Art History and Visual Culture

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Arnaud Maggs, Once a Designer
(2024-11-07) Cibola, Anne; Parsons, Sarah
Arnaud Maggs had a decades-long career during which he produced important work in both commercial and fine art. In his early years he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator. In the late 1960s he pursued commercial photography. Maggs then transitioned to fine art in the early 1970s, producing work frequently positioned within the context of conceptual art. Maggs and others often portrayed his shift to fine art as a dramatic and transformative reinvention, resulting in limited acknowledgment of his early commercial work and only cursory investigation of its impact on his subsequent artistic production. This dissertation maintains that Maggs’s visual and conceptual languages reveal a synthesis of strategies from each stage of his career, and argues for a more comprehensive understanding of Canada's visual culture by bridging the gap between fine and applied art histories. Biography helps to reveal a range of influences and experiences that may otherwise remain concealed but contribute to shaping an artist’s work. In so doing, biographical detail — especially detail that traces professional experiences and work history — helps to unsettle perceptions of artistic genius by offering a more nuanced understanding of how an artist’s work develops through interconnected influences, life experiences, and work history. Through a close examination of Maggs's biography and emphasis on his commercial experience, this dissertation highlights the interconnections in Maggs’s creative practices and challenges traditional biases in art history. In order to expand biographical and contextual details, I conducted a series of interviews with people who knew and worked with Maggs. This oral history unsettles the mythology around his career narrative. What emerges instead is a picture of an artist whose formal and conceptual languages evolved over decades of work. Structured in two parts, “Once a Designer, Always an Artist: Redefining the Mythology of Maggs” and “Once a Designer, Always a Designer: Commercial Practice and Conceptual Praxis,” this dissertation contextualizes Maggs’s work within larger trends and foregrounds the profound influence his early careers had on his artistic production in order to illuminate his motivations and offer a counternarrative to published accounts of his career trajectory.
Open Access
An Open Field: Informal and Anti-Formal Approaches to Videogame Art History
(2021-11-15) Bailey, Andrew Remington; Adler, Daniel A.
The last two decades have seen the emergence and formalization of game studies as an academic discipline as well as a repeating cycle of debates over videogames legitimacy as an artistic medium. Using a speculative conceptual framework assembled from art history, media studies, and game studies scholarship, this dissertation investigates the ways that formalist analysis and institutional formalization have acted to influence the way that videogames have been created, presented, and discussed as art objects. As videogame art exhibitions have become increasingly common over the last twenty years, so too have the debates over best practices for videogame curation, collection, archiving, and preservation. The central question of this dissertation is not how videogames have been defined as art, but rather how these kinds of definitions have specifically impacted the way that videogame artists and curators choose to orient their practices. In order to unpack the ontologies and aesthetics of contemporary videogame art, it is necessary to examine particular instances of its production and distribution in a variety of commercial and institutional contexts. This dissertation focuses on a collection of game art, art games, and videogame art exhibitions that were all produced between 2010 and 2020. The project is organized into a series of case study chapters that include the work of Bennet Foddy and Cory Arcangel within the context of failure and trash games; the autobiographical work of Angela Washko and Nina Freeman through the lens of mixed realism; the work of David OReilly and Ian Cheng as examples of lively, self-playing videogame art; and finally, Marie Foulstons recent eclectic work as a videogame art curator. Each of these case studies is used as a counterexample to productively disorient previous definitions of videogame form and to argue for a more explicitly fluid and mutable reconfiguration of the art history of videogames.
Open Access
Invasive Species: The Naturalization of Settler Colonialism by Flowered Quilts in Southeastern Ontario During the Nineteenth Century (1820-1880)
(2021-11-15) Nicholas, Vanessa Kathleen; Hudson, Anna
Studying three embroidered quilts made by British women who lived in southeastern Ontario during the nineteenth century, this dissertation establishes that the floral designs typical of the homecrafts that British women transported to and made in nineteenth-century Canada express the same settler-colonial desires for authority and belonging that have been attributed to the historical North American landscape painting tradition produced by Western men. This is significant because it suggests that the seemingly mild-mannered decorative traditions of white women contributed to a visual and material culture that was hostile to Indigeneity. The three embroidered quilts within this study were made by Mary Morris (1811-1897), Elizabeth Bell (1824-1919), and Margaret McCrum (1847-1888), respectively. My research involved establishing the provenance and geographies of these quilts, tracing the history of their floral designs, and assessing their cultural meaning. I have found that some of the quilts embroideries make specific references to floral designs found in Indian, British, and Indigenous decorative arts, and that a select few have been inspired by Ontarios wildflowers and gardens. These quilts show that British women in nineteenth-century Ontario were invested in the consumption, study, and transformation of Canadian land. Rather than attributing malintent to Morris, Bell, and McCrum, I situate their homecrafts within a broader cultural context and detail the political dimensions of their artistic references. I characterize these three quilts as belonging to an invasive species. Several species of European plants and animals have become successful colonizers in Canada, including the common dandelion and house sparrow. As a metaphor, these species represent the slow, steady course of settler-colonialism and its ultimate aim, to appear, feel, and act natural in a foreign environment. In Canada, this end depended upon the transplantation or deterritorialization of Indigenous peoples because the settler-colonial imaginary took root in a mythology of an untouched wilderness. This dissertation treats the floral embroideries produced by three British women as specimens within the broader invasive species of Western culture that has incessantly asserted its perceived entitlement to Canadian land.
Open Access
Moving Through Images: Spectatorship and Meaning-Production in Interdisciplinary Art Environments
(2020-08-11) Wilmink, Melanie Thekala; Parsons, Sarah
This dissertation establishes a framework for understanding embodied experience within immersive art environments by examining artworks that deploy interdisciplinary conventions to turn attention towards spectatorship itself. To accomplish this, I apply cross-disciplinary theory from John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Brian ODoherty, Gilles Deleuze, Laura U. Marks, Peggy Phelan, and others, to close-readings of select case studies. My methodology articulates how memory, duration, material forms, and the relational dynamics between the spectator and artwork all structure the aesthetic encounter. It is my aim to bring together the rich, but isolated, knowledge sets of the art gallery, cinema, and stage to develop a more nuanced understanding of how attentive spectatorial engagement with artwork is produced. In Chapter One, Robert Lepage and Ex Machinas installation The Library at Night (2016) demonstrates the philosophical framework for how a spectator moves between the virtual and physical within aesthetic encounters. Chapter Two extends these ideas through the spatial conditions of the art gallery in dominique t skoltzs y2o dualits_ (2015) exhibitions. Chapter Three addresses the architecture of the cinema, through Janet Cardiff and George Bures Millers The Paradise Institute (2001), which calls attention to the temporal and social conditions of cinema as an interloper in the gallery. Finally, Chapter Four examines the Situation Rooms (2013/2016) as theatre group Rimini Protokoll disrupts the division between the audience and stage by placing the viewer in the middle of the action as a live participant. Each of these case studies examines how artistic intervention either deploys or disrupts the architecture of the exhibition space in order to produce spectatorship that oscillates between the viewers immediate aesthetic encounter and the structures that construct their experience the work.
Open Access
Queer Modernities and Diasporic Art of the Middle East
(2020-08-11) Gayed, Andrew; Kal, Hong
This thesis investigates Middle Eastern diasporic artists in North America who are creating political art about queer identity. This doctoral project explores colonial contact zones to discuss queer identity in relation to politically motivated art being produced by the Middle Eastern diaspora and provides nuance and contributes to the growing scholarship on Middle Eastern contemporary art and cultural studies. I consider whether social scientists, cultural theorists, and historians can reach a narrative of Western and non-Western Modernity that works beyond sexual oppression (Middle East) versus sexual acceptance (North America), and instead examines a negotiation of diasporic sexuality. Arguing instead that diasporic subjects create an alternative coming-out narrative and identity script to inscribed Western models, the aim is to see the ways in which local instances of homosociality cite pre-Modern sexuality scripts within contemporary Middle Eastern art and its diaspora, and reject Western queer identity narratives that become exclusionary in non-Western contexts. By incorporating different sociological strategies in the analysis of contemporary art, this research strives to make self-identification categories less dichotomous and more expansive. This doctoral thesis examines how the artworks of Arab artists in the diaspora illustrate diasporic queer identities that are different from the global-to-local homocolonialism of Western gay identity, and provides examples of how local networks of identity are transmitted through visual language and how alternative sexuality scripts are written within transnational contexts. Examining the artworks of diasporic contemporary artists Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, and 2fik (Toufique), I explore the concept of multiple Modernisms and their relationship to displacement, trauma, and Arab sexualities/masculinities within a postcolonial and anti-imperialist framework. Jamil Hellu uses photography, video, performance, and mixed-media art installations to create contrasting metaphors about the politics of cultural identities and the fluidity of sexuality. Ebrin Bagheris ink and paper drawings evoke histories of pre-modern, same-sex desires in Iranian culture. 2Fik uses his own diasporic identity as a subject in his work to explore the dichotomies of his Canadian-Moroccan culture and his lived experience as a queer Arab.
Open Access
Refashioning Duchamp: An Analysis of the Waistcoat Readymade Series and other Intersections of Art and Fashion
(2019-11-22) Mida, Ingrid Erica; Gammel, Irene; Hudson, Anna
French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is best known as the iconoclastic author of the readymade. In spite of the vast corpus of scholarship dedicated to his oeuvre, the artists preoccupation with clothing has remained virtually unexamined and yet, as this dissertation argues, is of central importance to our understanding of the readymade. Using art historical considerations of the readymade, along with theories of fashion, identity construction, and curation, this dissertation presents a case for reconsidering Duchamps oeuvre with a focus on clothing to answer a central research question: What ultimately is the difference between a Duchamp readymade and an object of fashion exhibited in a museum? The answer, I argue, emerges by bringing the concepts of fashion studies and curatorial studies into a dialogue with Duchamps readymade. Specifically, this dissertation explores (1) Duchamps under-explored series of early drawings that reveal the artists profound interest in the clothed body; (2) Duchamps fashioning of his public self through clothing and photography that circulated widely in the mass media and more privately in avant-garde circles; (3) Duchamps waistcoat readymades Made to Measure (1957-1961) that expand the boundaries of the readymade into clothing; and (4) Duchamps use of fashion in his exhibition designs for the Surrealists in 1938 and 1942. By focusing on the material traces of Duchamps fashioning of his body and identity in his work, this dissertation argues that Duchamps use of clothing profoundly disrupts the notion that art cannot be worn. By exploring Duchamps use of clothing as art, this study advances scholarly knowledge at the intersections of art history and fashion studies, considering also the dynamic engagement of gender and the body in the vanguard of Modernism.
Open Access
Decolonizing Nunavut's Art Market
(2019-11-22) Yunes, Erin Elizabeth; Hudson, Anna
An Indigenous methodological framework of decolonization and Indigenization must support an Inuit-led revitalization of the declining arts and crafts sector in Nunavut. Arts and crafts express oral tradition, personal narratives, and Inuit worldviews and transfer those values intergenerationally. As Inuit Elder Shirley Tagalik argues, the transmission of Inuit traditional knowledge (Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit) through artistic expression plays a vital role in communities by promoting a culturally healthy society that is key to Inuit survival. By fusing Indigenous cultural heritage and new media technologies to centralize artwork, storytelling, and worldviews, the Inuit futurisms movement is contesting the digital divide that sustains a persistent colonial narrative of Arctic history. Decolonizing and Indigenizing information and communication technologies (ICT) strengthens Inuit engagement in rewriting the past, controlling the dissemination of stories and traditional knowledge, and creating a unified vision of their future. Inuit leaders and representative organizations have been calling for federally supported Inuit-developed frameworks for advanced ICT innovation to meet the needs of communities. At issue is the question, How can community-first ICT policies and infrastructure disrupt the status quo of the declining colonial Inuit art market in Nunavut? First-mile infrastructure development and equitable high-speed broadband, which do not currently exist in the territory, are required to promote and support Inuit culture. By placing ownership and control of broadband infrastructure within Inuit communities and thus the arts economy decolonization, self-determination, cultural sovereignty, and Inuit-led economic advancement will occur in Nunavut. This dissertation explores how equitable, affordable, and accessible ICT innovation reinforced by community-first strategic development policies supports expansion in the Inuit art market. Only by positioning Nunavut at the forefront of ICT access will Indigenous Nunavummiut artists be able to leverage digital tools to create works, organize for collective action, and engage in global markets. Creative solutions designed by and for Inuit communities living in remote and isolated locations are ultimately essential for achieving growth in the Inuit arts and crafts sector in Nunavut.
Open Access
Building Context: The Church of San Julian De Los Prados and Medieval Architecture in the Kingdom of Asturias (718-910)
(2018-08-27) Lvovski, Ronald Joseph; Thurlby, Malcolm
This dissertation investigates the date, patronage and style of King Alfonso IIs (d. 842) extant church of San Julin de los Prados in Oviedo, Spain. More specifically, I challenge traditional methods of dating the building, which almost exclusively depend on the repetition of unreliable medieval Asturian chronicle sources and antiquarian records. I arrive at the proposed date for the church (812-842) by broadening the conventional scope of analysis to include the combined impact of the Islamic Conquest of the Iberian Peninsula (711), King Alfonso IIs Visigothic bloodline, his stance against the Adoptionist controversy in the late eighth century, and his diplomatic ties with Charlemagne. This assessment builds upon an analysis of the kings political aspirations and his desire to propagate a sovereign, unchallenged rule. I similarly challenge problematic terminology, specifically the Mozarab label, that continues to saturate the discourse and perpetuate separatist views of Spanish history. In addition to the above, I provide a detailed catalogue of medieval Asturian buildings, wherein the architecture and historiography of fourteen related churches in the northwest of Spain are analyzed; each church plays a fundamental role in our understanding of San Julin de los Prados and its complex history. Though my dissertation is primarily a study of architecture, it is heavily informed by post-colonial and religious acculturation methodologies, concepts of artistic and architectural transmission, and medieval iconography.
Open Access
Cracking the Glass Ceiling: Contemporary Inuit Drawing
(2017-07-27) Campbell, Nancy Gay; Hudson, Anna
The importance of the artists voice in art historical scholarship is essential as we emerge from post-colonial and feminist cultural theory and its impact on curation, art history, and visual culture. Inuit art has moved from its origins as an art representing an imaginary Canadian identity and a yearning for a romantic pristine North to a practice that presents Inuit identity in their new reality. This socially conscious contemporary work that touches on the environment, religion, pop culture, and alcoholism proves that Inuit artists can respond and are responding to the changing realities in the North. On the other side of the coin, the categories that have held Inuit art to its origins must be reconsidered and integrated into the categories of contemporary art, Indigenous or otherwise, in museums that consider work produced in the past twenty years to be contemporary as such. Holding Inuit artists to a not-so-distant past is limiting for the artists producing art today and locks them in a history that may or may not affect their work directly. This dissertation examines this critical shift in contemporary Inuit art, specifically drawing, over the past twenty years, known as the contemporary period. The second chapter is a review of the community of Kinngait and the role of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in the dissemination of arts and crafts. Chapter three is a review of the literature in the field in of writing on Inuit art and exposes the dearth of material in this area of study. Chapters four and five are each Case Studies on two prominent female artists from Kinngait. Numerous key drawings of two third-generation Kinngait women, Shuvinai Ashoona and Annie Pootoogook, form the basis of each case study from which examples, analyses, and observations are based on the drawings and first person interviews. These women are critical in bringing the medium of drawing and contemporary renewed content to a larger audience. These two artists were chosen for in-depth analysis because their work has most dramatically bridged the solitudes of Inuit art and internationally recognized contemporary art. By focusing on these artists from Kinngait, I underscore the unbroken lineage between Ashoona and Pootoogooks ground-breaking contributions to what is known as the Dorset experiment, which first linked the market economy in the North to avant-garde art practice over fifty years ago. Chapter Six is an overview of the exhibition, criticism and dissemination of contemporary Inuit art, focusing on the period beginning in 1990. This chapter proposes a variety of scholarly voices in the field of exhibition and criticism, both Inuit, Indigenous and other. Conclusions are drawn in the final chapter that encourages the addition of Inuit voices to the discussion, rather than relegate the artists to the role of silent partners in a complicated trade agreement between the co-operative system, dealers, and middlemen.
Open Access
From Japan to Canadian Museum Storage: Continuous History of Objects from the Japanese Ceramic Collection of William C. Van Horne (18431915)
(2016-11-25) Takesue, Akiko; Kal, Hong
This dissertation traces the social life of a group of Japanese ceramic objects collected by Sir William Cornelius Van Horne (18431915) in late nineteenth-century Montreal, and examines the ways in which the meaning of these objects has shifted through their spatial and temporal movements: from Japan to Canada, from commodities to a private collection and then to museum collection, and from the late nineteenth century to the present. These objects embody interpretational gaps, between their high reputation during the collectors lifetime and their ambiguous status in the museum storage today, as well as the misidentification of a genuine tea bowl made by a prominent Japanese potter of seventeenth century. While such interpretational gaps are often considered to result from a lack of proper knowledge on the part of the individuals who evaluated the objects, this dissertation takes a different approach, in which the meaning of objects is seen as a production of multiple interactions among people, institutions, and societies at given times and places. Tracing the trajectories of Van Hornes Japanese ceramics as a continuous history from origin to current destination, and investigating their meaning-construction in relation to the modernization project of Japan, to Van Hornes interactions with others and to the museum operations, clearly demonstrate that the interpretational gaps of objects emerge through an epistemological disjuncture between the imagined idea of fixed authenticity and the actual, contingent processes of the objects meaning-formation. Through the cross-referencing of the actual objects, archival material, scholarly publications, and my own professional experience at the museum, this dissertation reveals some of the covert and unconscious mechanisms at work in knowledge production. These mechanisms disclose that the meaning of objects is created in the gaps between major arguments surrounding the historiography of Japanese art, collecting and collection, and museology. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this dissertation raises questions about post-colonialist discourses on the Western system of knowledge production of non-Western objects; the belief of collection as a mere space for the subjects identity-formation; and the discussion of cultural knowledge-production in museums solely through the politics of display.
Open Access
Total Work of Fashion: Bernhard Willhelm and the Contemporary Avant-Garde
(2016-09-20) Lau, Charlene Kay; Fisher, Jennifer
In fashion discourse, the term avant-garde is often applied to garments that fall outside of the mainstream fashion, whether experimental, conceptual or intellectual. However, such usage overlooks the social and political aims of the historical, artistic avant-gardes. Through an examination of the contemporary avant-garde fashion label Bernhard Willhelm led by designers Bernhard Wilhelm and Jutta Kraus this dissertation reconnects the historical or original vanguard and its revolutionary potential and proposes that Bernhard Willhelm belongs to an emerging, contemporary narrative of the avant-garde that intersects with fashion. In this study, I analyze Willhelm and Krauss collections, ephemera, runway presentations, exhibitions, online media, fashion films and critical reception from the brands inception in 1999 to 2016. Firstly, I develop the notion of fashion-time and contend that Willhelm and Krauss designs reject accelerated change, oscillating between the temporalities of fashion and anti-fashion and fashion and art. Secondly, I argue that the designers devise a political fashion, one that simultaneously critiques global politics and challenges norms in the fashion system. Thirdly, I assert that enduring collaboration with other cultural producers underpins Willhelm and Krauss work. The interdisciplinarity born of their collective work informs their spectacular visual language, the of sum of which I term a total work of fashion. By exploring these tenets of Willhelm and Krauss practice, I demonstrate that the avant-garde project is dynamic and in constant flux, at times incorporating dialectical facets that continually expand the disciplines of fashion and art.
Open Access
Nation Building: Gothic Revival Houses in Upper Canada and Canada West, c. 1830-1867
(2015-08-29) Mace, Jessica Lauren; Thurlby, Malcolm
The Gothic Revival is, without question, the most influential architectural movement to have ever come out of England. Its effects on houses, and colonial houses, in particular, however, have been little studied. Nation building: Gothic Revival houses in Upper Canada and Canada West, c.1830–67 examines the Gothic Revival houses built in the English colony of Upper Canada and Canada West prior to Confederation in 1867 in order to contextualize them and to give this category of housing the academic attention it merits. Using the buildings themselves as well as architectural drawings, plans, and archival photographs, this dissertation reveals and contextualizes the houses of pre–Confederation Canada within the broader scope of Western architectural history. The houses are divided into temporal and theoretical categories, examining the chronological spread of the style as well the means by which it was employed; namely, through architects and publications. Beyond formal analysis of the objects themselves, then, the influence of British and American precedents is examined from the mid–eighteenth century through to the late 1860s, as well as the dissemination of these ideas to the colony through a variety of conduits such as architects, publications and popular aesthetic theories. This study also explores the rise of the architectural practice in the colony and the resulting eventual spread of the architectural vocabulary of the Gothic style into vernacular housing. Likewise examined are the multiple identities and associations produced by the Gothic style as applied to designs for houses, both on paper and as actually built. This study is the first of its kind, providing not only a comprehensive examination of the houses themselves, but the diverse theories, influences and cultural meanings behind them as well. In short, this dissertation establishes the framework for the academic discussion of these houses by rigorously contextualizing them within existing architectural histories. Overall, it exposes these houses as valid cultural objects and as an important part in the formation of Canada’s built heritage.
Open Access
The Making of an American Sculptor: David Smith Criticism, 1938-1971
(2015-08-28) Bissonnette, Meghan Leia; Adler, Dan
At the time of his death in 1965 at the age of 59, American sculptor David Smith was widely recognized as one of the greatest sculptors of his generation. By then, he had been honoured with a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and had represented the United States at Documenta and major biennales at Venice (on two occasions) and São Paolo. Countless studies have analyzed Smith’s career and artistic development, but very little has been written on the published criticism of his work or its larger impact on our understanding of this artist. In this dissertation I examine the historiographic reception of his sculpture from 1938, the year of his first solo exhibition, until 1971 when Rosalind Krauss published Terminal Iron Works, the first monograph on Smith. I trace this reception from the early focus on Smith’s biography and working methods (the biographical paradigm), to the later interest in formal analysis (the formalist paradigm). I further analyze this criticism in the context of artistic developments in the 1940s and 1950s, namely Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture. In the process, I draw out common themes, tropes and narratives that appear in the criticism on Smith and the Abstract Expressionists. To do so, I engage in a close textual analysis of the exhibition reviews, magazine and newspaper articles, and catalogue essays published during this period. I demonstrate that this reception is culturally, socially, and ideologically informed. References to Smith’s biography, working methods, materials, and exceptionalism all point to the aims, desires and interests of the writers, but also to the influence of social and cultural factors. Ultimately, I intend to provide a revisionist history of Smith’s work that draws out the mythology that this reception contributed to—a mythology that continues to shape our understanding of mid-twentieth-century American art.
Open Access
Picturing Imperial Citizenship: The Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee's Slide Lecture Series, 1902-45
(2015-01-26) Moser, Gabrielle Amanda; Parsons, Sarah C.
Citizenship has emerged as a key term in recent photography theory as way to assert the critical potential of images as tools of civic engagement and political action, insisting that photographs are a forceful language through which subjects and spectators articulate their claims to rights. Important work remains to be done, however, in tracing the historical context in which citizenship was produced as a photographable subject, and in analyzing how spectators learn to identify images of citizenship in the first place. By examining a mode of colonial education created in the British Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century that combined photography with geographical instruction, this dissertation contends that photography’s relationship to citizenship is historically constructed, colonially inflected and pedagogically reinforced. Viewers must be taught to “see” citizenship in photographs through a pedagogical process that occurs both inside and outside of the literal classroom. Taking as its case study the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC)’s lantern slide lectures, a series of more than 3,000 photographs documenting the land and peoples of the empire that circulated in classrooms between 1902 and 1945, this dissertation traces the construction of imperial citizenship: an abstract, non-legal category of belonging used as both a strategy of colonial management and, conversely, for anti-colonial critique. By reading the COVIC lecture texts against the photographs, the dissertation looks for slippages between what COVIC claimed to do and the meanings that viewers may have created from the photographs’ visual evidence. Putting the COVIC images in conversation with concurrent photographic projects—particularly representations of insurrection, immigration and indentured labour in the empire—I argue the COVIC archive is a site where viewers could contest the empire’s discourses of inequality through a critical visual literacy, reading the photographs as moments when the promises of imperial citizenship were withheld. While the dissertation finds that photographs are not capable of guaranteeing the rights of citizens, they do offer spectators the opportunity to contest the logic that separates citizens from non-citizens, and to insist on recognizing and making claims for those subjects otherwise obscured within legal framings of citizenship.
Open Access
Repositioning Neuroaesthetics Through Contemporary Art
(2014-07-09) Mckay, Sally Jean; Fisher, Jennifer
Neuroaesthetics has tended to privilege neuroscientific understandings of art, eliding centuries of art historical research on perception and culture. Instead, this dissertation extends neuroaesthetic research to examine the specific social, sensorial and perceptual processes occurring as artworks are encountered in exhibition contexts. How does neuroaesthetic perception operate in contemporary artworks? What modes of cognitive address are involved? How can neuroaesthetic engagement facilitate embodied knowledges? This dissertation first inquires into the neuroaesthetic literature in order to establish its neuroscientific foundations, and then advances a perceptual standpoint stemming from art and art history. Drawing from feminist theories of embodiment, I reposition neuroaesthetics to incorporate art historical inquiries into body and mind through direct engagement with art. I argue that such a revised neuroaesthic perception must take into account post-humanist troublings of nature/culture dichotomies. I also suggest that the paradigm for embodied perception that has emerged from both cognitive neuroscience and affect theory can expand neuroaesthetic understanding. My investigation has led me to first-hand experience as a research subject of neuroscience experiments, which show that current fMRI contexts in fact delimit the perception of art and inhibit possible neuroaesthetic significance. Instead, I undertake neuroaesthetic research in exhibition contexts where self-reflexive awareness facilitates insights into perception and cognition that are inaccessible within the epistemological conditions of neuroscience labs. The first case study examines how an installation by the FASTWÜRMS collective reveals cognitive processes of abduction by inviting navigation through an infinitely complex web of objects and images. Turning from association to visual cognition, I consider how Olafur Eliasson’s immersive light installations manipulate colour perception thereby facilitating critical awareness of techno-mediated environments. Third, my analysis of a conceptual work by Kristin Lucas explores how the performance of digital and legal technology invites embodied transformations. Finally, I examine how the affective tensions produced in a video by Omer Fast activate an awareness of intersubjective communication that corresponds with recent neuroscientific developments in mirror-neuron theory. By taking contemporary artworks as its focus, the dissertation extends neuroaesthetic inquiry to demonstrate contextual understandings of how the cognitive processes of art constitute physiological engagements between body, brain and world.

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