La ricerca ha individuato come elemento specifico d'interesse la ricostruzione storico-critica delle relazioni artistiche tra Italia e Germania, nel periodo compreso tra il 1918 e il 1925, nel corso del quale sono stati riscontrati gli episodi più rilevanti e i momenti originanti di sviluppi significativi per gli artisti, i galleristi e gli intellettuali coinvolti in queste relazioni. La ricostruzione storica delle vicende espositive, bibliografiche, documentarie, che hanno costituito il tessuto attraverso il quale si sono sviluppati e intrecciati i percorsi dei due ambiti culturali, è stata arricchita dall'individuazione e dall'approfondimento di alcuni aspetti e tematiche che si sono riconosciuti come ricorrenti e fondanti il dialogo artistico tra Italia e Germania nel corso del periodo preso in esame. Il primo capitolo si concentra sul quadro di riferimento storico-critico e sulle figure di mediatori che ne hanno permesso gli scambi, mentre il secondo sull'ambito delle relazioni tra Valori Plastici e la Germania. Il terzo capitolo ricostruisce le vicende di alcuni artisti tedeschi che nel periodo in questione soggiornano in Italia (Georg Schrimpf, Carlo Mense, Alexander Kanoldt, Christian Schad). L'ultimo capitolo accenna invece ad alcune ipotesi di analisi comparativa, che testimoniano del comune terreno di ricerca. / This research has been considering as a specific element of interest the historical-critical reconstruction of the artistic relationships between Italy and Germany in the period 1918-1925. During these years, it has recognized the most relevant episodes and the originating moments for meaningful developments in the following decades, for artists, galleries, intellectuals involved in these relationships. The historical reconstruction of exhibitions, publications, documents, which determined the environment for the courses of the two cultural surroundings to develop and intertwine, has been enriched by the identification and study of some aspects and themes recognized as recurring and founding for the artistic dialogue between Italy and Germany in the analyzed period. The first chapter focuses on the historical-critical frame of reference and on the figures of mediators who allowed these exchanges, while the second concentrates on the relationships between Valori Plastici and Germany. The third chapter reconstructs the Italian stays of some German artist who reside in Italy during this period (Georg Schrimpf, Carlo Mense, Alexander Kanoldt, Christian Schad). The last chapter proposes some hypotheses for comparative analysis, that testify the common ground of research.

Rezeption und Produktion sind im Medium Buch seit jeher eng miteinander verbunden. Nicht nur die Texte in einem Buch gelten als zitierfähig, sondern jedes seiner Elemente, wie die Abbildungen, die Typografie, sogar das Material eines Buches. Um selbst auch „zu produzieren“, sind dafür natürlich Orte wichtig, an denen man auf das bereits Produzierte Zugriff hat: zum Beispiel Bibliotheken.

My master's thesis explores the photographic series "This Land is Mime Land," which Shelley Niro made in 1992. Despite this work's complex form and structure, there are currently no sustained studies of this series alone, or books solely dedicated to Niro's art. Instead, "Mime Land" is often discussed in compilations that address a number of Native artists, Western feminist practices, or multiple works in Niro's oeuvre. My thesis fills this gap, as I closely investigate how "Mime Land" asks the viewer to look at visual culture, histories and Niro herself. Bell hooks's definition of the "oppositional gaze" - meaning a way of looking that challenges the conventions of visual culture by implementing the media's tools (film and photography) to construct new images of self - provides the framework for my analysis. Specifically, I contend that the subject, form and structure of "Mime Land" critically intervene in mainstream visual culture by asking the viewer to look at Native American women's identities, cultures and histories in new ways; ways that disavow the conventions of dominant visual representations and return the power over one's image to Niro, her family and community. My study demonstrates this thesis through a close consideration of the context contemporary to the work's production; a detailed examination of the photographs in the series; and an analysis of the work's overall structure.

From 1972 until 1989, the artist trio General Idea produced FILE Megazine. The first eight issues of FILE, published from 1972 – 1975, are the focus of this thesis. They stand apart from the later issues because their covers hijacked the look and iconic logo of Life magazine. The red rectangle with white block letters attracted the attention of Time Inc. and resulted in a lawsuit. Rather than fight the corporate giant, General Idea changed their logo after the autumn 1975 issue. FILE, like many artists’ magazines, is typically discussed in idealistic language that privileges the subversive or democratic intentions of the publication while neglecting its significance as a device for the promotion of community and collaboration. I argue that General Idea envisioned FILE as a utopian project intended to produce the world they sought to live in. Authors frequently employ FILE as a tool to discuss General Idea’s work, focusing on it as a mirror or archive of a larger project and emphasizing FILE’s humorous, bawdy, and irreverent aspects. In this thesis, I situate FILE in terms of its historical, art historical, and theoretical frameworks. I pay particular attention to General Idea’s early involvement in the mail art network, FILE’s relationship to 1960s and 1970s artists’ magazines and magazine art, the contemporaneous social and political climate in Canada, and General Idea’s investigation and employment of theoretical frameworks culled from Marshall McLuhan’s text The Medium is the Message and Roland Barthes’ book Mythologies. / text

In 2009, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) brought together teens and educators from exemplary museum teen programs for an unprecedented event, the National Convening for Teens in the Arts (NCTA). Prior to the Convening the ICA Teen Arts Council engaged participants in four weeks of discussions hosted on an online conversation platform. Since the 2009 event, the museum has continued to engage participants in online conversations prior to the Convening. This study examines the role of technology in the teens' experience at the 2011 National Convening for Teens in the Arts through a synthesis of interviews conducted with key educators associated with the Convening and ICA, observations, and document analysis. This research additionally examines how technology impacted the Convening as a whole. The following shows how the online conversations sparked conference dialogues and enabled the teen-driven and teen-focus environment present throughout the Convening. Also, the online conversations helped to develop a community amongst conference participants, educators and teens alike. / text

As an interdisciplinary project that integrates African and African American Studies, critical race theory, and Art History, this dissertation attempts to enrich our understanding of the politics of difference in contemporary art by interrogating the formal practices of artists and the social significance of their work. The artwork discussed reflects a pattern of creative engagement with archival institutions and documents that is characteristic of contemporary artists who are concerned with questions of consumption and the body; representation and erasure; the social construction of race and space; and the relationship between history, memory, and identity. Taken together, these themes constitute a discursive landscape within contemporary art that is central to the principle question raised here—namely, how do social genres of difference and relations of power influence artistic practices of representation, curatorial display, and reception? In an attempt to both answer and reverse the direction of this question, this text presents insightful perspectives from different artists on the complex relationship between art and society. Using the politics of difference as a lens through which to examine the aforementioned themes in contemporary art, I argue that the artists under consideration are transforming the meaning of race in post-slavery societies throughout the black diaspora. Through various creative practices, these artists are shifting the terms, coordinates, and representations of difference seen in the archive in order to reimagine the language of identity in the twenty-first century. Fundamentally, their work challenges the way certain bodies are recognized—compelling us, as viewers, to reinterpret the past from alternative and critical perspectives. Moreover, by focusing on the disclosure of a black presence in western cultures through the comparative formal and historical analysis of contemporary works of art that call our attention to misrepresentation, commodification, invisibility, and displacement, this dissertation contributes to developing conversations about how contemporary artists challenge dominant narratives and representational aesthetics. Through their work, these artists expand our conception of the archive—disclosing the overlapping ways in which objects, images, words, signs, ideas, ads, bodies, and spaces register social and historical meaning through the demarcation of racialized difference. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how art can transform the way we see and represent ideas of difference, and therein, the way we see and represent ourselves. / African and African American Studies

The task of this dissertation is to assess the historical conditions that permitted Jenny Holzer to formulate a practice premised on language and conceptions of public space to break from historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde practices. My aim is to demonstrate the recourses sought by Holzer—through language, collaboration, and form—to reveal the operations of repression at work in the public spaces of place and language in particular moments of crises at the end of a—and at the ruined start of a new—century: the economic collapse of the late 1970s, the AIDs crisis, and the wars on terror following the events of September 11, 2001. The exemplary projects that I study in this dissertation—from her Truisms posters in downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s, to her collaborative work with The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince, and Winters, to her work with electronic signs and stone sarcophagi to address the AIDS crisis at its most dire period in 1987-89, to her light projections whose moving impermanence reflect on the continuity of mourning as an activity—each demonstrate the impossibility of neutrality. Concentrating on works conceptualized for and realized (for the most part) in New York City over the course of a quarter century, my study uses the seeming consistency of geography, or at least the fixity of a longitudinal and latitudinal intersection, to indicate the seismic changes inflicted on the city and its residents by economic, legal, political, and violent actions—and, in the case of the AIDS crisis, criminal inaction. My dissertation argues that Holzer’s unflagging demonstration of threatened subjectivity is the necessary form of protest to an ever-more bureaucratized world. / History of Art and Architecture

The decentralization of cultural production in China coincided with the introduction of economic and political reforms in 1979. The subsequent shift from a system of state propaganda production towards a market-oriented dealer-critic system of cultural production required a wider range of expertise beyond deep knowledge of the Western modern art canon or domain expertise. This dissertation investigates how the field of contemporary Chinese art (CCA) is constituted and transformed through a division of labor that reflects varieties of expertise using empirical data from 89 in-depth interviews with leading cultural professionals working in the CCA field, historical archival records, and participant observation. The study revises the conventional conception that domain expertise consistently shapes cultural fields. The main finding is that the kinds of expertise used are associated with how the CCA field has developed over the past three decades. Cultural professionals mobilize non-cultural expertise as well as cultural capital to enlist international support for CCA, establish aesthetic value, and extend the boundaries of cultural organizations that filter and deliver CCA to a broad audience. These results reinforce the agency perspective in institutional studies. Individual actors drive change in the CCA field while being embedded within it. Overall, the transformation of the field of contemporary Chinese art encompasses pragmatic adaptations to environmental shifts in resource distribution, the availability of new technologies of cultural production, and wider political and economic transformations. / Sociology

Group Material's seventeen-year collaboration began in New York in 1979 through the artists' shared interests in collective, politicized practices and their immersion in a localized network of countercultural activities. While GM's cadre of participants shifted over time (from the dozen who launched its first year to a smaller core comprising Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Mundy McLaughlin, Félix González-Torres, and Tim Rollins), its practice developed a consistent aesthetic vocabulary in dialogue with major figures of 1980s art and with an eye to 1960s conceptualism and the Soviet avant-garde. GM threw open the class coordinates of art's public and introduced a distinct set of responses to the central problematics of 1980s art: the debates over representation, appropriation, painting, public space, and activism. / History of Art and Architecture

This study critically reviews four works of the artist Joanna Rytel with the intention to find out if and how she is provocative. In order to do that I have studied the reactions on these works, mainly through press material, which differs from letters to the editors and comments posted on discussion forums that's also been used. My conclusion is that Rytel provokes not just because of her choice of subject, but because of her concept of 'art' doesn't agree with the general public's, i.e. 'art' is supposed to be something merely beautiful. The journalists sometimes seems provoked by Rytel's ability to draw attention and have claimed that to be her main aim.