A Questionnaire on Materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today

The Misuse value of space : spatial practices and the production of space in Istanbul

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Art and Art History, 2008.This dissertation is an interdisciplinary investigation of the indeterminate political role played by the inhabitants’ spatial practices of misuse in the social production of urban space in contemporary Istanbul. My argument is that both established and emerging hegemonic representations of the city of Istanbul presume a normative definition of the capitalist production of urban space based only on the use and exchange values of space; and they fail to consider what I propose to call “the misuse value of space.” I define the misuse value of space as a potential value that is activated by the spatial practices of misusers. Considering the ways in which the normative definition of the production of space in Istanbul is complicated by the inhabitants of the city through their spatial practices of misuse, I find that the inhabitants are not merely passive consumers of the spaces of the metropolis but they have an active and constitutive role in molding the shape of urban social space. This entails a discussion on spatial authorship, which is normatively supposed to belong to the authorities including urban designers, real estate developers and the state. To show how the spatial practices of misusers are also implicated in the production of space in Istanbul, I turn to a set of vignettes, which I call ethnographies of spatial authorship. Finally, I focus on the art collective Oda Projesi and their public artworks which take inspiration from actual misuses in Istanbul. I explore the ways in which the public art of Oda Projesi rely on an activation of the misuse value of space. My dissertation closes with a demonstration of how Oda Projesi demonstrates the political possibilities that generate from this activation

Images of reality / ideals of democracy : contemporary Korean art, 1980s-2000s

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2014.This dissertation concerns the shifting notion of what I call “democratic aesthetics” in South Korea from the 1980s--a decade when the country’s pro-democracy social movement called “minjung undong” (lit. “people’s movement”) provided a political stage of postcolonial, anti-statist, and anti-authoritarian dissent until its nationwide spread effectively forced the dictator to step down by 1987. The heroic participation of artists as a propaganda unit during this successful march towards democracy in the 1980s is well noted in the country’s political history. Yet the history of art has yet to consider the exhibition values as well as the formal and aesthetic implications of the political art of this period--which, by 1985, obtained the moniker “minjung misul” (lit. “people’s art”). This dissertation begins by addressing this lack, and furthermore it asks the question about political art after the institution of parliamentary democracy. In other words, what happened to art when the political struggle was over? In the 1990s and the 2000s, how did South Korean artists constantly reactivate their political engagement with the shifting realities in the age of globalization and neoliberal urban development, as well as democracy? This inquiry has led me to concentrate on four specific moments of “democratic aesthetics”: the conceptualization of dissident reality by artist groups Reality and Utterance and Gwangju Freedom Artist Association in the early 1980s; Choi Jeong-hwa’s postcolonial mimesis of vernacular and commercial urban landscape in the late 1980s to the 1990s; art collectives Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s pursuit of publicness in neoliberal urbanization in the late 1990s to the early 2000s; and the democratic understanding of division with North Korea in the art of Oh Yoon, Sin Hak-chul, and Seung Woo Back from the 1980s to mid-2000s. Establishing a genealogy of Korean contemporary art within the concurrent workings of political democratization and cultural globalization, this dissertation ultimately constitutes an epistemological inquiry into three implicated terms: “Korean (hankuk)”; “contemporary (hy!ndae)”; “art (misul).” As a visual and cultural studies inquiry into the history of political aesthetics in South Korea, a country still reconciling with its (post-)colonial dilemma and an antagonistic relationship with the “other” Korea in the North, this dissertation seeks to contribute to, and complicate, how art history has thus far envisioned the 20th-century history of political avant-garde art

Modernizing nature/naturalizing modernization : late Ottoman and early Turkish republican landscape imagery, 1876-1939

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2017.Although the concept of landscape is a shifting signifier, landscape imagery carries potency in its ability to stir very specific sentiments about progress, conservation, patriotism, nostalgia, and collective belonging. "Modernizing Nature/Naturalizing Modernization: Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Landscape Imagery, 1876-1939" looks at how landscape is framed through the perspective of changing state ideologies that took hold in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. While successive political regimes crafted differing ideologies over the course of this chronology, several constant themes emerge in the landscape imagery produced over these years. The first is the will to modernize and develop a region that was considered backward and inferior to the more industrialized nations of the world. The second interrelated aim is to harness the region's modernization, technological progress, and economic development to maintain imperial and national sovereignty during a time of political crisis. A third impulse, which can be detected in the years leading up to the Ottoman Empire's dismemberment and immediately thereafter, is the desire to present an image of territorial and social unity. A fourth impulse is to take a more active role in conserving the region's architectural heritage and material culture and, by extension, channeling these conservation efforts into the writing and rewriting of history. While my historical research shows how the lands of this region were drastically altered through their modernization and nationalization, my visual analysis of key landscape images deconstructs how modernist landscape imagery created under state sponsorship naturalized these alterations. In the first portion of my research, I look at photographic rural imagery commissioned during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1908) to illustrate how photography was used by the Ottoman state to exercise logistical power and engage in territorial governance. In the second portion of my research, I focus on the works of Seker Ahmed Pasha (1841-1907), one of the first Ottoman landscape painters working in the Western mimetic tradition. I argue that the artist's viewpoints synthesize the imperial panoptic gaze with individualized points of view. In my final chapter, I discuss how images of the Anatolian countryside and the peasantry emerged into metonyms for the new national homeland in the transition from empire to republic. Urban image makers looked to rural lands to locate new imperial and national identities. Their imagery comes together as a modernist visual geography that can be viewed as a response to the Orientalist imagination. The visual geography of Ottoman and Turkish modernity can be considered to be just as imaginary however, in its attempts to transform an ethnically and religiously diverse Ottoman citizenry into the vision of a homogenous Turkish society rooted to a shared soil

From Pop to Now : Selections from the Sonnabend Collection

"The most comprehensive survey to date of works collected by international gallery owners Ileana and Michael Sonnabend featured over one hundred works by fifty-four artists spanning Pop Art, Minimalism, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, and recent photography and sculpture." -- Publisher's website

Andy Warhol, publisher

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2013.This dissertation looks at a specific selection of Warhol’s books and magazines. These publications span his first years in New York City in the 1950s to the height of his career in the 1960s to the last book he published before his death in 1987. While unabashedly a monographic study, my project sets out to de-center the act of publication to a cast of co-producers, technologies, institutional frameworks, and readers. Along those lines, the title of my dissertation is meant to signal a necessary shift in how we grapple with the medium of the artist’s book. Warhol was a publisher in the sense that he self-published his first books and he was listed on the masthead of inter/VIEW magazine as its publisher, yet many of his books were published by established publishing houses-Harcourt, Random House, Harper and Row-therefore, my title also refers to Warhol as a publisher in a less literal sense. His books and magazines incorporate the conditions of their production and reception into their content and meaning. Whether the capacities of the typesetter, the graphic display of the magazine’s front page, the input of an editor, the publisher’s publicity program, or the reader’s response, Warhol shows us that these elements of publication are available for him to take up as his art. A recurrent theme in this dissertation is to unpack how Warhol’s art challenges our understanding of the construction of “reading” publics and the social performance of identity and affiliation that is facilitated through and in print media. I attend to the specific technological and social processes that define each of Warhol’s publications and I historicize these publications in relationship to Warhol’s other work, the work of his contemporaries, and the broader spheres of the literary marketplace and American popular culture. Unpacking what publishing meant to Warhol, then, becomes a means of understanding how a major postwar artist appropriated the mechanisms of print culture-of publishing, publication, and publicity-as a way of exploring and exploiting the value of being visible, or even partially visible, in a public

The Tragicomic Self: Amy Sillman and Philip Guston

Both Amy Sillman and Philip Guston make painting, in their different historical moments (respectively, the present and the 1960s-70s), into a tragicomic enterprise. This talk examines the role that shape plays in that enterprise, when it is seen not as a formal or compositional element but as key to both the tragic aspect of a painting’s historical reflection and its comic operations—its funniness. Tragicomic shape is the means that painting has at its disposal for exploring selfhood, a concept that Haidu develops in relation to not only painting but also video and dance in her new book. Rachel Haidu is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She is the author of The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976 (October Books: MIT Press, 2013).https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/havc_conversationsoncontemporaryart/1002/thumbnail.jp