Becoming a Foreigner: Traveling Faces in Artworks by Anne Garréta, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirin Neshat

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In their debuts, Anne F. Garréta, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirin Neshat, envision the experiences of female and non-binary protagonists as foreigners caught in-between the constraints of societal norms. Juxtaposing the works of these contemporary women writers and visual artists, this…

In their debuts, Anne F. Garréta, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirin Neshat, envision the experiences of female and non-binary protagonists as foreigners caught in-between the constraints of societal norms. Juxtaposing the works of these contemporary women writers and visual artists, this dissertation explores the themes of cultural hybridity, exile, migration, and multiculturalism by foregrounding these authors’ framing of liminality which defines the lives of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities in France and the United States. The existing scholarly discourse on these artworks often emphasizes their individual qualities and contextual backgrounds, inadvertently neglecting the possibilities for dialogue between them. Furthermore, there is a lack of investigation into the intricate interplay between the narrative content and the formal choices of storytelling in these artworks. By drawing on feminist psychoanalysis and feminist phenomenology, I argue that these cross-cultural and émigré artworks defy fixed categorizations of genre, form, and medium of expression to abate (orientalist and heteronormative) linear storytelling which once marginalized ethnicities, religions, and genders. Particularly, this dissertation examines this adverbial-infinite mode of becoming a foreigner, as an artistic construal of a threshold that connects the body of artwork to an embodied interpretation. The three chapters in this dissertation discuss experimental strategies used by these artists to situate their protagonists at a threshold between a fictionalized or real past and the present moment of reading, viewing, and interpreting. By focusing on the traveling faces of protagonists in a threshold, the result shows how artistic formal strategies give the audience affective immediacy to the liminal state of minority experiences.
Date Created
2024
Agent

The Institution of the Frame: Relevant Translations and Connections between Physical Spaces and Cinematic Screens

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Before the digital age, architectural representation in drawing resulted from two transformational processes: one happened with the author as they developed the drawing from an idea to material. The second happened with the viewer as they interpreted the drawing. In…

Before the digital age, architectural representation in drawing resulted from two transformational processes: one happened with the author as they developed the drawing from an idea to material. The second happened with the viewer as they interpreted the drawing. In these processes, a particular medium, the frame, raises the status of ideas—the frame functions as an organizing principle that unifies the artist’s intentions and practice. Today digital drawing has mostly replaced annotated drawing, and in the exchange, the benefit of the frame is lost.This qualitative study utilizes a conceptual approach to observe the frame and propose a methodology to bring together the analog/physical frame and the digital/immersive frame. The study enters a dialog with the art theorist Rosalind Krauss who writes about the “Institution of the Frame,” and the art historian Svetlana Alpers who classifies two different modes of representing the world—the Albertian and the Keplerian. Following Krauss’ statement, the study argues that a frame is an act of excision. Inspired by Alpers’ classification, the study focuses on creating two modes of frames, the Alberti and the Brunelleschi. The Alberti mode considers the frame a veil—a two-dimensional surface. Brunelleschi mode observes the frame as a fold—a three-dimensional surface. The study utilizes several analytical methods: descriptive writing, graphic diagramming, and the production of drawings that unite the analog and digital as physical spaces and cinematic screens. These methods develop from the work of Luke Winslow in Frame Analysis, which provides a three-step “meaning-making process” to dissect multiple materials as an interdisciplinary framework. The study examines eight cases studies to identify systematic and generalizable principles, distinguish the relationship between analog and digital frames, and illuminate a strategy to build a delay in the process of thinking about architectural design in the digital age. The conclusion offers an approach for interfacing analog and digital frames in architecture while reflecting on the results, the significance of the interdisciplinary research study, and a position statement—the very essence of the research.
Date Created
2022
Agent

Citationality in the Cinema: The Postmodern and Political Films of Adam McKay and Spike Lee

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The recent films of both Spike Lee and Adam McKay have been explicitly political in their respective thematic focuses. The former’s Chi-Raq (2015) adapted an ancient Greek comedy into a commentary on the state of violence in America’s inner-cities and…

The recent films of both Spike Lee and Adam McKay have been explicitly political in their respective thematic focuses. The former’s Chi-Raq (2015) adapted an ancient Greek comedy into a commentary on the state of violence in America’s inner-cities and more recent BlacKkKlansman (2018) adapted the memoir of a black police officer’s infiltration into a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The latter’s The Big Short (2015) adapted Michael Lewis’ bestselling book on the 2008 Financial Crisis into a farcical satire of economic greed, while his next film, Vice (2018), took a similarly scathing approach in depicting the life of former vice president Dick Cheney. While both McKay and Lee have their own unique filmmaking styles, their approach in these four films reveals both filmmakers to be working in the ideological tradition of postmodernism. These directors’ revival of postmodern aesthetic strategies in the 21st century has resulted in sophisticated artistic statements that cut through the political apathy and nihilism of our day. Their fast-paced films, saturated with paradoxes, allusions, and meta-commentaries, manage to keep today’s media-savvy audiences on edge and in a state of unstable equilibrium. This project argues that while both directors are fascinated by the deconstructionist potential that postmodern aesthetic strategies present, a key difference emerges when analyzing their respective political projects: while Lee fully embodies the postmodern mindset in both his narrative structures and thematic insights, McKay’s desire to persuade the audience to take a passionate stand ultimately makes his art transcend the traditional postmodernist stance of neutral, non-judgmental, or ironic acceptance of multiple truths. By comparing Lee’s approach to one of the most popular filmmakers of the day in McKay, this project situates Lee’s canonical style in the modern, ultra-partisan moment.

Date Created
2022-05
Agent

Culture, Commerce and Communism: The Rise of American Influence Seen Through Postwar European Cinema (1920-1960)

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This thesis evaluates how films from Western Europe portray the social, political and economic degradation that allows the American influence to rise leading up to the Cold War. Specifically, this thesis evaluates classic films from Weimar Germany, the Soviet Union,…

This thesis evaluates how films from Western Europe portray the social, political and economic degradation that allows the American influence to rise leading up to the Cold War. Specifically, this thesis evaluates classic films from Weimar Germany, the Soviet Union, post-fascist Italy and post-Vichy France as historical and cultural artifacts that depict the harsh conditions of postwar life and how American influence revitalized daily European life. While the American influence (defined as the support of democracy, technological modernization and a capitalist economy) was supported by many struggling Europeans who looked to the United States as a standard to rebuild, critics from each country viewed American influence as a threat to the stability of national independence which they sought to maintain as recovery balanced postwar society.

Date Created
2022-05
Agent

The Man in the High Castle or the History that Never Happened: The Conflation of Alternative History, Memory, and Ideology

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I center my analysis on Amazon’s recent foray into alternative history The Man in the High Castle premised on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name. Amazon Studio’s production The Man in the High Castle builds upon the…

I center my analysis on Amazon’s recent foray into alternative history The Man in the High Castle premised on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name. Amazon Studio’s production The Man in the High Castle builds upon the premise of an alternative history where World War II ends differently. Here, the diegetic narrative depicts a United States split into three distinct regions: the east coast, now part of the German Reich; the Neutral Zone, or most of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains; and the west coast, controlled by Japanese Empire. The film version debuted in 2015 as a series extending to four seasons of 10 episodes a piece by 2019. I argue that the show takes cues from modern political tensions, the rise of the alt-right and “post-truth” media manipulations, to intentionally destabilize viewers’ memories of the historical past. By blurring the boundaries between the diegetic reality of the show and our accepted version of history, The Man in the High Castle disrupts the facility in which the viewer assumes alignment with memory and past, opting instead for a complicated refiguring of the political present. Here I articulate how film as a medium tampers with the viewer’s ontological understanding of image by collapsing history and fiction together. Additionally, the capacity of film to provoke empathy from viewers complicates the universal condemnation of Nazism we are familiar with and permits viewers to see the banality of evil in this reimagined history. Finally, I discuss how film as a medium capitalizes on the incompleteness of memory and the loopholes of history to fabricate viewer memory.
Date Created
2020
Agent

Constructing Soviet Community in Five Objects

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Description
The Constructivists were a prominent group of Avant Garde artists that began to work in the years preceding the Bolshevik revolution and continued to work prominently until Stalin came to power. As other Avant Garde movements became prevalent throughout Europe,…

The Constructivists were a prominent group of Avant Garde artists that began to work in the years preceding the Bolshevik revolution and continued to work prominently until Stalin came to power. As other Avant Garde movements became prevalent throughout Europe, Constructivism became the Modernist movement that encapsulated Russia’s Socialist future. Constructivist artist-workers embraced the idea that objects of art must be useful in the daily life of a Soviet worker as well as representative of the future for which communists were working. As such, they aligned with the new national ideals aesthetically by illustrating national and political goals in a functional way. Constructivists wanted to create objects that would signify and enable future Soviet life through their usefulness and their ideological intensity. This thesis argues that Constructivist objects served a third purpose as productive agents of community.
Each chapter of this thesis closely studies a different object of a different medium to trace relationships between Constructivist objects and Soviet community. El Lissitzky’s PROUN Manifesto illuminates the creation of an artistic community. Alexander Rodchenko’s print Propaganda communicates between a state and its people. Varvara Stepanova’s Sportswear designs facilitate a society of workers. Alexandra Exter’s Marionettes combine common everyday objects and children’s theater. Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, envisions the ideal Soviet society as place in which socialists could convene. And Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonics relates the functional and aesthetic goals of Constructivism from Russia to the international art world. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction each provide the framework for discussing the intersections of art objects and community. Anderson explores nationhood through the lens of language and print media, Latour studies how social interaction on an individual basis might rely upon the physical objects around them, whereas Bourdieu addresses hierarchies in distinguishing objects of art in class-based societies by outlining the conflicts between cultural capital and tastemaking in the analysis of objects.
Through the exploration of each Constructivist object, this thesis explores individual, national, and international communities while considering their changing political, social contexts.
Date Created
2019-05
Agent
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