Un-done: The historiographical dialogue between past and present

Art critic for The Nation and professor of at Columbia, Arthur C. Danto led the charge with his essay “The End of Art” in 1984 to declare the end of art. Thirty-eight years later, the awareness of colonial problematics in the elite institutionalism of art history today warrants a reanalysis of art historical ontologies of progress (and their ties to colonialism), which have seemingly disbanded in the discipline’s current rhetoric. Because Danto’s historical framework to end art focuses on progress through artistic means, does it fall short or even negate itself by missing the deconstruction of colonial afterlives still present in art institutionalism? Moreover, does Danto’s end to art ultimately reiterate colonial and imperial dictations over time, and thus undercut a historical futurity for “non-Western” “artists”? In comparing Danto’s theoretical discipline with the work of Titus Kapar, Yuki Kihara, and Jason Garcia (Okuu Pin), I present a hypothetical dialogue between the art historical constructs of time and the present investment in decolonizing art with a critique through appropriation. Kaphar’s work underlines how representation can challenge the game of identity performance for the benefit of institutions, Kihara challenges the pervasive ignorance towards stereotyping Pacific Islanders by resisting and confusing the West-East binary boundaries, while Garcia challenges the hero complex historical figures still have in popular culture even if they are academically deconstructed. Ultimately, they perform a legitimacy to an end of Western hegemony that Danto alludes to

Of course I love you, the flower said : creation of a visual, fantastic and immersive installation based on classic literature for children

Le texte suivant est une réflexion sur la création et la théorie derrière mon projet de maitrise appelé ‘Of course I love you, the flower said’. Cette installation, basée sur la littérature classique pour enfants, est composée de plusieurs éléments dont trois cabanes distinctes et un environnement qui les entoure. Cette installation a comme but d’entièrement transformer la salle d’exposition afin de créer une possibilité d’immersion pour le visiteur. Elle est de l’ordre du fantastique et de l’imaginaire et prend son point de départ dans la dualité entre l’enfance et l’état adulte. Chaque cabane présente un diffèrent type d’art à l’intérieur, notamment un surplus de dessins, une muraille et une projection d’images virtuelles. Ainsi chaque forme d’art, l’élément de la cabane et le jardin entourant sont discutés prenant en compte comme ensemble, ils créent l’effet d’immersion désirée.The following text is a reflection on the creation and theory behind my master’s project titled ‘Of course I love you, the flower said’. This installation, based on classic literature for children, is composed of various elements such as distinct cabins and the environment around them and aims to entirely transform the gallery space in order to create a possibility of immersion for the viewer. The installation itself is of the order of the imaginative and the fantastic and has a starting point in the child-adult duality. Each cabin features a different type of art on the inside, namely a surplus of drawings, a mural and a projected slideshow of virtual images. Hence each of these different art-forms, alongside the element of the cabin and the outside ‘garden’, are discussed with special regards to how together, they achieve the aimed for immersion

Petro-Modernity and Urban Visual Culture since the Mid-Twentieth Century

Petro-modernity is a local phenomenon essential to the history of Kuwait, while also a global experience and one of the prime sources of climate change. The book investigates petroleum’s role in the visual culture of Kuwait to understand the intersecting ideologies of modernization, political representation, and oil. The notion of iridescence, the ambiguous yet mesmerizing effect of a rainbowlike color play, serves as analytical-aesthetic concept to discuss petroleum’s ambiguous contribution to modernity: both promise of prosperity and destructive force of socio-cultural and ecological environments. Covering a broad spectrum of historical material from aerial and color photography, visual arts, postage stamps, and master plans to architecture and also contemporary art from the Gulf, it dismantles petro- modernity’s visual legacy

Life Matter: Women Subjects and Women\u27s Objects in Innovative American Poetry

Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, and Juliana Spahr employ innovative poetic practices attuned to nature and environment in order to understand their personal lives and depict these understandings for readers. My dissertation investigates how these poets enact an inclusive posture toward environment that many innovative and experimental women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries possess, but are rarely recognized for. To this end, my dissertation provides counterarguments to characterizations of innovative or experimental poetic practices as reclusive, language-centric, opaque, and/or disconnected from the material world. I offer readings of poems, prose pieces, film, and art, to illustrate how materially innovative poetry compels an equally material framework for reading that is, at a foundational level, by and about the world

How Favourable Attitudes are Formed when the Semantic Associations of a Logotype are Congruent with Brand Personality

This thesis explores how favourable attitudes are formed when the semantic associations of a logotype are congruent with brand personality. By analysing the attitude response to varying brands sets, the findings from this thesis indicate that congruency within the underlying connotations of the logotype and brand personality did in fact produce positive responses in both attitude and aesthetics. Through the congruency research in this thesis, several influential factors affecting the attitude formation process towards a brand have been found. These factors include varying degrees of font appropriateness effectiveness, the over-powering effect of semantic associations and how underlying consumer behaviour tendencies affect purchasing decisions. The methodology for this project drew on two surveys completed by approximately 200 participants. Two logotypes and two brand slogans are cross-paired with each other resulting in four "brand" variants containing congruent and incongruent brand elements. Findings from this thesis emphasise the importance of underlying semantic associations in typography, as well as bringing a fresh perspective for graphic designers, typographers and type designers to assist their future work with successful logotype design

Iridescent Kuwait

Petro-modernity is a local phenomenon essential to the history of Kuwait, while also a global experience and one of the prime sources of climate change. The book investigates petroleum’s role in the visual culture of Kuwait to understand the intersecting ideologies of modernization, political representation, and oil. The notion of iridescence, the ambiguous yet mesmerizing effect of a rainbowlike color play, serves as analytical-aesthetic concept to discuss petroleum’s ambiguous contribution to modernity: both promise of prosperity and destructive force of socio-cultural and ecological environments. Covering a broad spectrum of historical material from aerial and color photography, visual arts, postage stamps, and master plans to architecture and also contemporary art from the Gulf, it dismantles petro- modernity’s visual legacy

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes examines the ways we encounter environments as readers/viewers of operas, literature, film, and sound recordings, and how each medium requires different detail-gathering techniques. Respective to the previously mentioned mediums, Sun & Sea (2017), Mount Analogue (1952), El Mar La Mar (2017), and Energy Field (2010) are analyzed by engaging with environmental media studies and invention. Reflecting the nature of each landscape—summits of mountains, aporias of deserts, and mysteries of waterscapes—an elemental approach is taken in investigating how these spaces may be noticed, internalized, recorded, and traversed by both the artist and viewer. With an emphasis on limitations of mediums, language, and equipment, this thesis argues that artists/readers/viewers in turn inhabit these rendered environments—while a looped response (termed as operatic mysticism) threads ekphrasis and imagination before and during the production, in the art proper, and in our minds during and well-after consumption

States of displacement: voice and narration in refugee stories

Includes bibliography.This thesis probes three texts to explore pathways between narration and refugee voices. In Dave Eggers’ text What is the What (2008), the words ‘novel’ and ‘autobiography’ on the title page set a framework for an exploration of the displacement of both genres. As Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee-exile claims to have “gone out in search of a writer,” so this thesis has sought textual manifestations of the voices of those labeled “refugees”. In Eggers’text a temporarily-gagged narrator presents the question as to how the writer-refugee collaboration allows the voice of a refugee to be heard. In Little Liberia: an African Odyssey in New York (2011), Jonny Steinberg’s placement of himself inside the text demonstrates a different narrative approach to this question as he opts to share subject-space with refugee-exiles, Rufus Arkoi and Jacob Massaquoi. Unsettling the idea of ‘protagonist’, the text challenges borders between story and history, telling and writing. Through a narrative relationship Steinberg probes acts of recounting, listening, reviewing in the routes he takes to the text eventually written. By contrast, Luxurious Hearses, a novella by Uwem Akpan, places the extreme fate of the refugee-protagonist in the hands of a third-person narrator to wrestle with the distinctions between voice, mediation and representation. Through Jubril and his co-commuters, the text investigates forms of “rupture” (Bakhtin, 2000) that occur when identities are opportunistically exposed to social labeling. Writer, reader and displaced person emerge as subjects of an economic framework which positions them within the powerful confines of terms such as citizen, refugee, exile. Said’s affirming insight thus presents a challenge to all on this continuum to “cross borders, (to) break barriers of thought and experience” (Said, 2000:185). Reading the text then becomes associated with interpreting events through the collaborative work of relating, and through reviewing the frames of reference. This thesis examines narrative approaches to refugee voices with the question ‘How do voice and narration inflect the transitions in these texts involving refugees?" Rather than the easy transference this may seem to involve, acts of entrusting the timbre of such stories to texts require political vigilance and a sensibility cognizant that a globalized environment implicates all in the crises creating refugees