This dissertation develops a history of experimental art emerging in India in the final decades of the twentieth century. It addresses the turn to video, performance and mixed-media installation – conceptually driven, circulation friendly, critical artistic modes – by artists who share a generational consciousness, shaped in part by their class position and metropolitan location. My arguments are constructed through a historical and formal analysis of significant transformations in the works of two Bombay-based artists, Nalini Malani (b. 1946) and Rummana Hussain (1952- 1999), between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s. This post-Emergency period is marked by the spectacle, symbolism and horror of the Babri Masjid demolition (December 1992) and numerous instances of targeted violence against minority communities (1984, 1992-93, 2002). The coinciding legislative passage of economic liberalization (1991) also had far-reaching implications, including a decline in state dominance over culture and artistic patronage. I contend that these dramatic shifts in the market, media and art institutional landscape catalyzed the development of postmodernist art practices. As artists like Malani and Hussain confronted the limitations and failings of their postcolonial, cosmopolitan imaginaries, their artistic responses were driven by the affective and reflexive tendencies of despair and melancholia, enlivening radical praxis in the face of derailments and lost causes. My work problematizes the notion of rupture that has often been deployed in discussions of these artist’s trajectories, referring to the transition from conventional formats of oil painting and sculpture towards expanded media experiments⁠. This study examines both specific shifts and underlying continuities in the formal and conceptual registers of the practices in question, while situating theoretical debates around postmodernism, feminism, periodization and artistic generation in the context of India.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2002. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The research question of this thesis was: What is the nature of the social boundaries that define women as a group, how has this been depicted throughout the ages and, more specifically, in the work of South African artists, Vladimir Tretchikoff and Irma Stern, and what comment does my own work seem to make on these boundaries? The study used an analytical approach to pursue these questions, while the works of art were analysed according to the levels of interpretation suggested by Panofsky and Dietrich, The aim of this research was also to analyse my own body of work more theoretically within the context of postmodern feminist thought to determine how it resonates with earlier assumptions regarding women. For this purpose a comparison was made between, on the one hand, what Tretchikoff and Stern's respective depictions of women reveal about traditional conventions that hold women captive and, on the other, how my own work seems to question the boundaries that society imposes on women. Both Tretchikoff and Stern were successful enough to raise public consciousness on issues that concerned female subjugation. Seemingly for very different reasons, however, they remained apathetic to the quest for women's liberation. The study shows that Tretchikoff's work reflects a blatant disregard of the identities and social realities of his models, and romanticises their constraints instead. Stern, on the other hand, could not have been unaware of the societal limitations imposed on women. Yet she chose to remain aloof. While she seemed to be able to move masculine requirements and the demands of society to the background to depict women as natural and almost free of stereotype in some of her works, she cannot be seen to have made a major contribution to the liberation of women. In contrast, I have found many similarities throughout the study between feminist thought of the Second Wave and the thought processes mirrored in my art. In addition to the expected outcome, the study has shown that it is possible to trace developments in feminist thought in art. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die navorsingsvraag behels die volgende: Wat is die aard van die maatskaplike grense wat vroue in 'n ondergeskikte posisie in die gemeenskap gehou het, en hoe is dit naspeurbaar in kuns, en meer spesifiek in die werk van twee Suid-Afrikaanse kunstenaars, Vladimir Tretchikoff en Irma Stem. Laastens, hoe lewer my eie werk kommentaar op hierdie vorm van onderdrukking. Die studie volg 'n analitiese benadering in die ontleding van die geselekteerde kunswerke, soos voorgestel deur Panofsky en Dietriech. Die doel van die studie was om binne die konteks van 'n postmodernistiese feministiese raamwerk 'n meer teoretiese ontleding van my eie werk te maak om vas te stel hoe dit ooreenkom met vroeer aannames oor die vrou. Vir hierdie doel is daar 'n vergelyking getref tussen, aan die een kant, die kommentaar wat Tretchikoff en Stem se werk oor die onderdrukking van vroue maak en, aan die ander kant, hoe my eie werk hierdie konvensies blootle. Beide Tretchikoff en Stern was in die posisie om die publiek bewus te maak van die ondergeskiktheid van vroue binne hulle gemeenskap. Ten spyte hiervan, toon die studie dat beide apaties gestaan het teenoor die lot van vroue, hoewel om verskillende redes. Terwyl Tretchikoff se werk die toonbeeld van 'n blatante miskenning van die verskillende indentiteite en maatskaplike realiteite van sy modelle is, en eerder kies om hulle toestande te romantiseer, kon Stern, as 'n vrou, nie onbewus gewees het van die lot van die vroue van haar tyd nie. Ten spyte hiervan, het sy apaties teenoor die ondergeskiktheid van vroue gestaan. Terwyl dit wil voorkom as of sy die patriargale eise van die gemeenskap op die agtergrond kon skuif om haar vroue as natuurlik en bykans vry van stereotipes uit te beeld, kan sy nie gesien word as iemand wat daadwerklik tot vroue se strewe na gelykheid bygedra het nie. In teenstelling hiermee, het die studie deurgaans 'n ooreenkoms aangetoon tussen die feministiese denke van die "Tweede Golf' en die denkprosesse wat in my eie kuns weerspieel word. 'n Bykomende bevinding van die studie is dat die ontwikkeling van feministiese denke in die kuns nagespeur kan word.

Orientador: Sérgio Mauro Romagnolo / Banca: Lúcia Regina Vieira Romano / Banca: Leda Catunda Serra / Banca: José Leonardo do Nascimento / Banca: Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa / Resumo: Esta Dissertação propõe-se a discutir questões relacionadas à identidade feminina, elaboradas durante um processo de produção pictórica. Aborda especificamente a aparência dos corpos à margem das padronizações instituídas e validadas socialmente. Para tal fim, foram investigadas sob a perspectiva feminista, as práticas e estruturas sociais que constroem, regulam e naturalizam o gênero, o sexo e a sexualidade como categorias identitárias baseadas na configuração corporal. Analisou-se ainda o conceito de estranho segundo a psicanálise freudiana e no contexto da crítica de arte contemporânea como assunto de pesquisa. Os desdobramentos do recorte proposto orientaram estudos complementares ao campo das artes visuais, da teoria feminista e psicanalítica, pertencentes as áreas da filosofia, linguística e literatura. O caráter interdisciplinar do projeto tem por objetivo compreender possibilidades de reconhecer e subverter os discursos opressivos que encerram o feminino em cenários de invisibilidade e violência. / Abstract: This dissertation proposes to discuss questions related to the feminine identity, elaborated during a process of pictorial production. It specifically addresses the appearance of bodies outside socially validated and instituted standardizations. To this end, the social practices and structures that construct, regulate and naturalize gender, sex and sexuality as identity categories based on body configuration were investigated from a feminist perspective. The concept of stranger according to Freudian psychoanalysis and in the context of contemporary art criticism as a subject of research was also analyzed. The unfolding of the proposed cut led to complementary studies in the field of visual arts, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, belonging to the areas of philosophy, linguistics and literature. The interdisciplinary character of the project aims to understand possibilities of recognizing and subverting the oppressive discourses that enclose the feminine in scenarios of invisibility and violence. / Mestre

Many scholars have considered Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to be a translator of Afro-Cuban culture. In her 2019 monograph on the artist, for example, Genevieve Hyacinthe writes: “brownness made Mendieta a powerful translator of Black Atlantic forms into contemporary art language because she was not, and could never be, part of the dominant white culture.” Mendieta also announced herself as a translator (and inheritor) of Siboney and Taino cultures. Her gallery notes that to celebrate her return to Cuba’s “maternal breast” as an adult, the artist titled the rock carvings she made there with “names of zemis, or Taíno spirits, such as Bacayu for ‘Light of Day.’” I argue that alongside her claims on Taino cultural heritage we might consider her actual ancestry and claims on Indigenous women in the art of Cuban settlers before her. My dissertation considers Mendieta as a translator not of Taino myths or Black cultural practices but of ethnological texts and nationalistic folklore which catalogued and caricatured Black and Indigenous cultures. “Bacayu,” for example, is not a Taino “zemi” but rather a word she culled from a glossary of Black and Indigenous terms: a performance of knowledge over Indigenous cultures rather than a Taino cultural product. It hails from a lecherous story written by a Havana dentist about the death of an “Indian doncella.” Each chapter considers her translations of such pieces, focusing in particular on her translation choices which I suggest are motivated by her feminist and anti-imperial politics. My first chapter considers the influence of ethnographic studies on Abakuá and particularly the writings of Fernando Ortiz in her Iowa campus performances which reference crime scenes and “sacrificial” initiation ceremonies. Rather than offering unmediated access to Black religious practices, I suggest she is performing an abased view of Abakuá as seen through the (exterminationist) lens of Ortiz’s scholarship from his criminological ethnography, Los negros brujos (1906), to his less punitive but still highly fetishizing account of Abakuá in “La ‘tragedia’ de los ñáñigos” (1950). I don’t believe Mendieta translates this work to oppress Black people. Rather as a bodywork artist composing a militant, corporal language of feminist critique, she aims the violence of cultural translation toward her chauvinistic art school cohort. The second chapter considers her literary translation of “La Venus Negra, based on a Cuban legend,” which was composed by Adrián del Valle, Ortiz’s secretary at La Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País for which he collated Cuba’s first public library among other projects. The original legend can be contextualized by del Valle’s broader stewardship of Cuban letters: he penned “La Venus Negra” for a collection celebrating the Centenary of Cienfuegos from the family notes of a prominent cienfueguero, Pedro Modesto. Examining the tacky national showcase in which the legend originally appears, I consider the ways Mendieta repositions la Venus Negra as a display of her own “will to continue being Other.” In particular, her translation imposes a “Siboney” ancestry on la Venus Negra and dispenses with the conditions which determine the protagonist’s muteness (in the original, la Venus Negra is a nude Black woman who is captured and displaced from her island hideout by criollo enslavers). In Mendieta’s translation la Venus is not muted Black protest incarnate but becomes an anti-colonial symbol. Mendieta publishes the piece in the feminist magazine Heresies, illustrating the legend with a silhouette of her own body from her Silueta Series. Again, I don’t think Mendieta poses as a Ciboney woman or absents Black women in a gesture of ill will toward Black and Indigenous people. Rather, she does so as an anti-imperial strategy consistent with Fidel Castro’s cadre, as her unavowed translation of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Calibán” into her “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” curatorial statement indicates. In the essay, Retamar, a white Cuban scholar, aligns the revolution with Black and Indigenous Cuba by “reclaiming” the caricature Caliban, which, as Coco Fusco writes, Shakespeare himself had based on an “Indian” exhibited in London. In the third chapter, I consider Mendieta’s Esculturas Rupestres, not as tributes to Taino spirits but as monuments of settler longing for mutilated Indigenous women. The legend I mentioned in the introductory paragraph, “Bacayu,” for example, is settler fanfiction about a daughter of a “cacique” whose death portends the coming of the white man and includes a lengthy description of the dead woman’s body. I also point toward the misnamings of Black women which appear within this rock series (Black Venus, Mother) which are often overlooked by scholars who ask us to read the work as Taino myth. Finally, building on these themes, I suggest a comparison to the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica: emphasizing the similarities in their “cannibalistic” approaches to translation. Although differently aligned politically (leftist, anarchist), Oiticica’s family, like Mendieta’s, were culturally and politically prominent settlers; and, like Mendieta, Oiticica is often read as a translator of Black Atlantic culture. Further both artists engaged in the caricaturing of Indigenous “American” cultures. In New York, Oiticica translated Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) to contextualize his work and the work of his friends. Artists in Brazil had adapted de Andrade’s manifesto into a translation program “cannibalizing” European and North American cultures, a practice they misidentified as Tupi as de Andrade had. Comparing Mendieta and Oiticica as translators reveals shared patterns of Latin American vanguards employing caricatures of Black and Indigenous cultures in anti-imperial performances. These caricatures and their resemblance to caricatures in the U.S. also point to older (and enduring) transnational networks of white nationalism in the Americas.

CAPES / No presente trabalho serão analisadas representações de feminilidades em dois periódicos distintos: as Melindrosas na revista Para Todos... e a coluna Garotas na revista O Cruzeiro. Os recortes compreendem os anos de 1922 a 1930 para as Melindrosas e de 1938 a 1946 para as Garotas, privilegiando uma sequência entre décadas subsequentes, de modo a entender como as representações de feminilidades se modificaram ou se mantiveram. Interessa também investigar de que maneira o humor e a visualidade contribuíram para normatizar papéis e relações entre gênero, em conjunto com políticas públicas. As revistas visavam trazer a identificação com discursos hierarquizantes, atuando como pedagogia de gênero. Contudo, percebe-se que o humor buscou, nas fissuras das representações, a dupla moral, na qual as mulheres negociavam espaços de atuação e liberdade. Tanto Melindrosas quanto Garotas possuíam táticas de convencimento e de sedução que as levaram a realizar desejos e a conquistar alguns de seus objetivos. Elas questionaram e enfatizaram as contradições e tensões das respectivas décadas. Por vezes, indicavam pretextos para pensar nas mudanças sociais, de comportamentos e no modo como os homens se colocavam neste quadro. / In the present work femininity representations will be analyzed in two separate journals: the Flappers in the magazine Para Todos... and the Garotas column in the magazine O Cruzeiro. The cuts include the period from 1922 to 1930 for the Flappers and 1938-1946 for Garotas, favoring to a sequence of subsequent decades, in order to understand how representations of femininity have changed or remained. We also want to investigate how the mood and visuality contributed to standardize roles and relationships between gender, together with public policy. Magazines aimed to bring identification with hierarchized speeches, acting as gender pedagogy. However, we notice that humor sought in the fissures of the representations, the double standard, in which women were negotiated spaces of action and freedom. Both the Flappers and the Garotas used tactics to convince and seduction that led them to grant wishes and achieve some of their goals. They questioned and emphasized the contradictions and tensions of their respective decades. Sometimes indicated pretexts to think about the social changes of behavior and how men were placed in this board.

CAPES / No presente trabalho serão analisadas representações de feminilidades em dois periódicos distintos: as Melindrosas na revista Para Todos... e a coluna Garotas na revista O Cruzeiro. Os recortes compreendem os anos de 1922 a 1930 para as Melindrosas e de 1938 a 1946 para as Garotas, privilegiando uma sequência entre décadas subsequentes, de modo a entender como as representações de feminilidades se modificaram ou se mantiveram. Interessa também investigar de que maneira o humor e a visualidade contribuíram para normatizar papéis e relações entre gênero, em conjunto com políticas públicas. As revistas visavam trazer a identificação com discursos hierarquizantes, atuando como pedagogia de gênero. Contudo, percebe-se que o humor buscou, nas fissuras das representações, a dupla moral, na qual as mulheres negociavam espaços de atuação e liberdade. Tanto Melindrosas quanto Garotas possuíam táticas de convencimento e de sedução que as levaram a realizar desejos e a conquistar alguns de seus objetivos. Elas questionaram e enfatizaram as contradições e tensões das respectivas décadas. Por vezes, indicavam pretextos para pensar nas mudanças sociais, de comportamentos e no modo como os homens se colocavam neste quadro. / In the present work femininity representations will be analyzed in two separate journals: the Flappers in the magazine Para Todos... and the Garotas column in the magazine O Cruzeiro. The cuts include the period from 1922 to 1930 for the Flappers and 1938-1946 for Garotas, favoring to a sequence of subsequent decades, in order to understand how representations of femininity have changed or remained. We also want to investigate how the mood and visuality contributed to standardize roles and relationships between gender, together with public policy. Magazines aimed to bring identification with hierarchized speeches, acting as gender pedagogy. However, we notice that humor sought in the fissures of the representations, the double standard, in which women were negotiated spaces of action and freedom. Both the Flappers and the Garotas used tactics to convince and seduction that led them to grant wishes and achieve some of their goals. They questioned and emphasized the contradictions and tensions of their respective decades. Sometimes indicated pretexts to think about the social changes of behavior and how men were placed in this board.

This dissertation investigates the correlation between semiotic theory and the way that gendered subjectivity is represented in contemporary South African art. The phenomenon of signification is central to the semiotic theories of the Bulgarian semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Semiotics can be described as the science of the sign that considers the way in which artists express their personal experience in art making. In this investigation I refer mainly to women's artworks, although the concept of gendered subjectivity in the work of male artists is also discussed. This particular research investigates the symbolic relations of culture in gender terms, that explores the apparent contradictions of subjectivity inherent in capitalist patriarchal society. / Art History, Visual Arts & Music / M.A. (Visual Arts)

This dissertation investigates the correlation between semiotic theory and the way that gendered subjectivity is represented in contemporary South African art. The phenomenon of signification is central to the semiotic theories of the Bulgarian semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Semiotics can be described as the science of the sign that considers the way in which artists express their personal experience in art making. In this investigation I refer mainly to women's artworks, although the concept of gendered subjectivity in the work of male artists is also discussed. This particular research investigates the symbolic relations of culture in gender terms, that explores the apparent contradictions of subjectivity inherent in capitalist patriarchal society. / Art History, Visual Arts and Music / M.A. (Visual Arts)