This thesis document serves as a support paper for my exhibition titled, Selected Work. The goal of this document is to present and discuss a set of ideas and interests as they pertain to my studio practice and thesis project in particular, and to contemporary (ie. current) art practices in general. In this document I examine selected works from Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Andy Kaufman, Maurizio Cattelan and Richard Prince. Through the exploration of these artists and their works, I begin by examining the object and the conditions that give it approval as an art object. Using these conditions, I examine the effect that experience has on the object. This support paper will serve as a glossary of terms and theoretical concerns relevant to my thesis exhibition / vi, 64 leaves : col. ill. ; 29 cm

Ceramics has always existed on the fringes of craft and high art. The purpose of this thesis project is to elevate clay beyond the traditions of craft by examining the historical use of clay and the everyday object. My research looks specifically at works by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Jasper Johns in order to examine the origin of displaying the massproduced object and reflecting upon it’s validity as high status art object. In this project I am also interested in infrastructural systems within modern architecture-- plumbing, wiring, heat ducts vents-- with a specific focus on systems lurking inside walls and how these function to influence architectural space. With the advent of modern plumbing, concealing these elements was adopted as the new standard and still exists today. Through the presentation of defamiliarized handmade objects, my exhibition presents the appearance of manufactured material through the serial manipulation of scale, surface and quantity. The result reveals a clay piece that renders the material unrecognizable providing the viewer with a new view on the object's tradition. / v, 47 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

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This dissertation draws upon Western literature in critical theory, aesthetics, art theory, and art history to explore how lying can foster aesthetic experience and the sociopolitical effects of this experience. It nominates the idea of pseudology—lying as an art—and outlines its distinguishing features from the dawn of postmodernism to contemporary practices. This study demonstrates an analysis of lying premised on an understanding of aesthetics as caught up in the wider issues of public pedagogy and everyday politics. Taking as case studies specific works of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, VALIE EXPORT, and Carol Duncan, this dissertation argues for the narrative framing of artwork as paramount for its reception. As well, by examining the artistic mystifications of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Joshua Schwebel, and Iris Häussler, this dissertation analyzes the use of pseudology in institutional critique. The study finds that perfidious practices can point to the importance of the relational boundary between what is real/unreal, highlight the social construction of this boundary’s aesthetic aspects, and reveal the ways in which each of us are active in the construction of a shared reality. Ultimately, our active framing of everyday life and the affective nature of our construction of a shared reality has been problematized by a contemporary prevalence of lying in the realms of public culture and politics. Pseudology reveals the power of narrative framing. The pseudological artworks discussed here expose, as models for the political aesthetic of lying, the need to debate the very tenets of reality constantly and continually—an essential civic action in the ethical, communal relationships of a democracy. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / An analysis of the use of lying as an artistic technique.

La condensation :un outil conceptuel pour la théorie de l’art / Résumé.<p><p>Notre étude sur la condensation tente de montrer l’intérêt d’une voie peu explorée dans le débat sur la nature de l’art, à savoir l’économie sensible des représentations symboliques. Nous donnons tout d’abord consistance au concept de condensation en suivant les écrits de Freud. Freud, un des rares auteurs à avoir thématisé cette notion, fournit dans L’interprétation des rêves les linéaments principaux du concept. Dans l’analyse de cet ouvrage, notre effort se porte sur la distinction entre une approche plastique et une approche symbolique de la condensation, c’est-à-dire l’obtention d’une condensation par composition de différentes figures ou par répétition d’une même représentation. En relation marginale avec la condensation, la méthode d’analyse des rêves nous montre l’importance des thèmes de l’idiosyncrasie et de la totalisation, lesquelles se révéleront en affinité étroite avec celui de la condensation. Nous procédons ensuite à l’analyse du second ouvrage d’importance rapporté à la condensation chez Freud, Le mot d’esprit et sa relation à l’inconscient. L’accent est porté, d’une part, sur la relation entre condensation et économie, et, d’autre part, sur la distinction entre deux états ou attitudes d’esprit révélée par le Witz. <p>Sur base de la thématisation freudienne, nous poursuivons la construction du concept de condensation à partir de l’expérience esthétique ordinaire. Cela comprend, tout d’abord, la simple considération du fonctionnement collégial et simultané de nos différents sens. Nous procédons ensuite à l’analyse de deux modes de représentation, tous deux fondés sur un rapport sensible au réel :la photographie et le cinéma. Par ces analyses, nous tentons de mettre en lumière les caractères élémentaires de la représentation sensible. Avec la photographie nous abordons l’économie sensible de la représentation, c’est-à-dire les transformations quantitatives et qualitatives qui sont au fondement du concept de condensation. Avec l’analyse du cinéma comme mode de représentation, l’effort est porté sur l’explicitation de la tension paradoxale entre présence et représentation dans le droit fil des développements sur le jeu des dimensions sensibles et l’hétérogénéité impliqués dans la représentation photographique. Cette deuxième partie assoit la validité objective du concept de condensation.<p>Dans un troisième temps, nous étayons cette validité objective du concept en la rapportant aux différents intervenants impliqués dans la réalité artistique (principalement, œuvre, créateur, récepteur). Enfin nous confrontons le concept de condensation à deux aspects de la théorie de l’art :un versant spéculatif, l’antinomie du jugement de goût avec les questions de la subjectivité et de l’objectivité, mais aussi et surtout celle de la communicabilité ;un versant plastique, les œuvres atypiques de Marcel Duchamp. Préalablement à l’analyse de ces deux aspects, nous consacrons un chapitre important à une définition du signe tenant compte de la responsabilité du sujet dans la constitution sémiotique. C’est sous le paramètre de la liberté dans notre rapport au symbolique que se rejoignent les deux aspects de la théorie de l’art abordés. <p><p><p><p><p><p>Condensation: A Conceptual Tool for the Theory of Art / Summary.<p><p><p>\ / Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation philosophie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Transdisciplinarity emerged from the urge to grasp the elusive knowledge in the most fertile zone in between and beyond disciplines that escapes even the most elaborate interdisciplinary operations. While interdisciplinary protocol enables experts to operate within foreign disciplines, in the extreme case as diverse as art and science (by inviting artists into scientific departments and vice versa), the production of knowledge remains confined to particular domains. To transcend these confinements and access the knowledge that evades institutionalisation Basarab Nicolescu’s Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity sets up conditions for an open structure to be grown outside the current compartmentalisation into a living knowledge. This thesis imagines a possible evolution of transdisciplinarity into knowledge to be lived internally rather than learnt externally in order to overcome the anxiety in transcending the established culture of disciplinary research. By entering the transdisciplinary zone, the identity of experts-specialists dissolves, even the crudest separation into artists and scientists becomes obsolete. From the illusion of losing control over knowledge arises the fear of a return to archaic, mystic or even shamanic ways of knowing. Far from proposing a return to shamanism in its ancient forms this thesis imagines the way of polyphibianism – an imaginary solution to navigate efficiently the protoplasmic state of knowledge that would be indigenous to culture of disciplinary researchers. With every significant discovery the disciplinary researchers already intuitively trespass into the very zone that the Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity invites them to enter intentionally. From examination of documented introspective inquiries into their act of discovery the thesis infers the necessary sensibilities and adaptabilities of the individuals to cross the borders of their disciplines. Their seemingly lost identity is temporarily restored with the term polyphibian (analogous to amphibian) designating their ability to survive and explore multiple environments. With each change of circumstances in research a polyphibian adapts by swiftly reinventing its instinctive instruments, mutating its organs of knowing, indifferently to conventional habits of thought. Through their introspective writings this thesis investigates the polyphibic aptitude of Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson and Marcel Duchamp to scout at the periphery of physics, metaphysics and ‘pataphysics, to intuitively anticipate the role of chance, chaos and complexity in both arts and sciences. A threshold of complexity has to be surpassed in order to bring the current apparatus of knowledge to life. Bergson’s insight on laughter and dreams suggests how intellect could transcend itself. The thesis proposes to consider laughter as faculty that could induce self-awareness in the intellectual apparatus while dreams are considered to facilitate self-organisation of intellect on higher orders of awareness. In Deleuzian manner of mutating Bergson’s work into Bergsonism, polyphibianism is a mutation in transcribing the code of Creative Evolution where Bergson insisted on interdependency between the theory of knowledge and the theory of evolution. The scholarly dispute on Bergsonian and anti-Bergsonian tendencies present in Marcel Duchamp’s work is revisited in the thesis by interpreting the higher dimensional Bride as a polyphibic organism of living knowledge with access to higher orders of awareness, able to guide the Bachelor’s apparatus of mechanical production and preservation of knowledge out of its predicament. Informed by peculiar Duchampian experiments that challenged both the domain of art and science the research projects in this thesis consist of an intervention at CERN that tested the impenetrability of institutionalised art-science collaborations and installation of the Interval of Suspended Judgement with high mathematical precision at the threshold between physics and ‘pataphysics. With these projects the problems of categorising researchers into artists and scientists are revealed. As Deleuze suggested, to effectively formulate the problem, to realize it in multiplicity of contexts, a new concept must be invented, a new organism must be conceived. This thesis gave birth to an imaginary organism of living knowledge in order to relieve the unnecessary anxieties and to fully engage in transdisciplinary research.

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From the viewpoint of classical reception studies, I am asking what contemporary British art (by, for example, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, and Mark Wallinger) has to do with the classical tradition – both the art and literature of Greco-Roman antiquity. I have conducted face-to-face interviews with some of the leading artists working in Britain today, including Lucas, Hirst, Wallinger, Marc Quinn, and Gilbert & George. In addition to contemporary art, the thesis focuses on Greco-Roman art and on myths and modes of looking that have come to shape the western art historical tradition – seeking to offer a different perspective on them from that of the Renaissance and neoclassicism. The thesis concentrates on the generation of artists known as the YBAs, or Young British Artists, who came to prominence in the 1990s. These artists are not renowned for their deference to the classical tradition, and are widely regarded as having turned their backs on classical art and its legacies. The introduction asks whether their work, which has received little scholarly attention, might be productively reassessed from the perspective of classical reception studies. It argues that while their work no longer subscribes to a traditional understanding of classical ‘influence’, it continues to depend – for its power and provocativeness – on classical concepts of figuration, realism, and the basic nature of art. Without claiming that the work of the YBAs is classical or classicizing, the thesis sets out to challenge the assumption that their work has nothing to do with ancient art, or that it fails to conform to ancient understandings of what art is. In order to do this, the thesis analyses contemporary works of art through three classical ‘lenses’. Each lens allows contemporary art to be examined in the context of a longer history. The first lens is the concept of realism, as seen in artistic and literary explorations of the relationship between art and life. This chapter uses the myth of Pygmalion’s statue as a way of thinking about contemporary art’s continued engagement with ideas of mimesis and the ‘real’ which were theorised and debated in antiquity. The second lens is corporeal fragmentation, as evidenced by the broken condition of ancient statues, the popular theme of dismemberment in western art, and the fragmentary body in contemporary art. The final chapter focuses on the figurative plaster cast, arguing that contemporary art continues to invoke and reinvent the long tradition of plaster reproductions of ancient statues and bodies. Through each of these ‘lenses’, I argue that contemporary art remains linked, both in form and meaning, to the classical past – often in ways which go beyond the stated intentions of an artist. Contemporary art continues to be informed by ideas and processes that were theorised and practised in the classical world; indeed, it is these ideas and processes that make it deserving of the art label.