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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Status: Published
Description
The turmoil that China endured during the twentieth century triggered a series of social and political revolutions. As China struggled to resolve domestic questions of dynasticism or democracy and nationalism or communism, Western industrialization and imperialism dragged China rapidly into the globalizing world. Likewise, Chinese painting had to confront the West, as Chinese artists dealt with the twentieth-century version of the recurring question of modernizing Chinese painting for its times: how does one reconcile an ancient painting tradition with all the possibilities Western interactions introduced? This dissertation focuses on one artist's lifelong struggle, often overlooked, to answer this question. By examining C. C. Wang (1907-2003) and his life in art, this case study reveals broader truths about how twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters, such as Wang, modernized the tradition of Chinese ink painting.
Wang's reputation as a connoisseur of ancient Chinese painting has overshadowed his own artwork, creating a dearth of research on his artistic development. Using public and private sources, this dissertation applied stylistic analysis to track this development. The analysis reveals an artist's lifelong endeavor to establish a style that would lift the Chinese painting tradition into a modern era, an endeavor inspired by modern Western art ideas and a desire to play a role in the larger movement of elevating Chinese painting. The argument is made that these efforts establish Wang as an influential twentieth century Chinese ink painter.
To clarify Wang's role within the broader movement of Chinese diaspora painters, this dissertation employs a comparison study of Wang with such established twentieth century ink painting artists as Zhang Daqian, Liu Guosong, and Yu Chengyao. It is
asserted that the 1949 diaspora forced this cohort of artists to adjust their style and to transcend traditional Chinese painting by integrating newly-salient ideas from Western art, particularly the abstract movement. Meanwhile, the essential Chinese identity in their art collectively became more significant. The solidarity of purpose and identity is a distinctive part of the answer this group of twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters proposed to their generation's inherited challenge of enriching the tradition.
Wang's reputation as a connoisseur of ancient Chinese painting has overshadowed his own artwork, creating a dearth of research on his artistic development. Using public and private sources, this dissertation applied stylistic analysis to track this development. The analysis reveals an artist's lifelong endeavor to establish a style that would lift the Chinese painting tradition into a modern era, an endeavor inspired by modern Western art ideas and a desire to play a role in the larger movement of elevating Chinese painting. The argument is made that these efforts establish Wang as an influential twentieth century Chinese ink painter.
To clarify Wang's role within the broader movement of Chinese diaspora painters, this dissertation employs a comparison study of Wang with such established twentieth century ink painting artists as Zhang Daqian, Liu Guosong, and Yu Chengyao. It is
asserted that the 1949 diaspora forced this cohort of artists to adjust their style and to transcend traditional Chinese painting by integrating newly-salient ideas from Western art, particularly the abstract movement. Meanwhile, the essential Chinese identity in their art collectively became more significant. The solidarity of purpose and identity is a distinctive part of the answer this group of twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters proposed to their generation's inherited challenge of enriching the tradition.
ContributorsHua, Ming (Author) / Brown, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Baker, Janet (Committee member) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
By focusing on photojournalists for LIFE and Ladies’ Home Journal, I investigate mental health care in state institutions located in America during the Great Depression and World War II immediately prior to the great deinstitutionalization that began in the 1950s. Relying upon scholars of medical humanities, social theory, disability studies, feminist studies, the history of psychiatry, and the history of art, I consider the iconography used to represent mental illness in photography during the first half of the twentieth century to explore the ways mentally ill individuals were presented as disordered and lacking humanity. I explore the didactic nature of both photography and film, emphasizing how the artists and directors imbued their mediums with medical credibility and authority. The photographs of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Jerry Cooke, and Esther Bubley from the 1930-40s reveal the state of mental health care in America during the Great Depression and World War II. I will investigate the stereotypes seen in representations of mental illness in photographs and how these depictions shaped and were in dialogue with popular films like Spellbound (1945), The Snake Pit (1948), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and Marnie (1964). As a point of contrast to the images and films representing mental illness, I examine depictions of healthy people in mental health clinics during this time. Finally, I offer four examples of public, contemporary art, including House for a Gordian Knot (2013), Bloom (2013), 1000 Shadows (2013), and Faces of Mental Health Recovery (2013), that explore mental illness to illustrate the enduring legacy of the iconography and stereotypes represented in the photography and films explored in the first half of this dissertation.
ContributorsTaggart, Vriean Diether (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Moore, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
ABSTRACT
Art historians typically consider Chinese porcelain a decorative art, resulting in scholars spending little time analyzing it as a fine art form. One area that is certainly neglected is porcelain produced during the late 19th and early 20th century during the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) into the early Republic period (1912–1949). As the Qing dynasty weakened and ultimately fell in 1911, there was a general decline in the quantity of porcelain produced in China. Due to this circumstance, porcelain of this era has not received the detailed analysis, characterization of styles, comprehension of themes, and understanding of patronage evident in other periods of Chinese porcelain production. Ultimately, limited research has been conducted to establish the styles associated with late dynastic porcelain into the early Republic’s establishment.
This dissertation utilizes a new perspective that considers the patronage of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) as a high point of late dynastic porcelain. Concrete documentation establishes that motifs were appropriated from Cixi’s painting, suggesting a direct connection between schools of painting and the imagery selected for porcelain during her reign. The porcelain Cixi influenced directly guided the porcelain produced during the Hongxian era (1915-1916), making Cixi’s patronage the key turning point from dynastic porcelain to early Republic porcelain. Utilizing predominately British collections, this study identifies the styles, symbols, and themes associated with porcelain of the 19th and 20th century, elevating late dynastic and early Republic wares to the status of fine art.
Art historians typically consider Chinese porcelain a decorative art, resulting in scholars spending little time analyzing it as a fine art form. One area that is certainly neglected is porcelain produced during the late 19th and early 20th century during the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) into the early Republic period (1912–1949). As the Qing dynasty weakened and ultimately fell in 1911, there was a general decline in the quantity of porcelain produced in China. Due to this circumstance, porcelain of this era has not received the detailed analysis, characterization of styles, comprehension of themes, and understanding of patronage evident in other periods of Chinese porcelain production. Ultimately, limited research has been conducted to establish the styles associated with late dynastic porcelain into the early Republic’s establishment.
This dissertation utilizes a new perspective that considers the patronage of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) as a high point of late dynastic porcelain. Concrete documentation establishes that motifs were appropriated from Cixi’s painting, suggesting a direct connection between schools of painting and the imagery selected for porcelain during her reign. The porcelain Cixi influenced directly guided the porcelain produced during the Hongxian era (1915-1916), making Cixi’s patronage the key turning point from dynastic porcelain to early Republic porcelain. Utilizing predominately British collections, this study identifies the styles, symbols, and themes associated with porcelain of the 19th and 20th century, elevating late dynastic and early Republic wares to the status of fine art.
ContributorsGreene, Carolyn Ann (Author) / Brown, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Baker, Janet (Committee member) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
During the 2nd millennium BCE Aegean Bronze Age, the people of Crete venerated an “erotic” goddess who was associated with marriage, sexuality, and the carnal pleasures of intercourse. As a syncretized version of the Mesopotamian Inanna and Ištar and their later eastern derivatives, her arrival on the island is attributed to an increased exposure to Levantine cultures, which was facilitated by the extensive networks of international exchange (trade, diplomacy, and population shifts) that linked the Mediterranean with the Near East. The presence of the “erotic” goddess in Crete fulfilled a distinct function: she guided elite female initiates through premarital and wedding-related rites of passage that were modeled from sacred marriage, a mythology that described the marital union of two deities or a king and the “erotic” goddess. To compensate for the lacunae in texts on this matter, this study draws from literary and cultural comparative material from the Near East and eastern Mediterranean to reconstruct the structure and metaphorical significance of female premarital initiation ceremonies in Crete and Thera, a Cycladic site with a strong Cretan cultural influence. The symbolism in Mesopotamian and Canaanite love songs and erotic poetry provides analogues to the iconography within Aegean frescoes produced in elite contexts between the Middle Minoan (MM) IIIB and Late Minoan (LM) IA periods. These paintings, which suggest a heightened sociocultural and political importance placed on matrimony, coincide with a time of increased factional competition among Crete’s elite. Wedding-related rites of passage facilitated such rivalries by cementing alliances between kin groups and advertising the perpetuation of dynastic lineages, both of which were processes in which females played key social and biological roles. Images of fine clothing, copious amounts of adornment, and floral symbolism communicated to the initiates the social and sexual expectations of women as brides and wives, while reinforcing strategies of gender-specific expressions of elite identity. The Cretan “erotic” goddess encouraged women to enact their sexuality, which enabled their active participation in Crete’s cultural and political systems, while her connections to sacred marriage underscored the ways in which marital unions could be effectively used to legitimize power.
ContributorsAndres, Brandelyn Mary-Christine (Author) / Serwint, Nancy J. (Thesis advisor) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Hitchcock, Louise (Committee member) / Nakhai, Beth A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This research explores and deepens our understanding of an element of arts infrastructure in the United States: the arts incubator, an organizational form or programmatic initiative that exists at the intersection of artistic production, entrepreneurship, and public policy. The study is a qualitative cross-case analysis of four arts incubators of different types: Arlington Arts Incubator, Intersection for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation, and Mighty Tieton, situated within the context of the literature of arts incubators, business incubator evaluation, and a theoretical framework for understanding entrepreneurship in the US arts and culture sector.
The research opens the black box of incubator operations to find that arts incubators create value for client artists and arts organizations both through direct service provision and indirect echo effects but that the provision of value to communities or systems is attenuated and largely undocumented. Arts incubators, like many small arts organizations, tend to look retrospectively at outputs rather than at the processes that convert inputs to tangible impacts, or means into ends. This is an issue not relegated only to the arts and culture sector; business incubators share some of these tendencies. Despite these issues, arts incubators remain a potentially impactful tool of cultural policy if their processes and activities align with their strategic goals and those processes and activities are assessed formatively and summatively.
The research opens the black box of incubator operations to find that arts incubators create value for client artists and arts organizations both through direct service provision and indirect echo effects but that the provision of value to communities or systems is attenuated and largely undocumented. Arts incubators, like many small arts organizations, tend to look retrospectively at outputs rather than at the processes that convert inputs to tangible impacts, or means into ends. This is an issue not relegated only to the arts and culture sector; business incubators share some of these tendencies. Despite these issues, arts incubators remain a potentially impactful tool of cultural policy if their processes and activities align with their strategic goals and those processes and activities are assessed formatively and summatively.
ContributorsEssig, Linda (Author) / Schugurensky, Daniel, 1958- (Thesis advisor) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Shockley, Gordon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s – Now presents a group of artists working in both natural and urban environments whose work exploits the power of place to address issues of social, environmental, and personal transformation. Through a focused selection of key works made between 1970 and 2019, which extend beyond traditional categories, Counter-Landscapes illuminates how the methodologies created by women artists in the 1970s and 1980s are employed by artists today, both men and women alike. Developing a practice of performative actions, these artists countered the culture that surrounded and oppressed them by embodying the live elements of performance art in order to push for social change. Looking back to the 1960s and the counter-culture mindset of the times, I approach the histories of land, performance, and conceptual art through feminist studies. Then I apply the same feminist approach to philosophical histories of landscape, place, and space. Through a discussion of an extensive range of works by 25 artists, this research seeks to demonstrate the indelible influence of feminist art practice on contemporary art. It brings the work of an innovative generation of women artists—Marina Abramović, Eleanor Antin, Agnes Denes, VALIE EXPORT, Rebecca Horn, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Lotty Rosenfeld, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Beth Ames Swartz, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—together with more recent work by artists who have adopted and extended their methods. These artists, both male and female, include Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Angela Ellsworth, Ana Teresa Fernández, Maria Hupfield, Saskia Jordá, Christian Philipp Müller, Pope.L, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Zhou Tao, and Antonia Wright.
ContributorsMcCabe, Jennifer (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Hoy, Meredith (Committee member) / Asmall Willsdon, Dominic (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020