Art History & Archaeology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2744
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Item The Sloth of the Author: In Defense of a Call to Inaction(2020) Brady, Laura Michiko; Mansbach, Steven; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mladen Stilinović’s (1947-2016) text “In Praise of Laziness” (1993) makes seemingly absurd claims about the relationship between art and laziness which are most often interpreted as political commentary in his typically cynical brand of humor. While this humor is indeed a consistent and essential element of his work, such readings fail to critically assess the depth of his notion of “laziness.” I conduct a thorough unpacking of his definition in order to reveal “laziness” as a form of constructive passivity with a potentially pacifist dimension. With particular focus on his artist books and works dealing with themes of time and pain, I demonstrate the myriad ways in which Stilinović’s notion of “laziness” manifests throughout his oeuvre. Contextualization of “In Praise of Laziness” has been dominated by oversimplified narratives of a global “East/West” divide while Stilinović’s particular geopolitical circumstances as a member of the last Yugoslav generation have been overlooked. Following a careful recontextualization of “In Praise of Laziness,” I suggest that this work may be considered a critical response to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.Item "In It We Should See Our Own Revolution Moving Froward, Rising Up": Socialist Realism, National Subjecthood, and the Chronotope of Albanian History in the Vlora Independence Monument(2014) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)November 28, 1972 saw the inauguration of one of communist Albania's largest and most significant works of public sculpture, the seventeen-meter tall bronze Vlora Independence Monument. The work, created by Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntas Dhrami, represented an unparalleled attempt to visualize both the geographical and historical unity of the Albanian people, assisting in the cohesion of a modern national identity created and reinforced by the communist government. This paper argues that the Independence Monument, as an exemplar of Albanian communist art, represented not the propagandistic revision of national history--as is often claimed of socialist realism--but rather the establishment of a spatial and temporal ground from which its viewers could come to understand themselves as possessing a shared national heritage and participating in the common construction of a uniquely Albanian socialism.Item Globalization and Ethnic Identity in the Art of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yong Soon Min, and Nikki S. Lee(2012) Choi, Yookyoung; Shannon, Joshua A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a comparative study of the work of three Korean American women artists: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), Yong Soon Min (1953-), and Nikki S. Lee (1970-). While the works by these three artists have garnered some critical attention, they have never been the subject of in-depth art historical research. Embracing the artistic media of photography, film, and video in their work these three artists express a common concern about their identities as simultaneously Koreans, Americans, and women. By looking at these artists' work together, this dissertation explores how the three artists negotiate their hybrid cultural identities in a globalized contemporary America. This dissertation also examines the role of photography, film, and video as their major artistic media following the art practice of the 1970s' Conceptualism. Cha's subtle and allusive film and video installation, Exilée (1980), for example, features images associated with the colonial history of her home country along with images and text about trans-pacific passage. Min's work from the 1990s includes photographs of writing on her own body, and images referring to historical events in both Korea and the United States. In her performative series of photographs entitled Projects (1997-2001), Lee disguises herself as a member of various social and cultural groups, trying to assimilate into them. Together, the three artists offer an intensive comparative case study of the ways in which hybrid cultural identity can be figured in the contemporary world. Focusing on the interpretive analysis of selected art works, the dissertation will show the unique intensity of the visual arts as a tool to communicate concepts of cultural identities, while also bringing needed specificity to the theoretical debates on the issues of cultural and ethnic identities.