Photographic, film and video representations of dying and dead subjects bring to light delicate balancing acts of agency involving representational perspective. In this thesis, I examine contemporary, lens-based artworks by Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Fischl (whose sculptural medium is an exception), Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Gillian Wearing, Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin, AA Bronson and Jorge Zontal, as well as works by photojournalists Richard Drew and Theresa Frare, to show how they effectively convey facets of identity to dying and dead subjects. The voice, visuality, touch and embodiment (in particular, the body's weight and its materiality) are considered dimensions of intersubjectivity in order to explore how they foster access to the dying or the dead. My hypothesis is that, despite the avenues of intersubjective agency that appear to be foreclosed to the dying and the dead, the artists negotiate the following, significant challenges: how to bear witness to suffering without enacting visual mastery; how to grant a voice to or engage in dialogue with a silenced subject; how to touch the other without inflicting injury. Through the artists' divergent representational paradigms, the terms of intersubjectivity will be shown to equally involve the potential for reverence as well as for representational violence and it is upon this duality that the ethical concern hinges. The degrees of photographic transparency invoked by the artists alter the emergence of identity and the extent to which it reflects the perspective of the dying and the dead or, alternatively, becomes a framework of distortion. In terms of subject matter, the causes of death to the subjects represented, all of which are non-fictional, are AIDS-related illness, falling from buildings and violence (sometimes self-inflicted). Conceptually, I will be relying upon the phenomenological models of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the photographic theories of Roland Barthes, the feminist met
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85906 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Fitzpatrick, Andrea D. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Art History and Communication Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002294325, proquestno: AAINR21643, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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