2)... [to full text]

In this thesis I suggest that the work of the four contemporary poets studied manifests the vital role perceptual experience plays in the creation of literary texts. I engage primarily in the analysis of particular texts in order to argue for a shift in critical focus away from the explicit manipulation or exteriorization of the physical aspects of poetry (for example versification and explicit visual presentation) in order to concentrate on the role sensory aspects of thought play within it. Emphasis is therefore put on the way these poets draw from sensory experience, and the effect this has on the way their poetry functions. A shift away from traditional critical vocabulary is considered necessary in part due to the fact that discussions of the physical aspects of poetry often carry with them a variety of preconceptions concerning the nature of language, thought and the thinking subject. The tendency to pose dividing lines between mind and body, word and image, the physical and non-physical aspects of language has characterized the history of Western thought, and neither literature nor literary criticism have been exempt from the conceptual presuppositions inherent in such binary systems. Here, I consider how the work of Pierre Alferi, Valère Novarina, Anne Portugal and Christophe Tarkos transcends such dualisms, using the analysis of specific works to develop a critical approach that reflects their exploration of the ambiguity of the boundaries that separate different sorts of experience and means of expression. The thesis is therefore structured around the development of three concepts, ‘pensée-vue’, ‘pensée-voix’ and ‘pensée-toucher’, inspired directly by the texts studied, that are intended to indicate the vital role different forms of perception play in both the creation and experience of poetic texts. It is hoped that the development of an approach that emphasizes the connection between thought, perception and creativity will suggest the fertility of a shift in critical focus in domains beyond that of contemporary French poetry.

This thesis explores the development of the Bildungsroman in Italian narrative between 1980 and 2011 and focuses, as a case study, on seven novels by three contemporary writers: Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Sandro Veronesi, and Giuseppe Culicchia. By contrasting the idea of an end of the literary genre with the First World War, as theorised by Franco Moretti in The Way of the World (an influential study on the European Bildungsroman published in 1987), this research will aim to demonstrate that contemporary Italian literature still engages with the genre. However, this analysis will show that a traditional coming of age process is no longer possible in contemporary society and will propose a different perspective from which to observe the transition from youth to adulthood – and its representation – in Italy. Acknowledging that the postponement of adulthood has become a common trope to describe this process, this thesis will argue that, instead of a coming of age process, the male young protagonist of the novels selected faces a ‘delaying of age process’, a conscious choice to postpone his entry into an unwelcoming adult world. The first two chapters of this work will establish the methodological background on which the textual analysis conducted in the following two chapters will be based. Chapter One will develop along two complementary lines: on the one hand, by basing my discussion on Moretti’s study, I will trace the origins of the Bildungsroman and identify the elements of continuity and diversity between the traditional examples of the genre in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its evolution in the twentieth century. On the other hand, I will study the changes undergone by youth over the centuries, especially focusing on the shaping of male identity in the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapter Two will provide the socio-historical framework of this research, drawing a picture of contemporary Italy (from the aftermath of the Second World War), which will discuss the central issues against which the ‘delaying of age process’ will be analysed: generation, family, gender roles, work environment and consumption. In Chapters Three and Four, I will read the narrative texts selected as representing that ‘delaying of age’ trend which I will identify as a specifically Italian way of coming of age in contemporary society. By focusing on the relationship between the male protagonists and the ‘other’, the textual analysis will show new ways of conceiving the process of becoming a man in contemporary Italy.

Theatre is a location of cultures, the reflection of our daily lives, the present moment we are living. This thesis focuses on studying performances of the Hakka Contemporary Theatre created by female directors (Hakka and Non-Hakka) in Taiwan to observe how they combine western modern theatre forms with Hakka traditional and cultural elements and further transformed the specifics of Hakka culture on stage and represented various images of Hakka women. Through applying theories in relation to diaspora discourse, the hybridity of post-colonialism and postcolonial feminism and theatre study as the foundation of academic research, I attempted to critically examine the hybrid forms and development of the Hakka Contemporary Theatre to explore in depth the meaning of Hakka culture represented in theatre. In this thesis, I firstly offer performance analysis and draw on hybridity discourse and feminism in relation to post-colonial study to discuss three elements: the interaction and negotiated relationship between Hakka women (including female directors and the Hakka actresses), Hakka culture, and modern theatre forms. Furthermore, as part of my research, I critically reflect upon a practical performance project I have undertaken to illustrate how Hakka culture could be presented as subject and be constructed as the subjectivity of the Hakka ethnic group in post-colonial Taiwan. I hope that this thesis may encourage more Taiwanese to appreciate the value of Hakka culture and offer Taiwanese theatrical practitioners a practice of critical hybridity in associating ethnic and cultural issues of Taiwan in the future.

This thesis is concerned with extending the role that live performance might play in our understanding of the work of the interrelated avant-garde performance communities that emerged in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s. This is a practice-led project that uses my own performance work as the site of its enquiry. In the last decade performance itself has begun to play a significant role in our understanding of and relationship to past performances, in the main through the increasing pervasion of re-enactment as an acknowledged historiographical trope. However, as a consequence of its association with re-enactment, the nature of the historiographical role afforded to performance is still primarily determined by its proximity to the archive and institutionalised modes of performance history. Challenging the primacy of the re-enactment as a means of embodied engagement with past performance, this research project explores how manipulation of my own performance practice might generate new forms of historical knowledge. In particular my focus is on using this practice to develop a new understanding of how the work of this earlier period altered y the experience of the urban landscape for those participating in the work, audience and performers alike. Structured around a rigorous analysis of three specific works from across this earlier period, I conceived a series of spatial ‘blueprints’ that were applied to my practice to create three new performance pieces. Using my own research and practice to renegotiate the relationship between live performance and the archive, I demonstrate the possibility for a new historiographical approach to past performance. This approach emphasises the role of the participants in the performance as generators of an alternative form of historical understanding embedded in ways of operating in the city.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how God and Moses are depicted in three contemporary American film adaptions of The Exodus story. The films I have analyzed are: The Ten Commandments (2006), The Bible: Exodus (2013) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). For this, I have used a content analysis and Bruce Lincoln’s theory of religious maximalism and minimalism. This study has shown that the first two films are characterized by an almighty God who helps Moses from the very first step, while the third gives a more scientific explanation of e.g. the ten pledges and the crossing of the Red Sea. While God in The Bible: Exodus (2014) is also portrayed as a god who acts out of love and compassion for his people, this is not the case in the other two films which instead portray him in a much more negative light. My conclusion is therefore that these three films do not only differ in how God and Moses are depicted but that they provide us with different messages about God and religion in general.

Contemporary cultural practices sometimes appear dispassionate, distant and clinical—committed to conceptualism or formalism. Yet works by Jacques Roubaud and Jacques Jouet (both members of the Oulipo, a group of experimental writers in France that use formal and mathematical constraints to generate new literary forms) suggest a complex relationship between epistemology and affect. This thesis argues that contemporary literary and artistic projects that appropriate the tropes of clinical procedure and experimental constraint, suggest alternative forms of knowledge that implicate the body and emotions of the experiencing subject. In these projects, affect and emotion travel through reason, logic, system and constraint and are transformed in the process. Therefore any analysis of forms of affect in these works must also consider the procedural and scientific aspect, that which makes them "projects". My research, drawing on recent work that places emphasis on affect, considers these projects as test cases often mediating between a series of dichotomies such as reason/emotion and mathematics/poetry. Curiously it is in the encounter with epistemological systems that the value of affect, embodiment and subjectivity is underscored, and this thesis interrogates the various ways that contemporary projects articulate affect almost despite themselves. By passing through a scientific impulse to inquire about and test the validity of epistemological systems, these projects underscore the role of affect in producing knowledge. This thesis insists on the continued importance of the Oulipo in contemporary culture and seeks to provide a larger, interdisciplinary context for oulipian experimentation by analysing similar works in the visual arts. This thesis has four chapters, each based on the materials that the projects themselves investigate: 1) numbers and mathematics, 2) lists, collection, and census-data, 3) itineraries and travel, 4) weather and meteorology. Projects bear witness to what the poet Lyn Hejinian has called the romance of science: its rigor, patience, thoroughness and speculative imagination (Mirage, 1983, 24) In so doing, these projects reveal forms of affect that only emerge through this 'weird science' as literary and artistic experiments.

This thesis analyses the representation of so-called human curiosities in recent visual art, by drawing a connection to historical practices of exhibiting 'monstrous' and deformed bodies within institutions such as freak shows, anatomical collections and medical museums. The last two decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in the histories of these institutions, particularly through the work of Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, Richard Sandell and Samuel J.M.M Alberti, whose research can be situated in interdisciplinary humanities fields such as disability studies, museology, history of science and literary and visual studies. Concurrently, a remarkable number of contemporary artists have also turned to the history and imagery of these spaces to explore the politics of display in exhibitions of non-normative bodies. This study addresses the critical gap between these two parallel domains of inquiry, drawing upon recent studies concerning historical exhibitions of monstrous bodies to analyse how contemporary artists have simultaneously confronted and extended these traditions through their artworks. In order to show that the very notion of 'monstrous bodies' is inextricably bound up in the curious display practices that frame them, I analyse the representation of human curiosities in the work of Zoe Leonard, Joanna Ebenstein, Diane Arbus, Mat Fraser, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Marc Quinn and John Isaacs. Each chapter examines a distinct institutional context – the anatomical collection, the freak show, the art gallery, and the contemporary medical museum – to investigate how these artists challenge the meanings conferred upon extraordinary bodies within each space, bestowing new significance upon these forms within the context of their various art practices. I argue that, by doing so, artists themselves can take on roles like curious collectors, freak show talkers and teratologists, revealing the potential for 'art' to act as yet another display framework that imposes a particular set of meanings onto anomalous bodies.

Museums are culturally constructed as places dedicated to tastemaking, preservation, historical record, and curation. Yet the contemporary isn’t yet absorbed by history, so as museums incorporate contemporary art these commonly accepted functions are disrupted. Through case studies, this thesis examines the successes and failures of three New York museums (MoMA, Dia:Beacon and New Museum) as they grapple with the challenging, perhaps irresolvable, tension between the contemporary and the very idea of the museum.