Jeffrey Charles Stanley is an M.F.A. Candidate in Transmedia in the Department of Art and Art History. The Artist, Jeff Stanley, Works as a cultural “hacker” and critical “terrorist” with the aid of video and the internet. The character, Jeff Stanley, plays the role of a 2010 Max Headroom, the popular 80s anti-corporate TV personality/talking head and seller of Pepsi. Media delivers people. A few deliver media. The audience is the product. Media hacking is a technique that allows an artist, or anti-artist, to change the game and fight back. An artist practice can be open to technology, yet remain powerful, and culturally and socially relevant. Jeff Stanley is a virtual AI, a person, and a corporate entity. With this new holy trinity, the combined efforts as a person, a virtual AI, and a corporation will provide the enhancement an artist needs today. Art and its methods must evolve as the playing field evolves. Technology defines the 21st century artist. / text

A performance surgiu inicialmente como um meio no qual os vanguardistas testavam as suas ideias e passou a ser aceita como uma manifestação artística independente por volta da década de setenta. Trata-se de uma arte híbrida que mistura elementos de outras linguagens, como a poesia a música, a dança, o tetro e o cinema. Tornou-se conhecida por chocar suas plateias com apresentações espontâneas e transgressoras, colocando em cheque a concepção de arte. Assim como as demais linguagens artísticas, a performance estabelece um modo específico de atuação, o que não torna impossível analisá-la por meio da particularização de seus aspectos. A semiótica estuda os fenômenos culturais como sistemas de signos, e torna-se assim, uma ferramenta que pode fornecer a base para estes estudos, uma vez que relativiza as camadas do significado e permite que se observe os diversos níveis de articulação do sentido em diferentes atos comunicativos. Assim, através da semiótica greimasiana, cujo conceito de signo é estruturado por significante e significado, esta pesquisa pretende verificar possíveis coerções de gênero próprias à arte performática, e por meio delas, podem ser desenvolvidas novas reflexões sobre os contornos deste gênero, aparentemente espontâneo e livre. Provando falsas as aparentes diferenças irreconciliáveis que se apresentam no confronto de obras pertencentes ao gênero. Este trabalho pretende propor um modelo de organização para análise de manifestações performáticas, através do qual se pode verificar a relação entre a ação performática e o espaço onde ela é realizada. Portanto, o objetivo central desse estudo é analisar, não, a relação do performer com sua obra, mas colaborar para a análise da performance como um fenômeno que se desenvolve diante de um público e analisar as relações que comumente se estabelecem entre esse espectador de arte performática e a própria ação, utilizando para tanto, o critério do espaço onde a ação se desenvolve. / Performance Art appeared initially as a means wherewith vanguard artists tried their ideas and came to be accepted as an independent form of art in the mid seventies. It is a hybrid art, which mixes elements from other languages, such as poetry, music, dace, theater, and cinema. It became known for shocking its audiences with spontaneous and bold presentations, shaking the very foundations of art. As other artistic languages, performance art establishes a specific way of acting, which does not render impossible to analyze it by particularizing its aspects. Semiotic studies the cultural phenomena as sign systems, and becomes, thus, a tool which can supply us with the base for such studies, given that it relativizes the layers of meaning and allows for the observation of many levels of meaning articulation in different communicative acts. Thus, by applying Greimasian semiotics, whose concept for signs is composed of signified and signifiant, this research aims to verify possible genre specifications specific to performance art, and, though them, one can develop new thoughts on the outlines of the genre, apparently spontaneous and free, proving to be fake the apparent differences which appear when analyzing works of the genre. This research aims to propose an organization model for analyzing performance art works, wherewith the relationship between performatic action and its space can be verified. Thus, the main goal of this study is not to analyze the relationship between performance art and his/her works, but to collaborate to performance art analysis as a phenomenon which develops itself in front of a public and analyzing the relationship commonly established between public and the work itself, using, as an analysis criterion, the space where the action is developed.

A performance surgiu inicialmente como um meio no qual os vanguardistas testavam as suas ideias e passou a ser aceita como uma manifestação artística independente por volta da década de setenta. Trata-se de uma arte híbrida que mistura elementos de outras linguagens, como a poesia a música, a dança, o tetro e o cinema. Tornou-se conhecida por chocar suas plateias com apresentações espontâneas e transgressoras, colocando em cheque a concepção de arte. Assim como as demais linguagens artísticas, a performance estabelece um modo específico de atuação, o que não torna impossível analisá-la por meio da particularização de seus aspectos. A semiótica estuda os fenômenos culturais como sistemas de signos, e torna-se assim, uma ferramenta que pode fornecer a base para estes estudos, uma vez que relativiza as camadas do significado e permite que se observe os diversos níveis de articulação do sentido em diferentes atos comunicativos. Assim, através da semiótica greimasiana, cujo conceito de signo é estruturado por significante e significado, esta pesquisa pretende verificar possíveis coerções de gênero próprias à arte performática, e por meio delas, podem ser desenvolvidas novas reflexões sobre os contornos deste gênero, aparentemente espontâneo e livre. Provando falsas as aparentes diferenças irreconciliáveis que se apresentam no confronto de obras pertencentes ao gênero. Este trabalho pretende propor um modelo de organização para análise de manifestações performáticas, através do qual se pode verificar a relação entre a ação performática e o espaço onde ela é realizada. Portanto, o objetivo central desse estudo é analisar, não, a relação do performer com sua obra, mas colaborar para a análise da performance como um fenômeno que se desenvolve diante de um público e analisar as relações que comumente se estabelecem entre esse espectador de arte performática e a própria ação, utilizando para tanto, o critério do espaço onde a ação se desenvolve. / Performance Art appeared initially as a means wherewith vanguard artists tried their ideas and came to be accepted as an independent form of art in the mid seventies. It is a hybrid art, which mixes elements from other languages, such as poetry, music, dace, theater, and cinema. It became known for shocking its audiences with spontaneous and bold presentations, shaking the very foundations of art. As other artistic languages, performance art establishes a specific way of acting, which does not render impossible to analyze it by particularizing its aspects. Semiotic studies the cultural phenomena as sign systems, and becomes, thus, a tool which can supply us with the base for such studies, given that it relativizes the layers of meaning and allows for the observation of many levels of meaning articulation in different communicative acts. Thus, by applying Greimasian semiotics, whose concept for signs is composed of signified and signifiant, this research aims to verify possible genre specifications specific to performance art, and, though them, one can develop new thoughts on the outlines of the genre, apparently spontaneous and free, proving to be fake the apparent differences which appear when analyzing works of the genre. This research aims to propose an organization model for analyzing performance art works, wherewith the relationship between performatic action and its space can be verified. Thus, the main goal of this study is not to analyze the relationship between performance art and his/her works, but to collaborate to performance art analysis as a phenomenon which develops itself in front of a public and analyzing the relationship commonly established between public and the work itself, using, as an analysis criterion, the space where the action is developed.

<p>This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation analyzes the institutionalization of avant-garde artistic practice within an American university, the University of Iowa between the years 1967 and 2000. In order to understand the development of the Intermedia program at Iowa, the institutional context of the "Iowa Idea" as it was developed on campus from the 1930s that emphasized the simultaneous instruction of art history and theory with instruction in the graphic and plastic arts. Following the success of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Iowa received a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1970 to form the Center for New Performing Arts. Following the development from Happenings to Intermedia, and gradually into specific "disciplines" of performance art and video art, this dissertation demonstrates how the institution was inseparable from these avant-garde practices which required significant resources to develop. The importance of technology is traced through the digital revolution in the arts, and the role of "intermedia" is shown to be part of a process of changing consciousness as opposed to commonly accepted definitions of "multimedia" or Gesamtkunstwerk.

<p>This dissertation examines the intersection of experimental art, literature, performance, photography, and architecture, as Japanese artists and intellectuals grappled with political disillusionment after the end of the protests against the ratification of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of 1960. I focus on the work of the sculptors Miki Tomio and Kudo Tetsumi; photographs of late 1960s protests by Tomatsu Shomei and the self-portraits of the novelist Mishima Yukio; the collaboration between photographer Hosoe Eikoh and butoh dance founder Hijikata Tatsumi in the photo album <italic>Kamaitachi</italic> (The Sickle-Weasel, 1969); and depictions of the urban periphery in Hosoe's unfinished <italic>Private Landscape</italic> series (1970-) and the visionary urban planning of the architect Tange Kenzo. All shared an interest in portraying peripheral spaces, the detritus of the everyday, and the sexually perverse, cultivating a rhetoric of marginality that allowed them to explore their ambivalent feelings towards post-Anpo Japan.</p> / Dissertation

What is queer? What is queer? What is queer theory? Where can it go from here? This thesis sets out to explore the origins and influences of queer theory before investigating the present and the future spaces (ie, bodies and settlements) it can potentially move into. Three distinct experiments of fieldwork and ethnographic filmmaking test the truths and potentialities of queer theory when relating to queer bodies and settlements. That is to say that each chapter balances a film and its supporting text by embracing the value and urgency of practice led research. The first chapter questions queer history and details the importance of emerging trans politics in the post-gender, leftist, avant-garde, queer activist and militant space of Bologna. Queer bodies, case one: transgender and transsexual perspectives. Settlements, case one: Bologna and Lido di Classe (Italy). The second chapter considers the interface between disability theory and queer theory with particular attention paid to the practical theory of ‘curative education’. Defined by Rudolf Steiner in 1922 and further developed by Karl König with the foundation of the Camphill movement in 1944, curative education privileges the social model over the medical model in the field of disability so that disability is in fact ability. Queer bodies, case two: learning differences and disabilities perspectives. Settlements, case two: Berlin (Germany), Chatou and La Rochelle (France), Barry and Glasallt Fawr (Wales, United Kingdom). The third chapter uses queer perspectives to promote the relevance of quantum physics to the human body, thus involving contemporary dance, physical theatre and the arts more generally to address and redress the chiasm between science and technology on the one hand, and arts, humanities and socio-cultural sciences on the other. Queer bodies, case three: the inescapably queer reality of the physical world. Settlements, case three: multiple locations in Tuscany (Italy), and Thamesmead, London (England, United Kingdom). This thesis brings notions of queer and otherness deceptively close to notions of the self. Otherness and queerness become mirrors in which our own queerness comes into view.

This essay documents a year of exploring how to continue to be creative, experimental and intuitive within an art institution. It provides a context and thus academic shelter for a non-linear, experimental process of making drawings, sculpture and site-specific work. The essay has three layers; the contextual document, images which show the process of making, as well as a narrative written in experimental poetry which describes the embodied process of making through collaged journal writing. The images are interspersed through the essay, while the poetry provides an alternative narrative and is printed on the back pages of the essay. ‘Building’ is used as an active metaphor for the creative process, as well as buildings as sites for research and installation of adaptive sculptures. Building as a metaphor for unchanging narratives will be contrasted with artists whose work challenges the unitary nature of a functional building through their interventions. Using the body to make meaning is discussed in a feminist context, as an alternative this model to linear, rational thinking. This also questions and problematizes the heroic male artist body. Performing the making through a female body will be discussed and issues of privacy and proximity covered. A potential solution to these issues will be explored in using abstraction to create active meaning, thus implicating the body of the audience as well as the artist.

Ce travail propose d'observer les stratégies d'individualisation, de résistance et de subversion mises en place dans les œuvres d'artistes américaines ces 40 dernières années en me penchant tout particulièrement sur les productions de Kathy Acker et de Diamanda Galás. À travers leur pratique de la performance, de la musique, des textes et divers travaux visuels ancré dans l'expérimentation, je voudrais analyser comment elles révèlent, explorent et déconstruisent les dynamiques de pouvoir. / In this paper, I wish to explore and discuss the strategies of resistance and of subversion implemented in the works of Kathy Acker and Diamanda Galás. Using the voice and the body as spaces of experimentation and emancipation, these artists, I will argue, both reveal and deconstruct the dynamics of power.

Cette thèse est une étude du mouvement Cobra à travers les œuvres collectives, une de ses composantes caractéristiques. Il s’agit tout d’abord de comprendre le mouvement, ses origines et influences, ainsi que sa visée d’un art libre, ouvert, expérimental, partie prenante de la vie. Dans un contexte social d’après-guerre, souvent politisé, Cobra défend l’action collective, définie notamment dans les notions d’antispécialisme et d’interspécialisme. Il convient de mettre en exergue les origines de cette pratique, et saisir les divers aspects qu’elle arbore, notamment au travers de revues, d’expositions ou de créations partagées. Le poète Christian Dotremont, animateur et âme de Cobra, favorise le travail de collaboration et contribue à son développement en stimulant les rencontres artistiques. Il se fait le passeur et le permanent « agitateur » de cette notion. Les peintures-mots qu’il crée avec d’autres artistes participent à sa réflexion majeure sur l’écriture et la peinture. Ce lien interpelle quelques artistes belges comme Pierre Alechinsky, mais il passionne Christian Dotremont qui ne cesse de multiplier les expériences à ce propos, pour aboutir à ce qu’il nomme les logogrammes, remarquable fusion de la peinture et de la poésie, et aboutissement de toute une vie de recherche. Ce travail est structuré en trois points. Le premier établit une étude du contexte artistique et social des années précédent Cobra puis la mise en place du groupe. Le second aborde les années d’intense activité « officielle » du groupe, au service du collectif. Enfin, le troisième propose de suivre l’évolution post-Cobra des œuvres collectives et des recherches sur l’écriture et la peinture. / This thesis is a study of the Cobra movement through one of its characteristic components: the collective works. First of all it's about understanding the movement, its origins (three countries), its influences and its purpose of a free art, open, experimental, involvement with life. In a social after-war context, often politicized, Cobra defends collective action, notably defined in concepts of anti-specialism and inter-specialism. We should therefore underline the origins of this practice and undestand different aspects that it shows, in particular through publications, exhibitions or shared creations. The poet Christian Dotremont, leader and soul of Cobra, promotes cooperative work by collaboration and contributes to its development by stimulating artistic meetings. He is the purveyor and permanent "agitator" of this concept. The words-paintings that he creates with other artists, take part of his major thinking about writing and painting. This link interpellates a few Belgian artists like Pierre Alechinsky, but it fascinates Christian Dotremont who keeps experimenting on it, in order to reach what he calls the logograms, a remarkable fusion of painting and poetry, and a culmination of a life-time of research.This work is structured in three parts. The first one draws a study of the artistic and social context of the years preceding Cobra and the setting up of the group. The second one talks about years of intense "official" activity of the group serving collective way of work. Finally, the third one offers to follow the post-Cobra evolution of collective works and researches about writing and painting.