A presente investigação examina a atuação de duas instituições museológicas paulistas o MASP e o MAC USP enfocando os pensamentos e práticas de seus dirigentes Pietro Maria e Lina Bo Bardi e Walter Zanini especialmente entre fins da década de 1960 e início da década de 1970. Através do estudo de textos desses diretores e de exposições por eles concebidas junto a essas instituições busca-se entender como suas concepções de arte e museu foram colocadas em prática. O frutífero histórico de ações e reflexões que envolveram as atuações do casal Bardi no MASP e de Zanini no MAC USP compuseram nessas instituições ambientes condizentes com a ideia de museu entendido como espaço vivo e atento à manutenção do diálogo com as suas funções sociais e com a dinâmica do meio no qual está inserido. / This research examines the performance of two museological institutions in São Paulo MASP and MAC USP focusing on the thoughts and practices of their directors Pietro Maria and Lina Bo Bardi and Walter Zanini especially between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Through the study of these directors texts and exhibitions designed by them in these institutions we seek to understand how their conceptions of art and museum were put into practice. The fruitful historic of actions and reflections involving the actings of the couple Bardi in MASP and Zanini in MAC USP composed in these institutions environments harmonized with the idea of the museum understood as living space and attentive to the maintenance of the dialogue with its social functions and with the dynamics of the environment in which it is inserted.

Esta dissertação tem por objetivo analisar o trabalho artís tico Projeto para a Ocupação de uma Casa, realizado dentro do programa de mestrado em Poéticas Visuais entre 2004 e 2005. Através desse trabalho pretendeu-se compreender e aprofundar o interesse no ambiente doméstico presente na produção que o antecedeu. Para isso, foi feita uma revisão crítica dessa produção, onde foram identificados os principais assuntos, recursos e problemas que formaram o interesse no ambiente doméstico. Essa revisão constitui a primeira parte desta dissertação. Na segunda parte, é analisado o Projeto. Partindo de um conjunto de referências prioritariamente literárias, uma série de objetos foi elaborada para ocupar cada um dos cômodos de uma casa escolhida, de modo que, ao percorrê-la, uma narrativa de caráter ficcional se formava. No texto, verificam-se as intenções e resultados de cada peça e ambiente; se elas cumpriram a meta de aprofundamento e entendimento da questão doméstica, as suas soluções formais, os sentidos que engendraram e o papel que desempenharam na constituição da narrativa. / The objective of this thesis is to analyze the art work Project for the Occupation of a House, which was developed within the masters program in Visual Poetics, between 2004 and 2005. The thesis has aimed at understanding and deepening the interest in the domestic environment that was present in the production that preceded it. In order to achieve this, a critical review of the production was carried out, in which the main subjects, resources and problems involved in the interest in the domestic environment were identified. This review constitutes the first part of the thesis. In the second part, the Project is analyzed. With the background of a number of primarily literary references, a series of objects was elaborated to occupy each of the rooms of a chosen house, in a way that as the house was visited, a narrative of fictional character was formed. In the text, the intentions and results of each piece and surrounding are checked: whether or not they have achieved the result of deepening the understanding of the domestic question, their formal solutions, the meanings that were generated, and the role they played in the cons titution of the narrative.

The current culture of commodity fetishism that surrounds both modern art and tattoos are disproportionately a part of the perpetuation of an artificial sense of society and community. It promotes the notion that by simply by inking the deeper layers of their skin or by spending millions on a painting that somehow one becomes elevated and enters an elite space, or club, of people like them.

As the artwork’s title suggests, Penelope Umbrico’s "Mirrors (from Home Décor Catalogs and Websites)" (2001-2011), are photographs of mirrors that Umbrico has appropriated from print and web based home décor advertisements like those from Pottery Barn or West Elm. The mirrors in these advertisements reflect the photo shoot constructed for the ad, often showing plants or light filled windows empty of people. To print the "Mirrors," Umbrico first applies a layer of white-out to everything in the advertisement except for the mirror and then scans the home décor catalog. In the case of the web-based portion of the series, she removes the advertising space digitally through photo editing software. Once the mirror has been singled out and made digital, Umbrico then adjusts the perspective of the mirror so that it faces the viewer. Finally, she scales the photograph of the mirror cut from the advertisement to the size and shape of the actual mirror for sale. By enlarging the photograph, she must increase the file size and subsequent print significantly, which distorts the final printed image thereby causing pixelation, otherwise known as “compression artifacts.” Lastly, she mounts these pixelated prints to non-glare Plexiglas both to remove any incidental reflective surface effects and to create a physical object. What hangs on the wall, then, looks like a mirror in its shape, size and beveled frame: the photograph becomes a one-to-one representation of the object it portrays. When looking at a real mirror, often the viewer is aware of either a reflection of the self or a shifting reflection caused by his or her own movement. However, the image that the "Mirror" ‘reflects’ is not the changing reflection of a real mirror. Nor is it a clear, fixed image of the surface of a mirror. Instead the "Mirrors" present a highly abstract, pixelated surface to meet our eyes. The "Mirrors" are physical objects that merge two forms of representation into one: the mirror and the photograph, thus highlighting similarities between them as surfaces that can potentially represent or reflect almost anything. However, in their physical form, they show us only their pixelation, their digitally constructed nature. Penelope Umbrico’s "Mirrors" are photographs of mirrors that become simultaneously photograph and mirror: the image reflected on the mirror’s surface becomes a photograph, thus showing an analogy between the two objects. In their self-reflexive nature, I argue that Umbrico’s "Mirrors" point to their status as digital photographs, therefore signaling a technological shift from analog to digital photography. Umbrico’s "Mirrors," in altering both mirrors and photographs simultaneously refer to the long history of photography in relation to mirrors. The history of photography is seen first through these objects by the reflective surface of the daguerreotype which mirrored the viewer when observing the daguerreotype, and because of the extremely high level of detail in the photographic image, which mirrored the photographic subject. The relation to the history of photography is also seen in the phenomenon of the mirror within a photograph and the idea that the mirror’s reflection shows the realistic way that photographs represent reality. Craig Owens calls this "en abyme," or the miniature reproduction of a text that represents the text as a whole. In the case of the mirror, this is because the mirror within the photograph shows how both mediums display highly naturalistic depictions of reality. I contend that as an object that is representative of the photographic medium itself, the shift from analog to digital photography is in part seen through the use of the mirror that ultimately creates an absent referent as understood through a comparison of Diego Velázquez’s "Las Meninas" (1656). As Foucault suggests that "Las Meninas" signals a shift in representation from the Classical age to the Modern period, I suggest that the "Mirrors" signal the shift in representation from analog to digital. This latter shift spurred debate among photo history scholars related to the ontology of the photographic medium as scholars were anxious that the ease of editing digital images compromised the photograph’s seeming relationship to truth or reality and that it would be impossible to know whether an image had been altered. They were also concerned with the idea that computers could generate images from nothing but code, removing the direct relationship of the photograph to its subject and thereby declaring the “death” of the medium. The "Mirrors" embody the technological phenomenon with visual addition of “compression artifacts,” otherwise known as pixelation, where this representation of digital space appears not directly from our own creation but as a by-product of digital JPEG programming. In this way they are no longer connected to the subject but only to the digital space they represent. As self-reflexive objects, the "Mirrors" show that there has been a technological transformation from the physically made analog photograph to the inherently mutable digital file.

Dans un Beyrouth en pleine mutation, les habitats délaissés sont des lieux en suspens, condamnés à terme par la spéculation foncière. Notre recherche se propose d’examiner les transformations subies par ces architectures hors d’usage. Basé sur le terrain (près de 750 édifices répertoriés), les archives, témoignages et histoires orales, le travail réévalue également les pratiques artistiques et les regards qu’elles ont posé sur la ville. Cette imprégnation est d’autant plus importante que son déclencheur est un projet photographique entamé par l’auteur sur ce sujet. Trois chapitres sont consacrés aux interventions guerrières. Le premier, la bataille des hôtels aborde un espace disputé, le second explore la ligne de démarcation et le troisième s’intéresse aux baraquements, prisons et lieux de torture. Le quatrième chapitre réunit habitats informels, squats et autres réappropriations. Ces fonctionnalités qui s’enchevêtrent découlent de flux migratoires consécutifs à des violences. La guerre, plutôt les guerres, restent en toile de fond. / In a rapidly changing Beirut, neglected dwellings are places in abeyance, condemned to disappear as a result of land speculation. Our research aims at examining the transformations that these obsolete architectures undergo. The study, carried on site (nearly 750 buildings have been identified), based on archives, testimonies and oral history, also re-examines artistic endeavours and the way artists have viewed the city, which is particularly important considering that its trigger has been a photographic project undertaken by the author. Three chapters are devoted to belligerent activities. The first, on the “Battle of the hotels”, addresses contested space; the second explores the demarcation line and the third examines the military barracks, prisons, and torture centres. The fourth covers informal dwellings, squatted buildings and other reappropriations. It observes the background of entangled features stemming from migration flows that were triggered by the violence of war, or rather wars.

This thesis presents a theoretical and historical account of how artists have responded to politics of democracy since the late-1980s. Three questions guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: why, during its apparent apotheosis in recent years, have numerous artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? Secondly: how have artists undertaken this critique? Thirdly, and most importantly: what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy that they critique? Particular case studies of art from Europe help us to address these questions, for Europe has been an important crucible for vociferous, and often fraught, arguments about democracy in recent aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses. The first chapter of this thesis rigorously contextualises these discourses in relation to historical mobilisations of democracy since the Iron Curtain??s collapse. Relying on writings by Pat Simpson, Slavoj ??i??ek, Alain Badiou and Mario Tronti, I chart the significant imbrications of political ideology, philosophy and what I call ??aesthetics of democratisation?? from the end of European communism, through the democratisations of postcommunism to the militarised democratisations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Notions of democracy shift and change during this period, becoming what ??i??ek calls a problematic ??transcendental guarantee?? of assumed values and self-legitimation. These shifting values in turn propel the concurrent critiques of democracy that are the subjects of the five subsequent chapters: Ilya Kabakov??s ??total?? installations; Neue Slowenische Kunst??s mimicry of the nation-state during the 1990s; Thomas Hirschhorn??s large-scale works from the late-1990s onwards; Christoph B??chel and Gianni Motti??s collaborative ventures; and the co-operative practices of Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Through examination of the artists?? installations and voluminous writings, and based primarily on archival research and interviews, this thesis examines how their aesthetic politics emerge from the remobilisation of nonconformist art histories, through self-instituted contexts and alternative models for art production, exhibition and interpretation. These models, I argue, counter our usual understandings of art practice and its politics in Europe. They cumulatively assert ??postsocialist aesthetics?? as an impertinent, yet urgent, prism through which to analyse contemporary art.

Using the vehicle of hand drawn animation, this is an ongoing reflection of instances that repeat themselves to a point beyond the humorous and back. The Myth of Sisyphus 'The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back on its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there was no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.' Albert Camus- The Myth of Sisyphus By observing and illustrating assiduous daily gestures and events our absurd hero is revealed: this protagonist, be it object or human consciously and often unconsciously lives within a relentless finite experience. As the same moment is duplicated, the

Possibly, Maybe is an exhibition of polychromatic, process-based objects made out of acrylic paint. Working with and against the limits of the material, the paint is systematically cast, peeled, and stretched colour by colour transforming it into three-dimensional hybrid forms. The working process I devise is predetermined and regulated, yet the element of chance is integral to the work due to material constraints. I explore the sculptural potential and plasticity of a material traditionally used for painting. While acrylic is a relatively new material, designed to be durable and long lasting, the forms I create out of acrylic paint are vulnerable to climate, gravity, and time and therefore counter plastic’s perceived resilience. Possibly, Maybe looks within the marginalized and the failed of our everyday, and uses these as aesthetic elements, which can constitute contemporary cultural potential. Through an engagement with the fallibility of plastic, with the hybridity of artistic practice, and the excess, opulence, and decay of the Baroque, my work plays with the paradoxes and relationships between the high and the low, pure and impure, precious and throw-away, which I find are all elements that exemplify our contemporary culture.

This thesis examines the use and promotion of shamanic themes in contemporary Canadian Inuit art, being the principle venue in which Inuit identity is presented to non-Inuit in Canada and internationally. The image of Inuit identity promoted through the arts since the mid-twentieth century is arguably the product of non-Inuit state authorities, but Inuit artists themselves are increasingly asserting their voice in their arts and crafts, thereby challenging the image of Inuit identity to non-Inuit. This project first problematizes the history of contemporary Inuit art, where the construction of Inuit identity was heavily prescribed, and then turns to the shifts occurring in Inuit art to highlight the process of identity construction and the agency of Inuit within it. In the process, this project challenges the static conceptualization of minority identities in diverse societies by both state authorities and majority populations. This dissertation contends that Inuit art and identity are fluid concepts and there must be an emphasis made to permit for their fluidity, to avoid affirming a static minority identity in a diverse society, whether in the public or state forums. Consequently, the effort to assert the authenticity of these intangible concepts is contrary to the ideals of diversity and equality promoted in Canada.

The collection of paintings and drawings constituting the thesis exhibition The Anxious Actor are rooted within the visual language of contemporary realist figurative painting and drawing, with a focus on the male body. Traditionally in western culture, the depiction of the human form, both male and female, has sought to reinforce hierarchical constructions and meta-narratives implicit in religious and imperialistic structures. I paint and draw my own body as subject, exploring personal narratives that contradict these pre-existing notions. As a queer man interested in the vocabulary of realist figurative painting, my body is a catalyst for my fascination with stereotypic masculine portrayals.<p> Utilizing historic themes of male bravado, heroism and narcissism I juxtapose the mundane realities of everyday contemporary life. My narratives are situated within the complex visual languages of Neo-classical, Baroque, Rococo and Renaissance style painting. These specific pictorial vocabularies add both psychological and metaphoric weight to my conceptual process; locating my marginalized identity within historic and contemporary archetypes.