Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

anekdota is an exploration of the form of short short fiction. The exploration contains original works of fiction as short as five words and as long as twelve-hundred words. The exploration seeks new forms for fiction by frustrating and manipulating our traditional sense of story structure. At times, the exploration also investigates a form of conceptual art known as "found language" whereby original material is created by transforming, reframing, and collaging previously published material. anekdota translates from the Greek as "unpublished things." / by Scott Wood. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011.

This thesis offers a periodization of the present according to which contemporary art and visual culture are understood to be symptomatic of an increasingly pervasive pessimistic social, political and ecological outlook. This pessimism I will claim is what is authentically new about our contemporary cultural forms, which are directed towards a particular form of humour and stupidity. Core elements in the periodization include the limitation of imaginative horizons expressed in the well-known remark of Fredric Jameson’s that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as well as the pervasive sense that nature is in a state of perpetual and endemic crisis and the idea that modern computing technology is making us stupider than we have ever been before. I argue that these issues are symptomatic of what Gilles Deleuze, in 1990, termed the societies of Control – a world of corporate power, ubiquitous computing, data extraction and financial capitalism that has intensified since its early diagnosis. However, dominant narratives of art and visual culture continue to theorize artistic production according to traditionally avant-garde categories of resistance, criticality, transgression and subversion. This presumes art to have an agency that is difficult to imagine in the current social situation. In this respect, the thesis in part constitutes a critical reflection on the pressures placed upon our existing models of art and visual culture - for example, and centrally, the idea of an ‘avant-garde’ - by current social and technological conditions. Building on these observations, the thesis proposes a new model of contemporary art and visual culture that has no agency: images under control that are formed, as epiphenomena, by technological apparatuses of Control; studying examples such as extreme sports stunts, internet memes, online trolls, bad quality jpegs and impassive ‘artworks’. The purpose is to ask what value we can place on these emergent cultural forms, which seem to mirror, reflect and reiterate a pessimistic worldview deeply entrenched in the societies of Control.

This essay offers both a historical analysis of twentieth century avant-garde practices relating to representation in music, and a prescriptive model for contemporary methods of composition. I address the taxonomy problem in classical music, clarifying the ontological divide identified by German musicologist Michael Rebhahn Contemporary Classical music and New Music. I demonstrate how neoliberalism has developed a Global Style (Foster 2012) of "Light Modernity,” evident in both contemporary architecture and music alike. The central problem facing composition today is the fetishization of materials, ultimately derived from music's refusal to allow the question of representation to be addressed. I argue that composers have largely sought to define noise as sound-in-itself, eliminating the possibilities of representation in the process. Proposing instead that composers should strive to tackle representation head-on in the 21st century, I show how Jacques Rancière provides a model in which noise and sound—representation and abstraction—function in a conjoined, yet non-homogenized aesthetic regime. Governed by what he calls the "pensiveness of the image,” it allows for a renewed art form that rejects repetition and neoliberalism, re-connecting to the spirit of the avant-garde without slavishly echoing either its outmoded aesthetics or dogmatic philosophies.

This dissertation reexamines the art-into-life narrative of the historical avant-gardes through an analysis of a set of experimental life practices established by artists across Dada, Orphism, and Surrealism. Focusing on Tristan Tzara’s performances of identity, Sonia Delaunay’s fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, my project proposes a broader envisioning of avant-garde material culture to examine the ways in which artists creatively produced an “art of living” in relation to the normative types of “lifestyle” produced contemporaneously in France during the years 1910-1930. Rooted in original archival research and interdisciplinary in focus, my discussion of these artists is centered on three distinct sites within material culture (the manifesto, advertising, the office) and reveals how these activities at times challenge and at times replicate various dominant discourses. The first chapter examines how Samuel Rosenstock became the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Specifically, I focus on Tzara’s elaboration of himself through the delivery and subsequent publication of his manifestos, Sept manifestes dada (1924), which performatively cite and repeat his name throughout. Discussed alongside additional publications and events throughout Paris Dada, I detail how Tzara’s well known critique of language is geared toward a production of subjectivity that refuses to cohere to the types of categorical identity dominant within France at the time, including those of national, racial, and ethnic classification, particularly as they circumscribed the artist within the popular press. In the second chapter, I consider Sonia Delaunay’s early simultaneous dresses (1913) and the development of her commercial fashion business, Maison Delaunay (1924-1931), analyzing in particular the ways in which Delaunay deliberately intertwined her image with her business practices of publicity, from branding and advertisements to fashion photography. Elaborating the ways in which these practices evolved within the gendered constraints of the artist’s own everyday life as well as the broader feminization of the decorative arts, I argue that Delaunay strategically negotiates normative forms of marketing and commercialism in order to gain visibility and ultimately recognition as an artist. My third chapter provides the first in-depth material history of the Bureau de recherches surréalistes, which operated in Paris from October 1924 to April 1925. Focusing on the Bureau’s daily Cahier de la permanence, its promotional photographs, and press announcements, I detail the ways in which the Bureau became a site of debate among the Surrealists for issues concerning office labor and governance. Elaborating the tensions between the Surrealist pursuit of revolutionary action and the need for workplace leadership and control, I position how the daily procedures of the Bureau overlap with the rise of standardized office practices as outlined in contemporaneous trade journals and management theories. Together, these creative, material practices offer a new narrative of the avant-garde endeavor to merge art with life. Here, Dada becomes an identity, Orphism becomes a business, and Surrealism becomes a workplace, each with its own political uncertainties, each simultaneously challenging and upholding varying historical norms, each serving as an alternative to both pure critique and pure affirmation. Within this discussion, the traditional concepts of an avant-garde politics (revolution, utopia, and anti-capitalism) give way to a greater consideration of ethical practices of self-making. “The Art of Living in the Historical Avant-Garde” thus reveals the integration of art and life as neither utopian pursuit nor historical failure but rather as a series of actual life practices ambiguously enmeshed within a terrain marked by nationalism, consumerism, and bureaucracy.

Dans le cyberespace, les distinctions entre les différentes acceptions du mot code deviennent poreuses : le code juridique cède le pas au code informatique dans son rôle coercitif, le code informatique possède la même étoffe qu'un code secret pour l'utilisateur moyen, etc. L'hypothèse principale de ce mémoire est qu'on doit laisser de côté la représentation traditionnelle du hackeur en tant que pirate informatique pour n'adopter que la stricte définition suivante : le hackeur est un manipulateur de code, quel que soit ce code. Selon André Belleau, « l'institution [...] agit comme le code des codes. » En conséquence, il devient possible de considérer les mouvements d'avant-garde du siècle dernier comme des hackeurs d'avant l'heure puisqu' ils ont relevé le pari qu'en contestant et en renouvelant les codes esthétiques institutionnels, ils transformeraient dans la foulée les codes politiques de leur société. À la suite de l'analyse des multiples manifestes produits par le hackeur au cours de son histoire, on peut rétrospectivement émanciper sa praxis hors de l'étroite sphère informatique où on l'avait relégué pour lui faire investir l'ensemble des champs de l'activité humaine. Prospectivement, on peut affirmer que si le transvasement de l'institution culturelle vers le cyberespace s'effectue sur un mode conflictuel, c'est en raison d'une difficulté pour le code institutionnel de s'amalgamer au code informatique. Là où l'avant-garde artistique au sens traditionnel s'essouffle, le hackeur prend le pas et produit quantité d'œuvres qui procèdent de la manipulation d'un code et ce faisant, mettent en tension des enjeux spécifiques à ce code. On pourrait par exemple considérer les œuvres distribuées sous licence Creative Commons comme un hack du langage juridique utilisé pour formuler le droit d'auteur, lequel hack remet en question la relation institutionnalisée entre l'éditeur et l'auteur. Le repliement du code de la langue sur le code du langage de programmation dans le poégramme, ou poème-programme, pourra par ailleurs constituer la preuve que l'informatique n'est pas qu'un véhicule d'expression artistique, au contraire qu'on y trouve en son cœur l'Art et la Beauté. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : avant-garde, code, cyberespace, hackeur, Internet, institution, manifeste, ordinateur

Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Droit privé--Paris 1, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. 437-478. Index.

Diss.--Bayreuth, 2000. / Bibliogr. p. 212-233.

Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Histoire de l'art--Paris 1, 1998. Titre de soutenance : Les relations internationales de Robert Delaunay de 1909 à 1941. / Bibliogr. p. 281-298. Index.

Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Sociologie--Besançon, 2002. / Résumé en anglais.