Global ETD Search

1	Inside The Power Station : Allegory And The Dance Of Represented Ideas Cunnington, Maree Helen January 2004 (has links) This performance-as-research project incorporated a five-month residency inside a working power station, Swanbank, Ipswich, a provider of electricity to Australia's eastern states via the national grid. The concept 'power station' is compelling because it involves the transformation of material form (coal) to immaterial phenomena (electricity), a process analogous to making electronically-mediated art. Three linked interdisciplinary works were created out of the artist's immersion on site: Swanshift, a music-video eulogy to the closure of the station's oldest coal-fired facility, Swanbank 'A'; The Industrial Theatre, a photographic series featuring Swanbank workers; and unstatic, a live, video-mediated performance. As an enquiry into meaning within contemporary art practice, this research project used allegory as its symbolic mode of thought and formation. Through allegory, the Swanbank site was explored metaphorically to reveal a fictional, parallel world beyond the literal surface of danger, authority and rigour. In this space of excess, unreality and overflowing boundaries, meaning is multiple and celebrated. Hand-in-hand with an exploration of allegory, this exegesis also presents an insight into methodologies for industrial, site-specific, interdisciplinary practice, and arts-industry collaboration. Allegory Appropriation Fiction Fragmentation Industrial Site Interdisciplinary / interdisciplinarity Machine Aesthetic Metaphor Modernism Performance Postmodernism Power Station Semiotics Site-specificity Structuralism Sublime
2	George Tsutakawa's fountain sculptures of the 1960s: fluidity and balance in postwar public art. Cuthbert, Nancy Marie 20 August 2012 (has links) Between 1960 and 1992, American artist George Tsutakawa (1910 – 1997) created more than sixty fountain sculptures for publicly accessible sites in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. The vast majority were made by shaping sheet bronze into geometric and organically inspired abstract forms, often arranged around a vertical axis. Though postwar modernist artistic production and the issues it raises have been widely interrogated since the 1970s, and public art has been a major area of study since about 1980, Tsutakawa's fountains present a major intervention in North America's urban fabric that is not well-documented and remains almost completely untheorized. In addition to playing a key role in Seattle's development as an internationally recognized leader in public art, my dissertation argues that these works provide early evidence of a linked concern with nature and spirituality that has come to be understood as characteristic of the Pacific Northwest. Tsutakawa was born in Seattle, but raised and educated primarily in Japan prior to training as an artist at the University of Washington, then teaching in UW's Schools of Art and Architecture. His complicated personal history, which in World War II included being drafted into the U.S. army, while family members were interned and their property confiscated, led art historian Gervais Reed to declare that Tsutakawa was aligned with neither Japan nor America – that he and his art existed somewhere in-between. There is much truth in Reed's statement; however, artistically, such dualistic assessments deny the rich interplay of cultural allusions in Tsutakawa's fountains. Major inspirations included the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko, Himalayan stone cairns, Japanese heraldic emblems, First Nations carvings, and Bauhaus theory. Focusing on the early commissions, completed during the 1960s, my study examines the artist's debts to intercultural networks of artistic exchange – between North America, Asia, and Europe – operative in the early and mid-twentieth century, and in some cases before. I argue that, with his fountain sculptures, this Japanese American artist sought to integrate and balance such binaries as nature/culture, intuition/reason, and spiritual/material, which have long served to support the construction of East and West as opposed conceptual categories. / Graduate George Tsutakawa American modernism modern design silicon bronze sculpture welded sheet metal sculpture West Coast modernism Pacific Northwest Seattle public art Century 21 Fulton Mall postwar shopping center design Asian American art World War II Japanese internment Nisei Kibei machine aesthetic abstract art spirituality in art Lawrence Halprin environmentalism in art International Style architecture postwar urban planning Ala Moana Center Northgate Shopping Center Zen in America Bauhaus in America Walter Gropius Victor Gruen Mark Tobey Japanese American Henry Moore Sigfried Giedion Lewis Mumford Alexander Archipenko Paul Horiuchi Johsel Namkung Dudley Carter Freeway Park, Seattle Bentall Centre, Vancouver Seattle Public Library secondary Orientalism organicism in art modernist architecture

Search results

Inside The Power Station : Allegory And The Dance Of Represented Ideas

George Tsutakawa's fountain sculptures of the 1960s: fluidity and balance in postwar public art.