This thesis examines contemporary art projects that are installed in unconventional sites in urban neighbourhoods. Using the conceptual framework of the neighbourhood imaginary, I propose that these local art practices utilize neighbourhood spaces to engage with nation, identity and citizenship practices within the contemporary discourse of globalization. The three art projects I investigate address different aspects of neighbourhood. Cuban artist René Francisco Rodriguez’s (René Francisco) project, El Patio de Nin, foregrounds the citizen in an urban neighbourhood. His project merges creativity and pedagogy with social service, and blurs the boundaries between art and life in order to comment on social conditions and citizenship practices. The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (2006), by Toronto artist Iris Häussler, uses a home in an urban neighbourhood as a physical space in which to create an imaginary life to explore aspects of community, human behaviour and social values. The Swamp Ward Window, a Kingston-based curatorial project, takes advantage of the intimacy of the private home and the immediacy of the street to present artworks that explore the interface between public and private and everyday life in the community. Cornelius Castoriadis argues that the social imaginary emerges when the subconscious, the symbolic and action interact, not merely to reflect the outside world, but to create new meanings from which social change is possible. In my analysis, the neighbourhood imaginary resonates with the social imaginary, functioning as a conceptual laboratory for artists to experiment with the different meanings associated with neighbourhood, community and citizenship. I propose that a reengagement with the local, as part of a iii global discourse, provides an opportunity to examine art projects that manifest in neighbourhoods. And, while taking place in different socio-political circumstances, the shared condition of locality, I argue, provides a window through which the three projects envision linkages between aesthetic practices and public life. Finally, in order to critically consider local artistic practices in relation to globalization and the commodification of culture, this thesis engages those discourses of globalization that see culture as integral in new global economies. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2008-02-29 13:04:52.207

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Over the past decade, scholarly works have examined the plurality and diversity of men in relation to social practices of Arab cultures, while also examining discourses of violence, militarization and hegemonic masculinity in times of war and conflict. However, there has been little discussion and critical literature concerning non- heterosexual (or queer) representations of masculinities in the Arab world. Within such context, this dissertation addresses the emerging and shifting visual representations of ‘queer’ masculinities as they are artistically performed in the contemporary lens-based artworks of internationally recognized Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari. Much of the research on queerness in the Arab region risks falling into a colonialist and liberatory framework that seeks to discover an ‘authentic’ queer identity. Contrary to such approaches, I argue for the fluidity of a local queer Arab model of disidentification underpinning Zaatari’s artworks, which questions our perceived realities of both queerness and hegemonic masculinity in Post-Civil War Lebanon. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that integrates cross-cultural comparative and queer visual analysis, I locate Zaatari’s artworks within a larger sociocultural context, as well as within and in tension with existing feminist and contemporary art discourses on the body, identity, and performativity. By examining visual and textual representations of local queer masculinities, this dissertation engages in dynamic discussions on the process of masculinization and elaborates on its future cultural and artistic trends both in the Arab world and in Western countries.

The last three decades have seen the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca evolve to become an autonomous centre for the creation and promotion of contemporary art on state, national and international levels. The present research's original contribution to knowledge is the analytical investigation of an art movement's response to the political and technological effects characteristic of postmodernity and effected through globalisation. The research uses a hybrid theoretical framework that includes the work of: Fredric Jameson to discuss postmodernism; Nelly Richard to characterise a postmodern Latin America; Homi K. Bhabha to analyse the postcolonial context and the creation of agency; and, inherent to this structure and the context, the work of Néstor García Canclini. The theoretical investigation is supported by ethnography that ascertains how hybrid political thought and community altruism characterise the Oaxacan art community and the aesthetic expression practised by a new generation of its members. Oaxacan contemporary art is based on the success of the post-Rupture primitivist magical realism practised originally by important Oaxacan artists living and travelling in other locations. The most recent generation of contemporary artists in Oaxaca integrates with, upholds and promotes the model of cultural production that is now inextricably intertwined with the local and wider communities. Participant observation and the analysis of the behaviour of the artists studied, focused the investigation on the efficient interaction between artists and collective action as an integrated sector of civil society. The research determines how the artists studied and the wider Oaxacan art community applies their knowledge of global communications and information technology to create and market a cultural product and promote a postmodern social and political perspective. Regarded as a solid sector of the local and regional community due to its national and international standing, the Oaxacan art community constructs political power from significant, direct involvement with micro-projects to engaging in partnerships with state and federal stakeholders in large-scale cultural endeavours. The research discusses projects instigated and undertaken by the artists studied, including the call for a pacifistic solution to the Oaxaca Conflict of 2006, a six-month socio-political uprising caused by actual and historic conditions in the national and regional Left-Right political duel. The strength of the art community is founded on necessary and reinforcing collective action in both artistic and altruistic projects; often combined through the direct use of art in the creation of funds and media-empowered support towards achieving a perceived common good that centres on the protection of identity and the political defence of diversity.

The movement of people and the fluxes of the world create complex topographies and destabilise the location of our homes. In this practice-based PhD, I explore the shifting sense of home that this manifests. The dramatic transformation of the boundaries of home that demarcates the borders between ‘here’ and ‘there’, “us” and ‘them’ is examined through an autoethnographically informed approach, which takes the researcher’s self as a medium as well as a source of research. Based on personal experience, the changing nature of ‘home’ is studied as it is anchored into the self, adopting an approach that studies the cultural through the personal. In this research, the methods of research are: strategies of observing, attending to the unsettling forces of the unfamiliar, documenting my personal responses on a daily basis, and unpacking some of the existing forms and practices that sustain ideas of belonging and proposing new forms of expression to this unhomely feeling. In this study, the objective is the study of the field (including the dissolving of the ground one is standing on) and the proposing new forms, new visions. This being the case, my methods come from the disciplines of autoethnography and art practice. Throughout my PhD, I aimed to negotiate the different means these two approaches work through their field that challenges the issues of representation, documentation and presentation in cultural inquiry. This thesis explores the transformation of the sense of home and my own sense of belonging based on personal experience. It is also a contribution to the discourse that has flourished between ethnography and contemporary art over the last two decades. The project is situated at the transdisciplinary site between artistic and ethnographic disciplines and reconsiders their mutual interest in the work of cultural inquiry. With a particular focus on the moment that inquiry meets its public, I explored other possibilities of “graphy” (writing) that conventionally translates as a descriptive, textual representation in ethnography. I strived to suggest alternative forms through the ways artistic inquiry work on its field that takes this moment of encounter as a crucial part of its process. Thus, the thesis is an account of these negotiations that complements the experiments in my art practice, through which I have explored the dialogue between the two distinctive approaches to inquiry.

The contemporary experience is profoundly rooted in the processes of remembering and recalling, recording and playing back. My work employs image and installation to speak of memory, nostalgia, and the integration of media and representation into experience. The rapid advancement of media technologies provides new immersive opportunities for the armchair traveler. Viewers may now be effortlessly transported across distances of time and space.

Arthur C. Danto introduced the term “disturbation” in 1985 to denote artworks that confront audiences with the materials of reality in order to produce reactions that are continuous with those of real life. Danto argued that disturbational art dissolve the distance between representation and reality opened up by Platonic metaphysics and by the insertion of theatrical distance, returning art to its mimetic and magical phase. The thesis uses Danto’s conceptual framework to develop a critical account of artworks that use politics as the medium for their disturbational content by creating relationships with audiences that provoke the re-realization of attitudes, experiences and identities that have been suppressed. In Shibboleth (2007) by Doris Salcedo, disturbation takes the form of the ‘political uncanny’ and in the case of Domestic Tension (2007) by Wafaa Bilal, it takes the form of the ‘political abject’. The thesis argues that Shibboleth confronted audiences with “the return of the repressed” through a disturbational process of interaction with the space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Departing from existing readings of Salcedo’s work, the thesis proposes that the installation provoked the experience of the political uncanny by physically enacting suppressed historical, economic and political divisions constructed upon a friend/enemy form of relationship. Likewise, the thesis argues that the use of virtual electronic media in the process of participation in Domestic Tension radically altered the structure of collaborative activities by its production of the abject through the detachment conferred by distance and anonymity. The degree of self-censorship and accountability that exists in face to face interactions was nullified by the process of remote participation which encouraged deindividuation and anti-social or dehumanizing behavior. The tendency towards dehumanization becomes intensified when the artwork’s content is political, thereby provoking hostile and distancing effects refracted by contemporary geopolitics.

This thesis offers a periodization of the present according to which contemporary art and visual culture are understood to be symptomatic of an increasingly pervasive pessimistic social, political and ecological outlook. This pessimism I will claim is what is authentically new about our contemporary cultural forms, which are directed towards a particular form of humour and stupidity. Core elements in the periodization include the limitation of imaginative horizons expressed in the well-known remark of Fredric Jameson’s that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as well as the pervasive sense that nature is in a state of perpetual and endemic crisis and the idea that modern computing technology is making us stupider than we have ever been before. I argue that these issues are symptomatic of what Gilles Deleuze, in 1990, termed the societies of Control – a world of corporate power, ubiquitous computing, data extraction and financial capitalism that has intensified since its early diagnosis. However, dominant narratives of art and visual culture continue to theorize artistic production according to traditionally avant-garde categories of resistance, criticality, transgression and subversion. This presumes art to have an agency that is difficult to imagine in the current social situation. In this respect, the thesis in part constitutes a critical reflection on the pressures placed upon our existing models of art and visual culture - for example, and centrally, the idea of an ‘avant-garde’ - by current social and technological conditions. Building on these observations, the thesis proposes a new model of contemporary art and visual culture that has no agency: images under control that are formed, as epiphenomena, by technological apparatuses of Control; studying examples such as extreme sports stunts, internet memes, online trolls, bad quality jpegs and impassive ‘artworks’. The purpose is to ask what value we can place on these emergent cultural forms, which seem to mirror, reflect and reiterate a pessimistic worldview deeply entrenched in the societies of Control.

The challenge of contemporary art, unlike in art history, has only recently been identified in sociology. Furthermore, an overly philosophical orientation, has undermined sociological expla- nations of artistic production. To remedy this, I propose a sociology of exhibitions. This entails a shift of focus from the elusive subject matter of art towards the tangible exhibition, and the construction of a new framework: the exhibitionary system, which also stands for the physical, institutional, and network environment of exhibitions. The central question in the sociology of exhibitions is to explain how the exhibitionary system shapes artistic production. The answer was sought by observing exhibition making in the Chinese exhibitionary system, from which quantitative data about 1,525 exhibitions, held in 43 exhibition spaces between 2010 and 2016, were also collected. I argue that the exhibition context shapes the physical basis of individual artworks and the construction of an artist's oeuvre. Through the contextualised creation of artworks for public viewing, artists aim to raise their visibility, which is crucial for artists' career prospects and symbolic consecration. An artist's visibility is, however, constrained by where she exhibits and with whom she co-exhibits. My method for measuring visibility reveals its binary nature, divided along a singular dimension and a collective dimension. Yet no binary division between the non- profit and for-profit is found within the exhibitionary system with regards to the selection of artists. Rather, both sectors contribute to a dual selection of marketable artists. A model of professional autonomy, which reconciles "art and the market" on the level of practices and awareness, prevails in the exhibitionary system. The sociology of exhibitions has solved persistent theoretical problems in the sociology of art. My empirical findings give rise to new research questions. Finally, I have offered a dialogue between studies of non-western and western cases within the same framework.

In this thesis, I address ephemeras - namely temporary displays in the form of festivals and exhibitions belonging to the field of contemporary art. The most appropriate criterion with which to select and discuss the ephemera, i.e., the data in which I analyse in this thesis, is the notion of the 'event'. 'Event' is a philosophical concept, and therefore does not belong to artistic or aesthetic categories. However, two main characteristics are particularly relevant in considering it, and these are also pertinent to the field of art. Firstly, the tandem contingency and necessity. Secondly, the fact that no one can control the reach and impact of an event, which is also the case with an artwork and its interpretation. In this thesis, I am creating a confrontation between what is usually described as abstract thought (a work of philosophy for example) and the production of contemporary art, which is so often culturally and economically dependent on the art market and hegemonic power structures such as institutions, as well as the apparatus of historians and experts to evaluate and legitimise it. Furthermore, it is also necessary to state my understanding of art. This latter has strong propinquities with that defined by Kant when he coined the term 'fine art', namely a cultivated, context-aware and sensitive art, one's reflection on which provides pleasure exceeding the pure enjoyment or satisfaction produced by erudition or technical virtuosity. Secondly, the artistic manifestations that I discuss are always produced by a collective, group or organisation of which I am part. Consequently, what unfolds is an organisational discourse originating in my praxis of art. Finally, the very fact that I am a member of the group of people whose activities are discussed leads logically to autoethnography, a field of inquiry that I am also contributing to.