This dissertation offers a reconsideration of the uses of photography under the aegis of Conceptual Art between 1966 and 1973 by analyzing the ways photography challenged epistemological limits, and, despite the claims regarding the medium’s inherent indexicality, emphasized experience over exactitude, and doubt in place of certainty. By focusing on four American practitioners, I argue for the “benefit of the doubt;” in other words, for the value of disbelief and hesitation, marking the reorientation of art at this time towards critical methods which oppose all orthodoxies, including but not limited to formalist dogmas, and instead are committed to the denial of autonomy in favor of understanding meaning as infinitely contingent. The dissertation is divided among four key case studies, including Mel Bochner (n. 1940), Bruce Nauman (n. 1941), Douglas Huebler (1924-1997), and John Baldessari (n. 1931). Each chapter argues for the unique contribution of photography in relation to conceptual art practices, while also situating the projects of these individual practitioners within the broader history of the medium of photography. I explore specifically the concepts of seriality, transparency and theory in Bochner; performance, “worklessness,” and failure in Nauman; portraiture, mapping and impossibility in Huebler; humor, didacticism, choice and chance in Baldessari. This project looks back continuously to significant precursors, in particular the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), as a means of engaging the status and function of art after the Readymade, particularly as concerns de-skilling, disinterest, affirmative irony, and nominalism, as well as the dialectic between inclusivity and inconclusivity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/32931 |
| Date | 05 September 2012 |
| Creators | Diack, Heather |
| Contributors | Kaplan, Louis |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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