ART OF THE STREET: TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF DISPLACEMENT

Western aesthetic discourse has grown complacent with the situs of art as planned encounter. Certain historical locations, such as the church, the museum and the gallery, have embedded the expectation of artistic encounter within the confines of their walls and gardens. Although certain practices like Earth Art and Public Art have moved art to outdoor locations open to and accessible by the public, they too perpetuate the notion of the planned aesthetic encounter through their public approval processes, newsworthiness, and fixed locations. Certain practices of street art challenge this legacy in critical ways. First, they do so by the intentional placement of the artwork outside of constrained institutional environments amid places where humans work, live and commune. Moreover, their methods render the work at once fixed by appending them within a static public context, and paradoxically ephemeral because of the likelihood that they will be removed, eventually fade or dissolve, or be painted over. Through these practices emerges what I call the aesthetics of displacement – that is, a decontextualization of the artwork which inhibits its re-placement in the museum and gallery. The paradigm embodied in these practices raises novel questions regarding both the ontology and the aesthetic of the artwork. What does it reveal about the being of the work? What does it inform about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its relevance to contemporary notions of community and v urbanity? In this dissertation, I argue that these street art practices are transformative because of the answers they offer to these questions. Specifically, they reveal and reinforce both a generative ontology of the work of art as well as a decontextualization of the aesthetic experience. The consequence is an aesthetic experience which becomes a repeatedly unique and iterative one arising from the coming together of artist, artwork and viewer in unexpected situations, always as experience of the present.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1071/thumbnail.jp

THÉATRO AGÓNA: THE GENERATIVE DRAMAS OF MIXED MARTIAL ARTS

This dissertation is an investigation of the combat sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) as both works of art and as philosophical processes for both fighters (the artists) and the spectators (the audience), an operation that inevitably leads to the disclosure of being. Using the anatomization’s of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the taxonomies of Roger Caillois, Friedrich Nietzsche’s notions on drama and animality, along with Martin Heidegger’s ontological confrontations with metaphysical forces, the inquiry aims to describe and extract some of the art- philosophy contained within MMA fight-works by investigating various principles, factors, and dynamics that become the constituting elements to the creation of form and meaning. The dissertation situates MMA within the context of a larger discourse in theater studies that aims to identify and describe the elements that distinguish this unique form of performance. This contextualization additionally clarifies the interdisciplinary nature of MMA and highlights the features which do not deny its athletic foundation but distinguish it from other sports and places it more accurately within the fine arts as embodied thought.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1072/thumbnail.jp

Summertime in the Belgrades : June 27, 2025

https://digitalmaine.com/summertime_in_the_belgrades/1230/thumbnail.jp

The Bucksport Enterprise : March 6, 2025

https://digitalmaine.com/bucksport_enterprise/1195/thumbnail.jp

The Maine Geological Survey’s Updated Nearshore Survey System, “Nessie”

Maine Geological Survey, Geologic Facts and Localities, Circular GFL-273.https://digitalmaine.com/mgs_publications/1658/thumbnail.jp

Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin Index 1966–2021

https://digitalmaine.com/maine_archaeological_society_bulletin/1111/thumbnail.jp