Thesis (M.F.A.)--Otago Polytechnic, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. / Thesis typescript. Supervisors: Adrian Hall, Michele Beevors. Otago Polytechnic department: School of Art. "October 2008." Accompanied by a website of the exhibition of the author's artistic.

Au moment décisif de l'histoire culturelle franco-américaine où s'inverse la hiérarchie des capitales artistiques entre Paris et New York, le Nouveau Roman français connaissait une certaine fortune aux États-Unis, en particulier dans la communauté artistique regroupée autour de l'Art Minimal. À la faveur d'un double transfert - du champ littéraire vers le champ artistique et de la France vers les États-Unis -, le Nouveau Roman retenait l'attention d'une partie de l'art américain, qui tentait de se construire contre l'art européen du XIXe siècle mais avec la littérature française de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Fondé sur une somme d'indices fournis par ces artistes et complétée par des enquêtes historiques et sociologiques, une collecte d'articles, une recherche théorique et des études d’œuvres significatives, ce travail tente d'expliquer les raisons de cette fortune et d'analyser les aboutissements théoriques et esthétiques de la réception du Nouveau Roman par le milieu artistique américain. / In an key Franco-American cultural and historical moment when New York takes Paris's place as the world artistic capital, the French New Novel achieved certain successs in the United States, especially in the Minimal Art community. Owing to a double transfer – from the literary field to the artistic field and from France to America -, some American artists drew attention to the French New Novel. While they were developing their art against 19th century european art, they created it with 20th century French literature. This work is based on an amount of clues given by these artists, supplented by historical and sociological investigations, a collection of articles, a theorethical research, and studies of significant works of art, in an attempt to understand the reasons of this success and the theorethical and aesthetic realizations of the reception of the New Novel by the American artistic milieu.

The American poet Susan Howe (1937-present) began her career as a visual artist, but owing to a dearth of information about her early collages it has been difficult to say anything substantive about how they might have shaped her poetic practice. In 2010, she placed her collages on archive. Along with a number of personal interviews with Howe, this heretofore unavailable material has enabled me to consider Howe's subsequent work in a new light and to establish significant links between her early visual aesthetics and the poetics of bibliography, historiography, and elegy for which she is now known. Howe's collages, like her poetry, focus on details that are at risk of vanishing from cultural memory and printed record. For this reason, I argue that her work evinces an 'elegaic materialism', or a way of reading, viewing, and thinking about texts that is attuned to loss. If “history is the record of the winners,” as Howe says, then one way of rescuing marginalized perspectives is by regarding manuscripts as drawings, thereby rescuing the concrete particulars deemed irrelevant by editors and historians. As Howe's late work turned increasingly toward elegy, her early aesthetic contributed to a nuanced poetics of personal loss and to a series of astonishing new formal tropes. The Introduction to this thesis discusses Howe's materialism in the context of current literary theory and textual scholarship. Chapter 1 concerns itself with Howe's art historical context. Chapter 2 analyses a selection of her word-drawings. Chapter 3 considers Howe's transition to poetry. Chapter 4 addresses her turn to archival documents in her middle period. Chapter 5 looks at the influence on Howe of documentary film, especially in connection with the task of representing a lost loved one, and Chapter 6 discusses her two most recent elegies, The Midnight and THAT THIS. A Coda completes the circle by once more considering Howe in the context of the visual arts at the moment she was selected to exhibit at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

L'objectif de cette thèse est de proposer une étude exhaustive de l’œuvre de l'artiste allemand contemporain Franz Erhard Walther (1939, Fulda - ), accompagnant l'élaboration du catalogue raisonné de l'ensemble de son travail. En effet, pour cet artiste à l’œuvre colossale, la nécessité de la réalisation d'un catalogue raisonné se pose depuis plusieurs années. Bien que son œuvre ait une place fondamentale dans l'histoire de l'art de la deuxième moitié du XXème siècle, le travail de Walther reste encore très mal connu et souvent sujet à confusion. Cette œuvre, caractérisée en grande partie par l'utilisation de la couture comme technique et du tissu comme matériau, et dont la monumentalité n'a été rendue possible que grâce à la collaboration de l'artiste avec sa première femme, Johanna Frieß, trouve sa spécificité à travers l'évolution du concept de Handlung, propre à l'artiste. Cette étude propose donc le premier véritable catalogue raisonné de Franz Erhard Walther, de ses premières œuvres en 1954 à ce jour, accompagné d'une étude précise de chaque groupe d’œuvres, replaçant ainsi l'ensemble dans le contexte de l'histoire de l'art. / The objective of this thesis is to propose an exhaustive study of the work of the german contemporary artist Franz Erhard Walther (1939, Fulda - ), as well as the catalogue raisonné of his work. There is indeed since many years an imperative need for such a comprehensive catalogue, given the colossal production of Walther. Although his work plays a prominent role in the Art History of the second half of the XXth century, it remains little-known and is still subject of some confusion. This body of work, mainly characterized by the use of sewing as technique and tissue as material, and whose enormity wouldn't have been possible without the collaboration of the artist's first wife, Johanna Frieß, finds its specificity in the concept of Handlung that Walther developed. This study includes thus the first actual catalogue raisonné of Franz Erhard Walter, from his first-ever works of 1954 until now, as well as a specific study of every group of works, putting it in the context of Art History.

The dissertation is following both theoretical and practical sides of Victor Burgin's early work. The structure of this thesis mainly reflects a hybrid attitude of the artist/theorist - the text digress from theoretical comments to related art works which are arranged chronologically. The principal focus lies in Burgin's concers for ideological, social and cultural impacts of photographic advertising practice in Great Britain during the 1970s which he assesed through theories derived from marxism, semiology and psychoanalysis. Keywords: Victor Burgin, photography theory, minimal art, conceptual art, cognitive science, semiotics, modernism, postmodernism, LEF (Left Front of the Arts), marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism

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