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Against the "subject" of video, circa 1976 : Joan Jonas's Good night good morning and an archive of "narcissism"

This thesis analyzes the relationship between Joan Jonas’s 1976 videotape Good
Night Good Morning and the existing historiographical discourse on video art from the
1970s. I begin with a careful analysis and historical contextualization of Rosalind
Krauss’s seminal 1976 essay on video art, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” I then
compare her essay with a number of present-day interpretations of video art that are in
part motivated by a departure from Krauss and identify a range of presuppositions that
have persisted through the art historical discourse on video art from the mid-1970s
forward. Finally, I demonstrate that the terms of this essentially medium-specific discourse are too limited to offer a satisfying analysis of Good Night Good Morning and argue that understanding Jonas’s work requires an intermedial analysis. / text

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2010-08-1810
Date19 October 2010
CreatorsWilliams, Robin Kathleen, 1981-
Source SetsUniversity of Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis
Formatapplication/pdf

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