Photographic, film and video representations of dying and dead subjects bring to light delicate balancing acts of agency involving representational perspective. In this thesis, I examine contemporary, lens-based artworks by Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Fischl (whose sculptural medium is an exception), Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Gillian Wearing, Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin, AA Bronson and Jorge Zontal, as well as works by photojournalists Richard Drew and Theresa Frare, to show how they effectively convey facets of identity to dying and dead subjects. The voice, visuality, touch and embodiment (in particular, the body's weight and its materiality) are considered dimensions of intersubjectivity in order to explore how they foster access to the dying or the dead. My hypothesis is that, despite the avenues of intersubjective agency that appear to be foreclosed to the dying and the dead, the artists negotiate the following, significant challenges: how to bear witness to suffering without enacting visual mastery; how to grant a voice to or engage in dialogue with a silenced subject; how to touch the other without inflicting injury. Through the artists' divergent representational paradigms, the terms of intersubjectivity will be shown to equally involve the potential for reverence as well as for representational violence and it is upon this duality that the ethical concern hinges. The degrees of photographic transparency invoked by the artists alter the emergence of identity and the extent to which it reflects the perspective of the dying and the dead or, alternatively, becomes a framework of distortion. In terms of subject matter, the causes of death to the subjects represented, all of which are non-fictional, are AIDS-related illness, falling from buildings and violence (sometimes self-inflicted). Conceptually, I will be relying upon the phenomenological models of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the photographic theories of Roland Barthes, the feminist met

The purpose of this creative project was to represent the structure and dynamics of the emotion of grief through a visual medium. Grief, as a process that occurs over time, is usually represented sequentially and verbally as in the writings of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. This project depicts the stages of grief by representing them both sequentially and simultaneously from a first person point of view by means of a visual medium, (i.e., videotape) in order to emotionally and personally involve the viewer in the process.The creative project is comprised of four video tapes each differing in length. of time between fifteen to thirtyfive minutes. The video tapes are presented as a documentary having a total of five participants who candidly express their experience with the death of a significant person in their lives and how they dealt with their grief. The four videos are shown all at the same time with the television monitors approximately twelve to fifteen feet apart.The video tapes are on file in the Art Department. / Department of Art

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-166).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 35).

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 53 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Art has very littlo to do with the dead. Death alone is the negation of creation, ,while art is a vital force, a deeply instinctive, everlasting, continual revitalisation. Art is life and nature and it lives in the realms of imagination, magic and mystery. Its language is the language of myth, and its aim is Truth. Art is action and reaction and is reached in silence by the artist alone and individually - its climate is solitude and its paths are as devious and labyrinthine as any the soul can follow in search of self-knowledge and the divine. Chap. 1, p. 1.

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The dissertation examines the appearance and meanings of corporeal anomaly in the arts of Postclassic Mexico (AD 900–1521). Drawing specifically upon those categories of the human or divine body that are regularly termed aberrant, grotesque, or otherwise “deformed” by scholars of Mesoamerican art, the images discussed here include dwarfs, hunchbacks, twins, animal-human hybrids, disfigured deities, and disembodied limbs, among others. While similarly distinctive images can be identified among earlier Mesoamerican artistic traditions, the variety of idiosyncratic bodies that pervade the arts of the Postclassic period, in addition to the breadth of available historical sources, make it the ideal lens through which to analyze many of the most fundamental issues of indigenous Mexican visual culture. Relative to Classic Maya art, a tradition of naturalism and linear elegance greatly resembling that of early modern European painting and sculpture, the art of the ancient Mixtecs, Toltecs, and Nahuas (Aztecs) is sometimes perceived as rigid, laconic, and hulking—even brutish—by comparison. Featuring complex figural abstractions and esoteric symbolism, these later traditions are further distinguished by the specificity of their physical deformations, including twisted faces, palsied limbs, contorted spines, extra appendages, and other unnatural anatomies. Consequently, Postclassic art offers an inventory of difference that is unique not only among Mesoamerican art but among Western traditions as well, making it doubly challenging to interpret its motivations and significance. However, by analyzing the role of such extraordinary bodies within the broader anthropocentric worldviews of ancient Mesoamerica, this study offers useful strategies for unpacking the complex religious, political, and formal motivations that govern much of Postclassic visual culture. As I argue, extraordinary bodies share a common identity as transformational characters occupying specifically transitory states. As shape-shifters, gatekeepers, divine conduits, and shepherds, it is in the liminal regions of existence—the “betwixt and between” of reality and myth—where such figures live and serve as the custodians of heaven and earth. With tremendous regularity, their irregular forms indicate and define the various “borderlands” of Mesoamerican ideology, from the hinterlands of the urban center to the margins and gutters of hand-painted books. In short, a distinctly Postclassic notion of physical deformation stands at the threshold between creation and dissolution, center and periphery, life and death.

“In the decomposition of organic/botanic materiality, decayed and decaying exotic weeds are printed and imprinted on the host vessel: The surviving trace becomes a code - a sign - a semiotic map = disjecta membra: being there ... then destroyed... but still remaining.” THE BODY OF VISUAL AND WRITTEN RESEARCH, 'DECOMPOSE', is a cross-disciplinary interrogation, interpreting overlapping meanings in the Botanical Biodegradation of Weeds through Visual Art/Science practices and processes expressed as Text +Paintings. DECOMPOSE validates the Act of Art, Botanical Biodegradation of Weeds, as both: I. An expression of the Subjective, Expansive and Ephemeral nature of Art, Artist and Materials and II. An incarnation of the nature of Time and Sublime Beauty, that articulates, and expands perceptions of Art, Artist and Materials as Text + Paintings. The 'equation': DECAY + WEEDS = BEAUTY expands to encompass key elements in the DECOMPOSE body of research: BOTANICAL BIODEGRADATION + AUSTRALIAN EXOTIC, FERAL and NOXIOUS WEED SPECIES + ARTIST + MATERIALS + ART + SCIENCE + TIME = DECAY-PAINTINGS = RESEARCH = SUBLIME BEAUTY Argued by quantitative and qualitative example, DECOMPOSE is at once: I. Subjective: a conceptual and translative process expressed through the personal vision of the artist. II. Expansive: an interrogation of a single process, at once finite and infinite in meanings and extractions. III. Ephemeral: investigations and results signifying the specific and universal decay of all things. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)