Gestural Ethics: Consequences of the Mark in Contemporary Painting

The thesis considers what the difference is between generating an appearance by making something and generating it by thinking it (including naming it). By considering phenomenologies of agency in a variety of contexts, the argument questions the presumption that judgment determines the appearance. Judgment, understood as a disembodied, punctal decision-making is seen to be of little value for doing or understanding painting. Thus the (art-) theoretical acceptance of a distinction between 'craft' and 'judgment' is found to be misleading. The claim is then that painting constructs its domain of embodied thought through the gesture, and not through a disembodied act of judgment. The mark is, however, what allows painting to be commodified with a vengeance: individuated gesture as branded signature. Given the interwoven contexts of production and reception, however, - where agency resides then becomes hard to determine. The thesis takes this up this problem through a reading of Hegel's Master and Servant dialectic. The outcome is that the commodity form can neither be side-stepped nor straightforwardly assaulted; a discussion of Haim Steinbach's work is central. The proposal at this point is that artworks nonetheless retain their power according to the kinds of series they articulate; here various concepts of seriality are considered including Badiou's. It is then argued that the mark is best modelled through Derrida's notion of the trace. Barnett Newman's paintings are then re-considered through the lens of the trace, and vice versa. The argument here is that the critical gesture is the gesture that adequates itself to the trace. The painted mark is interrogated in these terms through close readings of works by Duchamp, Reed, Jorn and Brown among others. However, the limits of the Derridean vision are reached in thinking colour. For colour exceeds the logic of the mark insofar as the latter is a logic of inscription

Design and Aesthetic in Debussy\u27s Music: \u3ci\u3eThe Premiere rapsodie\u3c/i\u3e for Clarinet and Piano

In Claude Debussy\u27s Premiere rapsodie for clarinet and piano, the composer is beyond the realm of music just for listening , but has become a designer, an architect of musical structure. During the early 1900s, Debussy began to develop a different Paris, France, was a cosmopolitan city in the early 1880s and on into the outlook for his compositions. La mer (1903-1905), a piece for orchestra, begins to exhibit Debussy\u27s new focus on and compositional purpose of design and structure during his late career. The Premiere rapsodie, written from December 1909 to January 1910, is an example of this late compositional style. This thesis will explore the historical context of France from 1880-1910, attempt to discover the influences for a design aspect from the composer\u27s personal life, and complete a detailed analysis of the Premiere rapsodie

The Singular Echo of the Artwork: Painting, Writing & OOO

This research incorporates both practical and theoretical methods. The theoretical component of the research was a philosophical investigation into Graham's Harman's OOO philosophy, applying it to spectatorship and art criticism to frame the problem of the irreducibility of the literary and the visual, before extending it provide an alternative template for better art writing. Within the philosophical thesis I identify within the ever-changing and evolving philosophy of Harman his 'third object thesis', that which directly pertains to spectatorship, and in which the artwork and viewer are indissociable, are joined in a third object. I prove that it is this "third object" that must be written about, rather than the artwork. This provides a new approach to the 'well-worn' problem of the irreducibility between the literary and the visual. This novel approach provides original insights into the problem and a template for working beyond it that utilises fiction. In the course of this work I show that despite assumptions to the contrary, Harman's take on spectatorship is neither post-human, nor does it conform to other well recognised Modernist models. This is the first thorough practical application of OOO to artistic practice, 'road-testing' as it were, its suitability as a tool for artists and art writers. The philosophical thesis both provided support to and was supported by the practical research I have also undertaken. The practical component incorporated my creative practice as is, that is painting, writing and curating. These practical outcomes were both consequences of the research process and drivers of it

Fashion and art : the influence of art on fashion and the coexisting relationship in the 20th century western culture

Dissertação de mestrado em Design and Marketing de ModaThis work aims to present the relationship between art and fashion in the 20th century western culture focusing particularly on art movements and how fashion and art inspired each other throughout the years. The specific art movements which are investigated are Surrealism, Cubism, Pop art and the inspiration in contemporary designers such as Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Notions of fashion and art have been investigated by various numbers of academics and philosophers and the relationship of the two has also been an interesting, yet a demanding topic for a research. Co-existing affair of the two terms has been pointed out by working on specific cases such as Dali and Elsa Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent and several painters like Picasso and further more delving would lead to many more examples. This work intended to exhibit the bold aspects of how fashion and art interacted in terms of design, culture and performance; by some means searching for ways to evaluate art work in aesthetical term and try to measure fashion pieces in the same way. The work is constructed on explaining terms art, fashion, aesthetics and art movements and investigating them further on aspects of design and designers in order to depict the existing relationship with the help of visuals. The academic articles of scholars have also been examined to provide more evidence to the subject matter. With Worth, Poiret and other famous Parisian couturiers fashion and art relationship gained momentum in respect to the way they worked and interacted with the artists of the period. Continuing from on then, fashion and art has had considerable amount of transaction. The previous works inspired the current ones and this cycled continued until present day. Fashion is something that is worth to exhibit in museums today; having its own part. In the end, it is concluded that term investigation of fashion and art is a continuous process because each scholar reckons new perspective or criticizing the existing one, the notions are always up to date with the creation of new works, and therefore, it is best to work on specific cases to have a clear idea about the relationship. The intention of the designer and if the finished product is appealing to the aesthetics are important points to acknowledge when making a judgment of whether fashion is an art or not. From past to present, art and fashion inspired each other with a mutual benefit, they worked together though sometimes fashion has been viewed as only craftsmanship.Este trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar a relação entre arte e moda na cultura ocidental do século XX, com particular incidência sobre os movimentos de arte, sobre a forma como estes se inspiraram e interagiram, ao longo do tempo. Os movimentos artísticos específicamente investigados são o Surrealismo, o Cubismo, a Pop arte, bem como, a inspiração de designers contemporâneos como Alexander McQueen e John Galliano, nestes e em tantos outros movimentos e artistas. Noções de moda e arte têm sido investigadas, por numerosos académicos e filósofos, sendo a sua relação interessante, embora exigente, como tema de pesquisa. A relação co-existente dos dois temas, tem sido apontada, pesquisar trabalhos em casos específicos como Dali e Elsa Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent e Picasso ou Braque, bem como vários pintores e criadores de moda, o que numa investigação futura levaria a muitos outros exemplos. Assim, o objetivo desta pesquisa, foi o de apresentar os fortes aspectos de como a moda e a arte interagiram tendo, posteriormente, o design como ‘companhia’, oscultando a cultura e verificando a conexão de todos estes elementos. A busca pelas diversas formas de avaliação de obras de arte em termos estéticos e tentar perceber em que medida se poderá actuar da mesma maneira no que respeita a peças de moda. Este trabalho consiste na tentativa de explicar termos como arte, moda, estética e movimentos artísticos, investigá-los sob a perspectiva do design e de designers, a fim de mostrar, com a ajuda de recursos visuais, a relação existente entre todos os elementos. Para isso, contribuiu a ajuda de recursos visuais examinados, bem como, consulta de artigos académicos de outros pesquisadores, no sentido de fornecer mais credibilidade aos assuntos em foco. Com Worth, Poiret e outros famosos costureiros de moda parisiense, o relacionamento da arte obteve impulso, no que diz respeito à forma como os mesmos trabalharam e interagiram, com os artistas das épocas em que estavam inseridos. Sempre existiu uma considerável consonância entre moda e arte. As obras de épocas anteriores inspiraram as atuais e este ciclo continuou até aos dias de hoje. A moda, hoje em dia, é algo que vale a pena expôr em museus, possuindo um lugar próprio . Finalmente, conclui-se que a investigação da moda e arte é um processo contínuo, uma vez que, cada pesquisador avalia uma nova perspectiva ou critica a existente. As noções de moda e arte são sempre atualizadas, com a criação de novas obras, logo, entendemos ser melhor, trabalhar casos específicos para ter uma ideia mais clara sobre o relacionamento de ambas. A estética é um dos pontos a considerar, perante um produto atraente e acabado, sobretudo se tivermos um ‘julgamento’, positivo ou negativo, da ‘moda como forma de arte’. Do passado ao presente, arte e moda inspiraram-se mutuamente obtendo benefícios recíprocos apesar da moda, durante décadas, ter sido, apenas, olhada como uma frivolidade ou uma vaidade feminina

Exploring Creation and Curation as Steps Towards a Gamification of the Arts Through Game Engines

Game engines enable the creation of novel applications that can enhance how art is created and presented and provide new tools to artists. This thesis presents study, research, and development within the frontiers between the arts and computer science, namely about a perceived dual phenomenon of the artification of games and the gamification of the arts. It proposes the hypothesis that through gamification, one can create environments that enable artists to give new possibilities to their art and communicate differently with their audiences, as the digital game engines’ artistic multimodality opens possibilities of new kinds of art forms, and artistic creation, experience and curation, and also raises questions about if it could extend the arts’ domain and if it could be a resource for the endeavours of the research in computational creativity. This hypothesis is tested with the development of an art studio for multimedia sculptures - TIMAEUS – and an infrastructure that enables people to render such sculptures in virtual spaces, made in collaboration with artists to create examples of their art transformed into digital forms. The work also approaches the gamified possibilities of art curation to create a virtual stoa - or colonnade - for teaching Stoicism and a virtual Odyssey, enabling the presentation of artistic work as a virtual art gallery. The artistic evaluation of the prototypes, in collaboration with creators on different branches of the arts – painting, drawing, poetry – aims to assess the qualities of this approach that has been presented in relevant conferences and evaluated by peers and artists. ‘The arts’ are here treated as an umbrella term comprehending the whole field of creative expression and are the subject of an experiment of a special kind of gamification, thought as a sort of gamification that is extended to the use and transformation of the digital game software infrastructure itself – the game engine

Art, Decoration, and the Texture of Modern Experience: The Interior Before 1900

This dissertation explores the critical fascination among artists, architects, and their publics with the interior and its image at the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing primarily on Belgium and France, it argues that the ambition to create work that engaged, confronted, and constructed the shifting texture of the wider world motivated much of this representational engagement with the interior. Whereas it had once constituted a paradigm for bourgeois fantasies of protective retreat, by the 1880s, new challenges of modernity prompted a destabilization and reconfiguration of the interior's representational and cultural resonances. These challenges included sweeping industrialization and urbanization, developments in psychological research, an increasingly fractured political landscape, and the combined juggernaut of exploitation and attempts to resist it. Questioning the widespread assumption that the interior was merely a defensive, nostalgic asylum from a turbulent and spectacular modern world, in my account it is rather recognized as a pervasive paradigm integral to modern life and an index of cultural transition at the turn of the century. In seeking to create work that critically engaged this revolutionizing modern world, artists and designers were faced with new formal problems. They responded by attempting to evoke experiential realities of such a world through new configurations of the spatial environment. Focusing on case studies that traverse a range of media, national and political boundaries, and critical ambitions, this dissertation assesses how material, psychological, or political components of an older program of the bourgeois interior were individually engaged, and challenged, through experimental artistic practices. Subjects of analysis include: James Ensor's painted interior scenes and their prompts to visually remodel a relation of the self and the stuff of everyday life, the materials and materiality of modern existence; Édouard Vuillard's intimiste paintings and "environmental" pictorial practices in relation to changing conceptions of interiority and the modern, psychological self; and Henry van de Velde's socially-inflected experiments in which he conflated notions of the activated, charged surface of contemporaneous painting with enlivened interiors realized in architectural design. As these case studies attest, the interior provoked no single response; however, by the end of the century and in response to its reimagined resonance in the wider culture, fruitful interplays arose between pictorial concerns and the architectural, lived environment. These experimentations with the interior were activated with the goal of evoking the complexities of experience in the modern world. Such complexity, I demonstrate, was not founded in the progressive dissolution of one form of representation for another, but rather in negotiating the ways in which we might understand the world-and the image- to continually and vibrantly negotiate between private and public, individual and collective, space and picture plane. By reassessing the role of artistic practice across media in this way, the interior offers itself up as a tool, a way in, to dynamically address the relation between the individual, phenomenological encounter with the image and broader conditions of historical change. This "interior effect," I argue, also has powerful consequences for the study of late-nineteenth century art and culture, and for a productive reassessment of the interplay between Art and Architectural History.PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144186/1/aefraser_1.pd

Mind Circles: on conceptual deliberation − Hanne Darboven and the trace of the artist's hand

The phrase ‘de-materialisation of the art object’ has frequently assumed the mistaken role of a universal definition for original conceptual art. My art practice has prompted me to reconsider the history of the term dematerialisation to research another type of conceptual art, one that embraces materiality and incorporates cerebral handmade methods, as evidenced in the practice of the German artist Hanne Darboven. This thesis will establish that materiality and the handmade – the subjective – was embraced by certain original conceptual artists. Furthermore, it argues that within art practices that use concepts, the cerebral handmade can function to prolong the artist’s conceptual deliberation and likewise instigate a nonlinear conscious inquisitiveness in the viewer. My practice-based methodologies for this research involved analogue photography, drawing, an artist residency, exhibition making, publishing, artist talks and interdisciplinary collaborations with various practices of knowledge. The thesis reconsiders the definition of conceptual art through an analysis of the original conceptual art practices initiated in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s that utilised handmade methods. I review and reflect upon the status of the cerebral handmade in conceptual art through a close study of the work of Hanne Darboven, whose work since 1968 has been regularly included in conceptual art exhibitions. I discuss the many contradictions embedded in her practice, and establish how critics and theorists consistently simplified her work by predominately focusing on the conceptual aspects of her art practice. The thesis maps and analyses the historically disregarded fact that Darboven’s practice depended on materiality, as present in both her intensively temporal handmade processes and her methodologies of collecting. To explore the current legacy of this analysis I contextualise contemporary encounters related to fine art practice and conclude with a dialogue, artist-to-artist, with Lucy Skaer