Academic Research and Dissertations

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  Emptiness and Empathy: An Artistic-Philosophical Study of Mastery

  Eric Anthony Bess

  The technological advancements of recent history have undeniably led to greater comfort in some parts of the world. These technological advancements stem from a pursuit of mastery in scientific endeavors. At their limit, however, these advancements also serve to isolate human beings from one another and from the world they occupy leading to an increase in mental health issues and a lack of empathy. This project addresses this problem by asking, “What if human beings turned toward the pursuit of an aesthetic type of mastery alongside a scientific one?” and “What would comprise the practice of such mastery?” I will argue that the artistic study of the phenomenological world of appearances is the simultaneous practice of empathy which harbors a spiritual connectivity between subject and object. Using Georges Bataille’s notion that the subject is indistinguishable from the object at the limits of the object’s study, Friedrich Nietzsche’s consideration of amor fati, and Soren Kierkegaard’s consideration of sacrifice, Love, and union with God, I will paint a picture of an aesthetic mastery that is grounded upon sincerity, detached-empathy, and patience.

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  Adrift, Uncertain and at Risk: Liminality, Movement and the Art Encounter

  Eileen Marie Doktorski

  This dissertation addresses the transitional, in-between state of liminality, a topic of study that intersects philosophy, anthropology, art, literature, science, religious mysticism, and spiritual experience. It provides a narrow focus on the act of entering into an artwork as both an opening and point of slippage. A liminal experience is one in which quantifiers of space and time are seemingly absent, as are previously known entrances, exits and borders. This project argues that passage and transformative change may and do occur through acts of movement. It examines the phenomena of buoyancy, departure, falling, oscillation, and drift and their conveyance in art as potential catalysts for shifting into a liminal state of becoming.

  Understanding liminality through the lens of engagement with art and movement will illuminate new ways of thinking about art today: how it may be entered, its significance to lived experience and its potential to impact an understanding of a bodily conscious, felt awareness. This project elucidates the liminal experience through close examination of specified movements. Encounters with specific works of art by John Everett Millais, Andrei Tarkovsky and Francesca Stern Woodman are analyzed against this framework, and within the context of literature and science. Philosophical writings by Dufourmantelle, Irigaray and Meleau-Ponty are key to this exploration.

  This project addresses ritual aspects of art encounters to include viewer receptivity to possible liminal passage, identified as transcendent interiorizations—altered states of consciousness which blur internal experience and exterior reality. It proposes that a duration of receptive, subsuming engagement is essential for a viewer’s potential liminal experience, while raising questions regarding recent shifts towards art encounters. It argues that such an engaged encounter has transforming capabilities—as an entering into—as other. It contributes new theories and reflective conclusions regarding the art viewing experience and the conveyance of movement in art.

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  Queer Shapeshifting: Latinx Graphic Novels as Forms of Continual Resistance

  Héctor Rolando Garza

  The study of Latinx graphic novels is a form of continual resistance is an area of popular culture that, for a long time, evaded proper examination and analysis due to the lack of an effective philosophical approach in addressing the phenomenological complexity of shapeshifting and marginalized identities. Presently, however, scholars and contemporary Latinx artists-writers have actively reimagined the field of graphic novels and the figure of the classic superhero as an infallible figure and disrupted the hegemonic principles that have constrained storytelling within a heteronormative structure. The emergence of contemporary artworks has aided in shattering the hegemonic representation of the classic superhero, as well, focused renewed interest in the relevance of representing superheroes as divergent forms and their impact on popular culture, particularly in the way that Latinx, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) voices are represented and amplified within the unfolding process of alternative storytelling. Furthermore, this analysis explores how artists’ reiterations of classic comic book characters in alternative visual-verbal forms expose their vulnerabilities that move them beyond the realm of patriotic symbols of propaganda. This dissertation therefore examines the disruption of mainstream interpretation of the field of comics and their insertion into popular culture as forms of continual resistance that decenter authoritative narratives and reflect expressions of desire and sexualities that are still being invented. Latinx graphic novels create a space that allows the reader-viewer to imagine and invent possible futures that are not tethered to identitarianism or sameness in embracing different cultural perspectives without labels. Through the work of contemporary Latinx artists borrowing from the imagery of early comic characters, a radical, rhizomatic, reinvention of classic superheroes emerges to disrupt, expose, and reimagine one’s views of what a superhero represents in mainstream culture while expanding the field of Latinx futurism that reveals while not concealing other marginalized voices.

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  Wild Care: A Vital Surrealist Inquiry on Loss in the Wood

  Samantha Cherie Stanko Jones

  This dissertation identifies paths of escape from the familiar confines of care as presented by domesticated life. To this end I assert that the human capacity to care is a deeply rooted, creative impulse, which exceeds the visually governed human ontology. In other words, the human approach to the caring relationship presents certain self-centered and self-imposed limits which have served to truncate the relationship to care through the oppressive deployment of utility, roles, and stasis. I argue that wild care, in its a) visceral redolence, b) wavering grief, c) feral excess, and d) fetal potentiality, opens the threshold of human-being beyond the confines of its own domestication; that is to say, from caring for to being-with. By combining the hermeneutics of vital materialism and French surrealism within the ecosystem of the forest, I endeavor to build a new definition of care, which I term wild care. For the depth of the transformation necessary for wild care to emerge, the dynamics of decay and growth in the forest must be implemented into serious theoretical considerations. Hence, I introduce the following analytical concepts: the ambivalent loss, understood as wavering grief, that is a somatically inscribed and perpetually fluctuating state that opens the human threshold to encounter new ways of being;ferality, an ever present condition of the forest, that provides an escape from the captivity of domestic life and, in its excretive excess, bears the persistent residue of wild care; fetality–present in the womb of the woods, that is the most potent site of wild care which resists telos in favor of possibility, awakening the sense of being here, but not here yet. Being, then, as energy acting through material, therefore constantly breaks through the boundaries imposed by human perception, opening us to the wild side of care.

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  Dwelling in the Woven Threshold: Unraveling the Habitat of the Entanglement and Reweaving the Oikonomia of Flourishing

  Carrie L. Kellerby

  This dissertation explores the materiality of dwelling as a woven threshold. The study begins with Martin Heidegger’s project concerning the problem of dwelling as a separation from Being to posit a concept of dwelling that weaves together the elements of nature, human presence, and the mystery of Being as a praxis of meaningful belonging with the world. In this fourfold, the aesthetics of dwelling reveal both the gift and the responsibility of human presence in the world. This study aims to unravel the knots that challenge dwelling by tracing the located separations from the world within the development of hierarchical hegemonies and by critiquing Western metaphysics, including the impulses of dualism, abstraction, and value calculation. Individual threads of the argument are teased out by using the methods of phenomenology, materialism, and feminist hermeneutics, assisted by the writing of Martin Heidegger, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adriana Cavarero, Luce Irigaray, Donna J. Haraway, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. The study traverses the historical, mythological, and political threads of domestic embodiment through the work of Neolithic weaving women and ancient Minoan practices of oikonomia to the rise of the polis and the development of political economies that work to separate the human body from the materiality of the world. The project honors the historical and contemporary unravelers whose work has navigated and opened the ways to dwelling, such as Guo Xi, Homer’s Penelope, Vanessa Bell, Roni Horn, Lenore Tawney, Chiharu Shiota, Candice and Dora Wheeler, and Virginia Woolf. Finally, while acknowledging the frayed remnants of the materiality of living on a damaged planet, the work returns to Heidegger’s uncanny being and the Daoist landscape to offer some hope for the recuperation of dwelling in the woven thresholds to come.

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  Chance Aesthetics in Quantum Realities: Sentient Observers and Artificial Intelligence as Architects of Information's Journey

  Mersedé Mirshamsi

  Delving into the intersection of philosophy and quantum mechanics, in this dissertation I explore the dynamic journey of information’s transition from quantum potential to contextualized artistic expression, as it runs the risk of being challenged-forth by information technologies. I will explore contemporary theories of consciousness to examine the role of sentient observers on the articulation of spacetime, blurring the lines between human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Accordingly, the central inquiry of this study is to discern the role and identity of the observer: Who or what counts as an observer? How does this observer, as a principal architect of information in spacetime, influence creative aspects of existence, reshaping our experience of being in the world? Positing the observer as an active sentient agent within spacetime – an ‘information generator’ par excellence – I argue that the role of the observer transcends mere observation, engaging in a continuous strife against chance to create narratives of being by actively participating in the materialization of streams of information.

  Central to this discourse is the concept of chance aesthetics, a term I have coined to encapsulate the aesthetics of serendipity and indeterminacy inherent to human experience. This concept emphasizes the aesthetic significance of the observer’s embrace of chance and serendipity in artistic endeavors. Consequently, I make a corollary argument that chance is not an ontological backdrop but a pivotal element of reality, playing a crucial role in both the creation and interpretation of art. When chance prevails it dictates the outcome, leading to a reality that might not align with the observer’s intent. In contrast, when intent aligns with the outcome, it suggests a triumph over chance, enabling a subjective experience shaped by the will of the observer. With this in mind, using examples from photography the dissertation not only explores the role of the human observer, but expands the definition of an observer to include artificial intelligence, thereby opening new philosophical inquiries into the nature of consciousness, agency, and the subjective experience of existence.

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  Oceanic Phenomenology and the Athlete-Philosopher-Artist

  Terri Pyle

  This dissertation explores the concept of oceanic phenomenology, defined as a subjective, athletic ocean experience. This oceanic experience is studied through surfing, sailing, open water swimming, and freediving to reveal the athlete-philosopher-artist in a quest for meaningful existence. Athletic experiences are opportunities for analysis not only of the body’s movement in creative performance, but also the athlete’s sensory awareness as focused intensity or presence, and the resulting artworks of those experiences, be it film, literature, painting, or photography. The movement of the body in the ocean offers a physiological, psychological, and philosophical transformation of the athlete. In addition, while in the ocean, water athletes are able to encounter sentient, marine life creatures which opens up a larger feeling of connectedness and being-in-the-world. An oceanic ontology is thus developed through our experience of reality in the ocean, and the transformation of self upon reflection of those experiences when back on land. Presence, grace, space, time, and ethics of a body in motion are explored through the athletic endeavors of swimming, surfing, sailing, and freediving in the ocean to actualize and define the life of an athlete-philosopher-artist. It is with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Aristotle that this thesis is able to take hold and validate the body’s movement in nature to enable and offer phenomenological, oceanic experiences of a water athlete. I apply their philosophical perspectives to water sports, and thus elucidate how the sea is rich with phenomenological opportunities.

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  The Black Sublime and the Possibilities of the Impossible

  Novel Denise Sholars

  This project argues that Black/ness embodies a uniqueness that is communicated through its poetic and aesthetic expression. This uniqueness is posited here as the Black Sublime. It addresses the conditionality of Black/ness in a state of constant historical and ongoing oppression this thesis calls Black State. This is the conditionality of DuBois’s Veil, or Glissant’s matrix, which screams for Opacity. Christina Sharpe aligns this historical context in her work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being with what she calls, “Wake Work”. The process of Wake Work moves through DuBois’s Veil, and Glissant’s aquatic reality, as a baptism, a violent submersion into nothingness that becomes a rebirth into thinglyness.

  Exploring the realms of Black/ness as Black Sublime read with and against/despite the Kantian Sublime, is to understand more fully the connections between Black/ness and the possibilities of representation, this is to say, the As If. This As If, which is an abstraction, allows for the construction of race, which challenges Black/ness and its pursuit of Being, but is also a chaotic and poetic realm which ironically allows for possibilities outside of the fixed Black State of impossibility.

  We will argue how its beingness or its ontology is disclosed through aesthetics and poetics, acting not only as a disruption to western standards of language and the binding narrative of Black/ness as contrary to the reasoning human, but also opens to something transformative and beyond it. This project explores the As Is of Black/ness and its relation to spirit, soul, abjection, and the sublime. We will show how the gesture of a Black Sublime allows vii for a generative liberational praxis that motivates and exists beyond the performativity of resistance and the metaphor of freedom. It is the possibility of the impossible.

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  Being in Play: How Otherness Emerges Through the Playful Event

  Jeffrey George Siemers

  The ontological nature of “play” has been overlooked throughout our philosophical tradition. Too often play is lived out in human activity such as games and sports, but does not fully encapsulate the ontological nature of the topic, typically posing play in the context of competition with a winner and a loser or as an alternative to serious endeavors such as work. This project aims to move beyond and through these predetermined outcomes and various stances to reveal a valuable encounter within the essence of play and the interaction of players. Being in Play traces the history of how play as an aesthetic construct has been defined and documents influential thinkers, presenting carefully the tensions found within the paradigm of play itself. This project prioritizes the space of play as found in Martin Heidegger’s Spielraum. In this play-space, the ontological inquiry describes what I term “the playful event.” Relying on thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt, I employ an ontological approach to the event to reveal a movement that weakens a logocentric focus. The intersubjective aspects of play bring the distinctiveness of the Other to the surface. The intimacy of the playful event transforms the competitive and dominating approach of play to one that has the freedom to form a dialogue. Through themes such as winning and losing, anarchy, hospitality, socio-economics, asymmetrical relationships, and community, I incorporate artworks as events and praxis to disclose otherness as a possibility vii of emancipation.

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  The Hidden Intimacy of Wonder and Trauma: Genealogical, Hermeneutic, & Phenomenological Analyses of a Fundamental Mood & Its Relation to Thinking, Seeing, & Being-In-The World

  Nicolas Márquez-Sterling Tanner

  This project explores the relationship between wonder and trauma within the realms of philosophy, art, and human existence. The inquiry begins with the etymological and mythological kinship between the ancient Greek words for wonder (thauma) and trauma (trauma). It reveals a reciprocal correspondence that goes beyond linguistic and symbolic affinities to the origins of basic thinking. The central thesis is that wonder and trauma are the same—where the ‘same’ means opposing, nonidentical aspects—in the experience of thaumazein. This primordial, disclosive wonder signifies a disposition, attunement, pathos, or mood. Thaumazein is also a philosophic wonder because it signifies the experience, in thought, said to be the beginning, archē, of philosophy and the one true pathos of the philosopher. Although wonder is named as the beginning of philosophy by the pre-Platonics, its meaning changes over time through its usage by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and modern scientists. A sub-thesis of this dissertation is that while metaphysics, modern science, and logical thinking still claims to be able to wonder as the ancient Greeks did, wonder’s meaning has been radically flattened and forgotten. The history of metaphysics is the history of its repression of the trauma inherent to all life and human existence. This inquiry expands on Heidegger’s claim that the history of metaphysics is the forgetting of Being by investigating how the process of forgetting is intimately related to the neurotic repression of the traumatic in the experience of wonder. This project explores possibilities for the recovery and cultivation of this forgotten attunement, in which wonder and trauma are one. To that end, the medium of photography in general and the photographic work and life of Garry Winogrand in particular offer real-world examples of how the wonder and trauma in thaumazein can inform the creative process and its results in today’s world.

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  Uncovering Abjection Through Utopian Dreaming: How Techno Subverts Hierarchical Structures and Continues to Forge A Synergetic Experience

  Angela R. Whitlock

  This dissertation employs phenomenological and poststructuralist modes of inquiry to examine the relationship between techno’s utilization of abject experiences and the cultivation of a synergetic community embracing hope and inclusiveness. Using such key philosophers as: Mikhail Bakhtin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, and Rosalind Krauss, I emphasize parallels between community and track structure by investigating the interconnectedness between participants (including the DJ) within techno events and the interplay of samples within techno tracks. This analysis reveals tensions and dualities that shape the techno community and music, and involves the subversion and diminishing of hierarchical structures found within our day-to-day. Approaching techno in this way fills an underexplored gap within current scholarship, which commonly approaches the subject matter through the lenses of deviance, drug abuse, or its clumsy connections to shamanism.

  I argue that techno continually forges a synergetic community, transcending prior superficial interpretations that situate techno as related to momentary cathartic release. I emphasize the importance of interconnectedness, participation, and technology in fostering intimacy within a world increasingly swallowed by detachment. With a focus on peace, love, unity, and respect (P.L.U.R.), I assert that technology empowers the subversion of hierarchical structures, drawing individuals closer to one another rather than furthering isolation and alienation. This shift highlights that techno belongs to both everyone and no one. However, as techno is increasingly integrated within the mainstream, it has greater possibility for exploitation. This is why understanding techno’s transformative potential is important. By examining techno as a participatory experience and an activist state, as well as focusing on its development through its use of Detroit’s abjection to spur hope, inclusiveness, and the act of continual forging, I situate techno as being capable of transforming how we treat ourselves, others, and the rest of the world.

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  Removed Closeness: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Black Tap Dancing body Across Geographies, Space, and Time

  Truly A. Austin

  This dissertation establishes the concept of what I have named “removed closeness” as a means through which to develop a deeper understanding of, and dismantle ethereal discussions around, dance forms of the African Diaspora. I assert that removed closeness empowers the Black Tap Dancing Body to cross boundaries of geography, space, and time, enabling it to serve as a vehicle for catharsis, provide access to the sublime, and secure the future of Tap Dance as it maintains the link between tradition and innovation. Part One unpacks the concept of removed closeness and discusses catharsis, the sublime,and how removed closeness allows access to both. Additionally, African religion is discussed to clarify how African and western philosophical ideas can be bridged via the analysis of removed closeness and its manifestation in dance. Part Two delves into the history of Tap Dance, providing further context of the art form and how it became what we see today. Connections are drawn between the Black American movement systems involved in the creation of Tap Dance and the African movement systems that provided the initial groundwork. Part Three provides an earnest attempt to determine the future of the Black Tap Dancing Body. The philosophy of Afrofuturism is unpacked, along with its intersection with removed closeness– both place emphasis on the importance of maintaining a connection to tradition and using that connection to move forward, grow, andevolve. The first purpose of this research is to find a different way to understand the Black Dancing Body and investigate the experience of its past, present, andfuture. The second purpose is to give words to an experience and provide another discursive entry point for those most impacted by this query: Black Dancing Bodies that are performing Black Dance forms while navigating white dominated spaces.

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  The Domestic Sublime

  Sara Christensen Blair

  An investigation of the art of Tara Donovan, Liza Lou, Dave Cole, and Wolfgang Laib precipitated an articulation of a unique concept, the domestic sublime. The use of non-traditional art materials employed by each artist is one of the unifying characteristics that makes their work illustrations of the domestic sublime. Each artist presents work that is familiar yet uncomfortable, comforting yet disturbing, and lastly, finite yet immeasurable. The combination of repetitive labor, vast quantities of physical materials, and forms that present the unknown reveal characteristics of the domestic sublime.

  Tracing the concept of the sublime from its origins to today allows for its evolution from a transcendental experience to a tangible, material manifestation in contemporary discourse. Key figures in this argument include Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. Domesticity commonly refers to any labor, activity or material related to, in or around the home and has numerous social, historical, and philosophical contexts. Situated in notion of modernity, the domestic’s foundation is comprised of layers of discourse that include the politics of labor, economic implications, boundaries, technology, and identity. Contributing philosophers to the domestic include Gaston Bachelard, Witold Rybczynski, Simone de Beauvoir, Kathleen M. Kirby, Henri Lefebvre, and Martin Heidegger.

  Characteristics from both the domestic and the sublime meld to a framework that supports the paradoxes and complexities inherent in both notions, while simultaneously revealing the overlapping notions that inextricably create the domestic sublime. The artwork that illustrates the notion of the domestic sublime combines domestic materials, labor, and space with the uncanny relationships inherent in the sublime such attraction and repulsion, interior and exterior, and comfort and terror.

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  From the Ground Up: An Anarchic Methodology for Creative Practice Beyond Capitalism

  Margaret A. Coleman

  This research addresses the constraints of creative practice as it exists within the realm of mainstream capitalist culture and the possibilities for creative practice when practiced through a lens of anarchism. Drawing from Silvia Federici’s historical analysis of Marxist enclosures, and Gregory Sholette’s argument of art as a form of enclosure, this research advocates for an expansion of what is considered creative practice. The Dominant Art World Structures indicate institutional organization, a relationship with the cultivation of capital, and a hierarchical construction, making space for the conversations, practices, and people that have been allocated to this realm of mainstream contemporary art practice. In my research, I explore the potential for a creative commons, that allows for inclusion of voices that would traditionally be excluded from the Dominant Art World Structures. I engage with practices that often lie outside of the Dominant Art World, that may not even be commonly identified as art. The research also includes examples of creative practitioners whose practices are not acknowledged. Sources include punk zines, small town newspapers, posters from events that were not otherwise documented, and interviews with community members. This research advocates for a foundation of anarchic perspective that grounds itself on consciousness as stemming from the relational of being part of the other, of being a participant of the collective.

  The first half of the dissertation examines what capitalism, consumption, and commodification has created in relation to art, leaving a realm filled with competition with the eventual outcome being the monetization of people and relationships themselves. The second half of the dissertation begins to construct a perspective of what creative practice could be, when coming from a consciousness that employs anarchic sensibilities. These chapters identify characteristics of the creative commons and explore practices that demonstrate these characteristics, including collaboration or collective action without claim to authorship, skill sharing, and what it means to build from the ground up.

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  Plant Ontology, The Amazonian Yachag and the Artist in Trance

  Ana Fernandez Miranda-Texidor

  The commonalities that plants, shamans and artists share may not be evident at first glance, nevertheless, if we search for uncomfortable entanglements and difficult questions, we may find that for centuries the voice with which plants speak has been the Amazonian yachag and the chamana or healer. Furthermore, who has invariably accompanied different plateaus along humanity’s convoluted becomings, has been what I have called the artist in trance. This artist is a concoction born from Walter Benjamin’s notion of ecstatic trance and Nietzche’s tragic artist. In this research I have investigated the being of plants or plant ontology and how they may be others who we may learn from in order to relate to Earth in a better way. The artist-yachag or artist philosopher as we may call her, is the one who bridges disparate conocimientos or knowledge, those of plants and those of shamans and translates them into our own words and worlds. What for? To learn to inhabit this planet in a softermood, in a weak mood as Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala would say, stemming from other visions and other perspectives. The interconnectivity that plants generate, as well as the idea of them being a world in themselves allied with the yachag or shaman and the artist, may lead humanity towards the understanding of a world to come. Applyingand expanding the notion first posited by Levi-Strauss and then contested by Viveiros de Castro that the relation between nature and culture is one of“metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric resemblance”, I argue that the same kind of contiguity exists between plants,the Amazonian yachag and the artist in trance. The trope ofmetonymic contiguity serves to connect in a continuum these three entities one after the other in a nature-culture effervescent symbiosis.

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  Moving Through Experience: Disruption, Emergence, and the Aesthetic of Repose

  Jeanne A. Moore

  Contemporary aesthetic philosophy engages the notion of aesthetic experience from two conflicting lenses; on one hand are those who support a connection between the aesthetic and political while the other favors a more pragmatic position. An area of aesthetic engagement not yet explored inhabits an intermediary between these opposing poles, a modality of aesthetic experience I term, the aesthetic of repose. This dissertation traces the evolution of ideas regarding aesthetic experience through a survey of several philosophers whose varied perspectives form the foundation for my inquiry. Beginning with an exploration of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, proceeding through Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and progressing to John Dewey’s Art as Experience, my aim is first, to situate their individual aesthetic philosophies within the context of 21st century aesthetic experience. Despite their differing viewpoints, these thinkers share in common; 1) the importance of sense and sensation to valuable aesthetic experience and 2) a desire to find value and meaning in aesthetic experience for overcoming the ills of humanity and advancing culture.

  Secondly, this dissertation examines a polarity of ideas that challenge the notion of authentic aesthetic experience in our times. Similar to their predecessors, contemporary aesthetic philosophers desire to make aesthetic experience a portal for humanity’s recuperation. There are thinkers such as Jacques Ranciére and Santiago Zabala, who advance an aesthetics of action; others, like Richard Shusterman and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht advocate for an aesthetics of presence. The aesthetic of repose rests uniquely between action and presence, as an area of slumber, where neither action nor presence is necessary. Rather, the idea is to remain in repose, linger there, where repositioning occurs naturally, as though without perception. One emerges from this seemingly imperceptible experience, having done nothing save moving through it, yet being forever changed by it.

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  The Caretaker: Bearing Witness in Public Art an Examination of the Role of Contemporary Artists Addressing the Effects of Environmental Injustice within Michigan Communities

  Kim M. Reiff

  This paper examines public art and the role of contemporary artists in context of their relational experience in communities effected by environmental injustice. As a Michigan resident or as an out-of-state guest invited into an urban neighborhood, each of the twelve artists in this study participates within community through a unique cultural lens. Informed by historical and sociopolitical complexities, the public art bears witness for artists that care about the effects of a city’s water crisis, harm resulting from breached oil pipelines, generational loss of Indigenous traditions, and the inability to breathe unconditionally within certain neighborhood Zip Codes. Engaging in public art in the emerging role of ‘caretaker,’ the artist addresses evolving social narratives in such a way that the aesthetic form through its visual dialogue, becomes a catalyst for change. Current discourse on public art and environmental injustice regards a broad range of social contexts whereby the art performs a certain aesthetic or practical function relevant to location, however, the figure of the artist is rarely discussed. This paper focuses on the figure of the artist. In posing the question, How does public art bear witness for the artist in the role of caretaker?, I argue that the artwork reveals the role of caretaker through the artist’s 1) aesthetic practice, 2) gentleness in form, and 3) particular elucidation that personifies ‘caretaker’ as assessed through aspects of Witness, Testimony, Shelter, and Call, whereby the four categories become markers within the art for attributing the artist’s relational experience within community. The public art fosters consideration for the viewer to gain new insight through aesthetic form that bears witness for the artist as caretaker and to reflect on one’s own role in an environmentally just community.

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  Becoming Soil: Five Contemporary Cases in Eco Materialism (On Art, Fermentation, and Soil Remediation)

  Maria Patricia Tinajero

  This dissertation proposes a new approach to soil remediation that I term becoming soil. Becoming soil seeks to help reclaim soil’s aesthetic dimensions, dimensions where soil is dynamic and alive. I argue that soil remediation is an artistic, creative, and collaborative practice that goes well beyond a romantic attempt to recover a lost fertile ground. Instead, it invites the senses to become invested in the continuous processes that keep soil alive. Furthermore, the dissertation reveals the hidden aesthetic underpinning of soil depletion, a crucial environmental problem, while offering creative means to resist the massive and adverse impact that humans have on soil. To this end, the subject of Becoming Soil is examined through five operational questions: a) What is Value? b) What Hides? c) What Remains? d) What Resurfaces? and e) What is Recovered? That correspond to the five artworks by artists Claire Pentecost’s Soil-Erg (2012), Frances Whitehead’s SLOW Clean-up (2008-10), Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991—ongoing), Jea Rhim Lee’s Infinity Burial Project (2009—ongoing), and Wormfarm Institute creative initiatives on art and agriculture, Fermentation Fest (2010—ongoing). I answer these questions in the light of contemporary ecological theory; more precisely, eco criticism and eco materialism, than like fermentation, are methods of transformation (a giving and and taking in reciprocity) that benefit both the aesthetic and scientific aspects of soil remediation. These methods make tangible transdisciplinary collaborations possible. Illuminate the impact of humans on soil, becoming soil reveals the possibilities for new artistic, scientific, economic, social, and political engagements that are soil centric. Moreover, becoming soil amplifies the aesthetic dimensions of soil remediation, helping to restore the sensual experiences of eating nutritious food, standing on solid ground, and the enigmatic return to the soil in death.

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  The Black Veil of Freedom: On Kara Walker and the Aesthetic Education of the Black Man

  Nancy Wellington Bookhart

  This project is charged with the illumination and application of Jacques Ranciere’s theory of the distribution of the sensible and regimes of art in the examination of the historical posturing of black masculinity and what I propose as the new slavery inherent in mass incarceration. Paramount to this survey is the retrospection of the dialectic work of Kara Walker who is said to have desecrated black testament of freedom while contriving white desire. Contrary to this I argue Walker as artist-philosopher and her work as having the potential for the emancipation of the black man. Dissentient in nature Walker draws a comparison to the revolutionary comportment of Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner in the legislation of violence lodged against the archetypes of the master/slave narrative of history in her indispensable commission for the souls of black men. The distribution of the sensible is understood as the configuration of the sensible world as an ethical ought in the cartography of the Platonian republic as “living speech.” The silhouette participates in this discourse as the concatenation of knowledge and the soul vis-a-vis Plato. In this partitioning lies the birth of the Other as colonized thought. Knowledge as an epistemological grid shapes the discourse and terrain governing the black man as Other assigning him historically as an inferior product. The psychological predisposition of the black man as inferior is performed in history and recapitulated through the representative regime ad infinitum. The problem is the question concerning history as immutable law. How has law and legislation failed the black man in his procuration of freedom? I argue that the emancipation of the black man will be accomplished through an aesthetic education in his return to the primal scene of history as history. What comportment does genius have in this most critical excavation? How does art as knowledge participate in this intervention? Art is no abstract concept of community but its substratum taking form. How is form imperious to the fashioning of black masculinity, or at that Heidegger’s nothing?

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  Place-As-Medium: Toward a Shared Authorship of Place

  Katherine Paige Farrington

  This dissertation establishes a new philosophical framework to understand, evaluate,and champion a category of art practice appearing in the world that I call “place-as-medium.”I will argue that place-as-medium reshapes horizons of knowledge by the way it changes the way we think as the activity of “thinking through place.” Chapter one sets up place-as-medium as an art practice that goes beyond metaphysical thinking in the artworks of Alfredo Jaar. Chapter two demonstrates how Jaaruses place-as-medium as an artistic strategy that gathers things together and brings them into appearance spatially through art forms-as-thinking gestures,defining “boundaries of place.” Chapter three considers dOCUMENTA (13), an expansive international exhibition organized by artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012 as a thinking-artistic-praxis. The central investigation is the exhibition’s play with spatial, temporal, and historical dimensions of art as ways to reconfigure conditions of place. Chapter four looks at the function of hospitality in three art projects that occurred around the Occupy movement in 2012, which use the aesthetic form of the tent. Chapter five looks at the topic of authorship in place-as-medium, leading to the conclusion that place-as-medium presents new opportunities for art to enact shared authorship of place.

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  The Immersive Aesthetic Experience: Accommodating Art’s Ontological Task

  Poppy A. Gauss

  This dissertation examines how the immersive aesthetic experience engages sense and reason in interpretation of ontological questions. This examination is important, as it reveals how thinking contextually develops through the practice of nuance and lingering.This research demonstrates that the ontological task of aesthetics distinguishes art from entertainment. I argue that the immersive aesthetic experience avoids superficiality by addressing; embodiment, intertextuality, and the sublime.Embodiment relates to the abundance of sense data characteristic of immersives aesthetic experiences. Spaces, light, smells, environments that elicit physical response. Presented with, and as, ambiguous signs that appear to make ontological reference. Physical response stimulates interpretation, an interpretation that is intertextual. Understanding intertextuality can better facilitate operating in a complex and contextual world. These experiences require focus, becoming conscious of. The sublime, understood as an intense experience of aesthetic understanding, is integral to the description of immersive aesthetic experience developed in this study. When aesthetic understanding is of an ontological nature, occurs unexpectedly, briefly, and intensely, it is called sublime, and reveals the nature of singularity. This intense experience may act as an enticement to engage sense and reason, freely and with more frequency.

  The dialogue developed in this research aims to to understand what immersives aesthetic experiences share in common and addresses four important questions.What kind of being does the ontological content of each work address? What is the formal approach to the work? How does the work physically engage sense? And what is revealed? The guiding voices that this dialogue depends on include; Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jean Luc Nancy, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson and Damien Hirst offer examples of the type of work that encourages nuance and lingering, and reveals presence. Ultimately resulting in understanding that being responds to, and is responsible for, the world.

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  Collectivity as Practice: Examining Collaboration and Equitable Modalities in the Contemporary Artist Collective

  Erin Latham

  My dissertation focuses on the artist collective as a potential model to contribute to the reshaping of contemporary society. Through exploration of Michel Bahktin’s ‘polyphonic’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ‘rhizome’, Emmanuel Levinas’ theories of alterity, Edouard Glissant’s ‘relational aesthetics’, (among others) this project will explore how the contemporary artist collective engages autonomous subjectivity with others in the artist collective model by shifting ‘the group’ from a problematic modality into a multiplicitous mode of ‘being-with’ one another in collective space. In study of artist’s working in collaboration in history alongside contemporary artist collectives, this project argues that the artist collective considers the question of autonomy within collectivity through an assemblage of voices working together in relation to one another through practices that include: self governance, the question of authorship in relation to the multiplicity, and the engagement of outside participants with the created artwork. In so doing, the collective creates a community based on exchange with one another; one that engages the multiplicity of ideas and validates all forms of existence via communal making. Through comparative study of artist collectives based in contemporary society within the limits of the American, European, and Asian continents, this dissertation explores how creative collaboration occurs within collective practices. I will utilize a comparative-inductive approach through the intertextualization of contemporary artist collectives and thinkers. This project is an important contribution to the existing conversation surrounding the artist collective, because of the necessity to situate ‘collectivity’ through creative-collaborative endeavors as a practice in which we are all engaged, and in an attempt to re-configure oppressive societal apparatuses under which humanity exists, through creative collaboration of all others.

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  Between the Sun and the Sea" Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape

  George Orwel

  Recent aesthetic theories have neglected ambiance as an experiential thought while emphasizing aura and atmosphere as affective states; feelings grounded in Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology. Existing literature, particularly the works of Tonino Griffero and Gernot Böhme, have muddied this debate and caused confusion by equating ambiance with aura, atmosphere, and Stimmung, or mood. This dissertation delineates ambiance and characterizes its existential structure and materialism as it presents itself to a historical subject through sculptures situated in the landscape of Africana political, social, cultural, and ecological life. Ambiance is like an embosphere, an experiential thing that is internal, subjective, and individual; it is neither objective like aura nor collective like atmosphere. In explicating “sculpted ambiance” as an alternative methodology vis-à-vis historicism, this dissertation critiques contemporary forms of representation while applying Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, i.e., intentionality, to space. This research fills a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on non-architectural visual art. It does this by episodically discussing ambiance as a momentary process of mise-en-scène (staging) experiences—looking, listening, and touching art, triggering audience’s affective registers. The research also builds on Böhme’s and Griffero’s identity of affective state which they characterize as “between place,” “something more,” and “excess effect.” Enveloping history, culture, and ecosystem, sculpture—as an artform and a shared monument—temporally and spatially mediates accounts of society. My main argument is that when we are allured by objects and conditions, we rely on perceptions and processes that are spatially and temporally mediated. Ambiance is part of a spatial hierarchy in the human ecosystem, a process that is epistemic and ontological. As imaginary elemental things, ambiances determine individual moods, attitudes, ways of thinking, and topologies constituting life in society.

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  SPACE AND TIME IN THE MURALS OF THOMAS HART BENTON AND DIEGO RIVERA: REPRESENTATION AND MEMORIALIZATION OF NATIONAL IDENTITIES

  Tammy McMillan Parks

  In this study, I will show how the categories of linear time and horizontal space in the United States and cyclical time and vertical space in Mexico persist into the 20th century and are revealed in the public mural art of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera. Incorporating the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Arnheim, I will demonstrate that the murals articulate the origin stories of each nation by drawing on the chronotopes (time-space) utilized by each artist to serve as the formal structures of national memorials.

  I will argue that in the United States a national identity and collective memory are associated with a linear sense of time in which the past is insignificant and the present is simply a necessary step towards the future while a horizontal concept of space prevails in which the axis mundi expands and tilts outward and is best associated with the ideas of manifest destiny, constant change, progress, freedom and open space.

  In contrast, we find in Mexico a national identity where collective story and memory are associated instead with a cyclical sense of time in which the past, present and future are constantly linked and concurrent, and a vertical concept of space around which one centers identity that lessens the distance between diverse peoples physically as well as culturally.

  Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Raymond Williams, Erika Doss, Yi Fu Tuan and Hannah Arendt, I will further show that the representations in the chronotopes of Benton and Rivera are incomplete and need to be expanded upon to shape a more inclusive national understanding of “we” in both countries that reflects the diversity of its citizens.

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  Displacement of (M)Others in Twenty-First Century U.S. Films: Impact on Material Identities of ‘Other’ Subjectivities

  Jessica Rodríguez Colón

  At the present two foremost studies, the Annenberg Report and CARD analyze the inclusion or exclusion of underrepresented communities in film and television in US American media, both conclude there is an epidemic of representation, which includes the invisibility and misrepresentation of characters and the narratives that surround them. This epidemic of representation has further the displacement of mothers in U.S. Media. In relation to this latter point, Alison Stone and EtiWade provide insight on maternal subjectivity and the gaze of the mother. bell hooks questions parental roles and challenges Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory and feminist critique with her oppositional gaze and a critical lens of feminist theory, by including the voice and experiences of women who had been placed in the margins, while Gwendolyn Foster examines possible tools to decolonize the gaze. From such starting points, this project focuses on how the culture of film has created a Gaze Economy that influences economic structures in the United States of America, from the labor market to the political economies that shape our view of others and our subjectivity, specifically of the mother, from an object to a subject. I define gaze economy as the constant flux of exchange between the one who sees and the one who is being seeing. Such models are hegemonic constructions which lead to perceptions of the judgment of others, the self by others, and the self by the self. In addition, the project introduces the concept of (m)other as the mothers who are grouped outside of the dominant maternal discourse, but whom should be considered as belonging within. Furthermore, this project presents the genealogy of(m)others and explores how the narratives, the representations, the misrepresentations and the absent representations of some characters of mothers, expand the culture of (m)others by furthering their conditions as an ostracized group. The main line of inquiry is whether films influence the societal judgment of others, particularly of ALL mothers? If so, how and who places such judgment? Is it the mother upon herself or a mother upon another mother? The findings of this project contribute to the film and media theory critique of the representation of mothers and the epidemic of invisibility of underrepresented groups. Furthermore, at the present, the project has deconstructed the narratives, performances, and characterizations of mothers in a leading role in the top 25 films from 2000 to 2019 in the United States of America to propose an extension of the feminist critique of such.

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  Art-Voids: Contemplating Emptiness in Contemporary Art

  Taliesin Thomas

  This research emerges from my deep curiosity about the Buddhist concept of emptiness (śūnyatā) and the ways in which select artworks can express some manner of voidness. How can artworks embody and explore emptiness, pointing beyond image and language? My study begins with Ad Reinhardt’s enigmatic Abstract Painting (1963) and the black void in art. My analysis of Reinhardt’s work draws primarily from the writings of Nāgārjuna and Heidegger. Nāgārjuna’s understanding of emptiness suggests a complete deconstruction of all possible entities, leaving “no-thing” in its wake. In Chapter Three I turn to a different account of emptiness as presented in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions of Dzogchen, or Great Perfection. With Agnes Martin’s The Islands I-XII (1979) asmy focus, I engage the Dzogchen idea of “other emptiness” (shentong) as distinct from the emptiness of self. In Chapter Four Itransition to an exploration of the emptiness of bodily perception in James Turrell’s installation Aten Reign (2013).This site-specific artwork is an impermanent, non-material work that is simultaneously indeterminate and incorporeal yet existent and perceivable, andhere I draw on the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. The fourth artwork that I explore in Chapter Five is The Century with Mushroom Clouds:Project for the 20th Century (1996) by Cai Guo-Qiang. With Cai’s art the focus shifts from conceptual arguments for emptiness (as one finds in the ideas of Nāgārjuna, Heidegger, and Dölpopa) and the phenomenal experience of emptiness (as one finds in the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty) to a performative gesture that embodies the ephemeral, empty nature of reality as presented in East Asian traditions. I argue these four art-voids enable an aesthetic exploration of the experience and understanding of emptiness through reflective encounters with singular works of art.

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  Confederate Aesthetics: From Reconstruction to Deconstruction

  Lisa A. Williamson

  Confederate sculptures are not mundane objects that decorate the landscape in communities across the United States, but are ideological structures to white supremacy. When the words monument and memorial are used interchangeably and weaponized, the sculptures are trapped on a hermeneutic circle that escalates racial conflict to abuse. By twisting circular interpretation to form an apeiron, represented as an infinity symbol,rigidity can be opened to accept a multiplicity of truths.

  This project begins by untangling the words monument and memorial to demonstrate abuses of power and memory. By stripping away the language, the sculptures and the work they perform in public to uphold white supremacist ideology is revealed. Exposing them removes their power and neutralizes the grounds for discourse where dialogical sculptures can then be inserted.

  The inclusion of dialogical public art that moves Confederate aesthetics to an apeiron engages conflict transformation that expresses the fluidity of history, memory, and consciousness. Recontextualizing public art not only indicates a cultural paradigm shift, but has the power to form a new public that accepts a multiplicity of truths. Public art that aids in the formation of a new public holds the promise of helping the collective development of a new level of consciousness, compassion, empathy, and care that is extended to others.

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  THE EMPTY-SUBLIME: From ‘Je ne sais quois’ To Śūnyatā

  Christopher Huck

  Although much has been written on the phenomena and aesthetics of the sublime, especially over the past thirty-five years, I argue that a further interrogation is needed. This is because the Indo-Tibetan Yogācāra-Madhyamaka philosophy of ‘emptiness’ (Skt: śūnyatā) more precisely and elegantly elucidates what is happening in the mind when we experience the sublime. Therefore, I assert that a thorough interrogation of the Yogācāra-Madhyamaka notion of ‘emptiness’ (śūnyatā) will clarify our (mis)understandings of the aesthetic and phenomenological concepts of the sublime.

  I address several epistemological and ontological problems inherent in understanding the sublime, as has been widely postulated both in and outside the work of art. While employing a method of dialectic in this project, my critique of ancient, modern, and postmodern theses of sublimity postulate new insights into concepts of the sublime. I demonstrate that the theses of the sublime are burdened by several not-insignificant epistemological and ontological problems, which reveal both incoherences and contradictions. Finally, I argue that to promote a coherent theory of the sublime is, in the end, absurd, by virtue of the fact that sublimity can be neither a coherently understood object of experience, nor anything short of an epistemological contradiction. I propose in response what I call the empty-sublime, and then turn to twentieth-century American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Agnes Martin, and the contemporary German artist Wolfgang Laib, whom I argue are examples of its authentic aesthetic praxis.

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  A Critical Phenomenology Of Violence: At the Intersection of the Ontic and the Ontological in the Gaze and the Reimage of Violence

  Gale Richardson

  This study engages with Merleau-Ponty’s supposition, from Phenomenology of Perception, that exposing time underneath the subject and relinking it to all the contradictions of time, body, world, thing, and human other allows awareness to come into its fullness. I argue that rationales of thought associated with cultural violence and its images of the social world—both mental and tangible—link back to the ontological of time underneath each human being, where the conditions of language alter both consciousnesses and meanings behind the phenomenal dimensions of violence, appearance, being, and image. These alterations accompany violence into its reimaging, where an inaudible consciousness awaits each spectator.

  My focus here is phenomenological, but not in the strict Husserlian sense. Rather, I take other discourses and their methodologies to the borders of this centering. Through an intertextual latitude of subsets, I define the meaning of a critical phenomenology of violence through its paradoxical sense, interrogating past and current thinkers across a wide spectrum within a Merleau-Pontian and Arendtian arch. I contend that dangers in the paradox of thinking partner with moral and perceptual thinking and that the phenomenon of imagination in the aesthetic of violence pairs with human will and the Kristevian abject; that Lévinas’s ontology merges with perception, when language creates loss of being; that Lacan’s reduction of the Freudian drive and its gazes couples with Merleau-Pontian desire and his radical, ontological look at psychoanalysis. Finally, the Nancian ontic text-image signals Arendtian insight on deceptive metaphors that expose facets in the blow of violence.

  By the end, this study demonstrates that phenomena stay within their operations, but the power of the human will alternately recognizes or negates the authenticity behind the phenomenon of violence, while events remain actively, quietly at work in cyclical patterns of desires and perversions, placing the human being in the flux of endangerment and risk from an array of social images.

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  The Sublime: An Existential and Ontological Alliance with Mystery

  Gregory Steel

  This dissertation traces the phenomenon we call the sublime as it relates to the lived experience. Not fully understood, this mystery, much like human existence, obscures any possible telos. The experience of the sublime shifts our perspective and focuses our attention on our being. The wonderings inspired by the experience of the sublime stimulates and directs our ontological viewpoint and our existential potentials.

  This examination intends to reveal the necessity of sublime experiences in realizing our humanity and in plotting a course for a more just future. Tracing the genealogy of the sublime through foundational thinkers like Longinus, Burke, and Kant will establish the early interpretations of the experience. Examining the sublime through the shifting attitudes of Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Lacan will display a sense of uncertainty which unseated the sublime as integral to being human. Leaning upon thinkers like Rorty, Rescher, Deleuze, Guattari, and Kendall Walton, this works attempts to recover the sense of wonder inherent in experiences of the sublime. This exploration will examine the uncertain nature of the sublime and how it can be accessed in the contemporary world.

  Contemporary cinema facilitates accessing the sublime in the modern world. Via our imaginations, we can, through engaging with creative and well-crafted stories, experience the sublime connections to our authentic being. Contemporary ideologies mediate interpretive associations of the sublime and create a cul-de-sac for the meanings of the experience and stifle the possibilities of the sublime. This exploration intends to reify the reflections on the sublime and re-establish the significance of the experience as part of humanities ongoing evolution.

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  In the Mouth of the Woolf: The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group

  Christina A. Barber

  Literary critics and art theorists celebrate the work of Virginia Woolf and the activities of London’s Bloomsbury Group as emblematic of the early achievements made in modernist art and aesthetics. This dissertation argues that their creative activities exceeded modernist ideologies and practices of unity, purity, and autonomy; they instead embody the distinct postmodernist traits of hybridity, discord, and fragmentation. This project relocates Woolf’s literary work and the culture of the Bloomsbury Group within a posthumanistic theater; modernism was a performative cloak for their radical personal beliefs and endeavors. In their private lives, the Bloomsberries’ feminism, queer subculture, atheism, pacifism, and mixing of social classes reveal them – as individuals and as an intimate group – to be highly performative, heterogeneous, and post-human.

  I assert that Woolf’s novels describe the Bloomsberries’ radical social values and behaviors via the genre of fiction. The genre safeguarded the novels’ contents for public consumption on the premise that fiction is not confined to facts and real people or events. Woolf’s stories offered unutterable truths about herself, the group, and quotidian urban life.

  This postmodern re-reading of Woolf’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and her essay, A Room of One’s Own, repositions Woolf’s lyric prose as contributing to discourse on the post-human condition and with contemporary feminist and queer theory. Yoking the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Haraway, Braidotti, Bryant, Bergson, and others, I assert that Woolf’s stories occupy a threshold between fiction and post-human philosophy, because her characters exceed being in the world and instead participate in a scheme of becoming-with the world. Woolf’s scheme for intersubjective consciousness is a rhizomatic relation of encounters, machines, and multispecies alliances that permeate the post-human body and psyche. We find, in her century-old artistic vision, a schema for today’s post-human storytelling in the Anthropocene.

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  Sublime Embodiment: The Phenomenological Aesthetics of a Black Liberational Spirituality

  yonTande Whitney Vern Hunter

  My research is concerned with investigating how we can come to understand embodiment as consciousness through choreography, performativity, and performance. Further and more deeply, how the “knowing body” (Merleau-Ponty) enables liberation through an ontological embodiment. I contend that a black liberational spirituality, as an ontological embodiment, is revealed through the phenomenological aesthetics of the black concert dance/performance tradition. Here, I explore the works of eight African American dance/performance artists who convey, lucidly, this subject matter and who are firmly positioned within the black concert dance/performance tradition: Katherine Dunham (“Shango”), Pearl Primus (“Fanga” and “Hard Time Blues”), Eleo Pomare (“Blues for the Jungle”), Reggie Wilson (“Introduction”), Preach R Sun (“CHRYSALIS (Cry Solace)”), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (“Batty Moves”), and Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine (“how to survive a plague”). A main point of departure for my subject is an articulation of Haitian Vodou spirit possession (a sublime embodiment) as a perceptual means for the recontextualization of the beautiful. The choreographic and performance work of the eight artists lead the way along with my inquiry. Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Frantz Fanon offer phenomenological guideposts, while still other thinkers provide necessary grounding in areas specifically focused on temporality, spatiality, gender and spirituality. Three points that guide my investigation of this subject matter are all shared between the artists: (1) the works testify to the power of black embodiment through performativity and aesthetics; (2) the works recognize the interplay between the sacred and the secular domains; and (3) the works maintain a legibility of an inherent spirituality functioning as an animating, illuminating, and vital creative force both conscious and ancestral. The artists signal the viability of an embodied aesthetic of black subjectivity, and their works are infused with an urgency of spirit and a radicalism that demands recognition. It is through their works that the revelation of liberation through the secular ritual act of dance/performance may be encountered. It is, first, the centering of the black body that envisages the discourse from a place of agency rather than alterity. The ultimate goal is to decenter race as a governing principle in determining the beautiful in these works in order to turn our attention to a more equitable place of discovery that contests racial privileging, difference as equal.

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  Artwork as Network: A Reconceptualization of the Work of Art and its Exhibition

  Leonie Bradbury

  As it reshapes the world we inhabit, the concept of the network has emerged as the dominant cultural paradigm across numerous fields and disciplines. Whether biological, social, political, global, communicational, or computational, networks are constituted by a decentered, distributed, multiplicitous, nonlinear system of nodes, plateaus, and edges that are endlessly interconnected and interdependent. Networks prioritize relationships between things over the things themselves, suggesting a reconfiguring of binary elements including: digital/tactile, virtual/material, private/public, and past/present. As networks rapidly change our world, it is logical to assume that contemporary artistic practices are impacted as well. In fact, works of art are uniquely situated to discover and reveal new ways of understanding social and cultural phenomena including that of the network.

  Several questions arise: How do contemporary works of art relate to network culture? Alternately, how do networks redefine our understanding of specific works of art? How, in turn, are these works expanding our understanding of the network? As a way of focusing these questions, the dissertation addresses works by four contemporary artists: Franklin Evans, Simon Starling, Jenny Odell, and Pablo Helguera. Based on close art historical analysis, I argue that instead of depicting, illustrating or referring to networks as context, the works discussed are constituted or composed in and as networks. They are dynamic relational forms in which the work of art and the network are rendered indissociable from one another. I further claim, that components which were previously considered as existing outside of the work of art – the gallery, the studio, references to texts, histories, artworks, historic objects, other artists, place, and even public programs and participants – are now part of what constitutes the work, thus indicating a profound shift in perspective in what we consider the “work of art” and the ways in which it is addressed and interpreted.

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  Spiritual Capital: The Economic Core of the Global Art Market and its Origin in Church Financial Structures

  Jennifer Ford

  Organized religion in the Western Hemisphere and the art world share more than just a shared history of collaboration. Their most significant bond is an economic narrative powered by spiritual capital which produces aura. I contend that religion, specifically Christianity, and the art world share an economy of spiritual capital delivered through aura. Aura in a work of art is not an inherent property of the work itself, but it is manufactured by the art economy which draws its influence from the early formation of the Christian Church. This system involves a number of qualifying factors which I will isolate and investigate through this dissertation. Specifically, both religious and art economies: acquire physical space; establish a structure of cooperative agents; use an exclusive language which produces a discourse of disavowal that denies active participation in a consumer driven economy; and deploy ceremonial symbols of power during ritual events. Additionally, the placement of money within this assembly of practices and practitioners will be presented as an original element inside the art world. The entwinement of the art market and the church’s growth as an international business will finally merge to create a construction of both physical and metaphysical value actualized through aura in spiritual capital. This dissertation offers a new reading of Benjamin's theory of "auratic perception" as identified in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In coordination with such theorists as Deleuze and Guattari, Bordieu, Marx, Weber, Agamben, Baudrillard, Massumi, Bourriaud, and others, we can understand the historical trajectory and formation of spiritual capital as a part of the economy of art as we are liberated from the taboo of discussing money and its relationship to art and religion.

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  Recuperating Mimêsis: Jackson Pollock and the Indigenous American Spirit

  Maria S. LaBrage

  Jackson Pollock has long been heralded as the quintessential Modernist. His work marks the pinnacle of the Golden Age of Modernism and the culmination of a long experiment with modernist ideas elaborated by theorists such as Croce, Fry, Bell, Greenberg and others. Within the predominant concerns of Modernism (including intuition, imagination, and abstraction), Pollock is the paragon of the modernist solitary genius. However, this view of Pollock depends primarily on analysis of his drip paintings and disregards the development of processes inherent within them. This enframing critique of Pollock overlooks the presence of symbol, allegory, and ritual upon which Pollock’s work depends. It neglects to account for the fact that far from pure abstractions, Pollock’s work crosses the boundaries of abstraction in order to reinstitute mimêsis in art.

  My analysis of Pollock’s work views his methodology as a recuperation of indigenous American aesthetics through mimêsis. I claim that through the forms, modes, and functions of mimêsis Pollock’s work transgresses modernity’s claims to pure form in favor of an inquiry into the forms and techniques of indigenous American aesthetics, thereby reintroducing notions of ritual and mythos in contemporary art.

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  Philosophy of Power and the Mediation of Art:The Lasting Impressions of Artistic Intermediality from Seventeenth Century Persia to Present

  Shadieh Emami Mirmobiny

  This is a phenomenological study of patriarchy through the examination of its genealogy as it relates to/parallels with the creative process. I argue patriarchy, while a product of human creativity itself, has artificially elevated itself to prominence, and as such, has dominated and shaped subjectivities to its own end. It has done so by undermining individuality, necessary for establishing the foundation of a more democratic form of government in the region of the Middle East. In this democracy, a dynamic balance and equity is envisioned between the subject and community.

  Therefore, this study is concerned with the power of imagination, in the broad sense, encompassing all creative endeavors that shape the subject. It focuses on the relationship between subjecthood, freedom and the infusion of Neoplatonic ideas with iterations of Islamic principles manifested in art and philosophy serving patriarchy. This study is predicated on the idea that the exploration of art and subjectivity can uncover the hidden, implicit power relations between humans and the creative process, and it relies upon the philosophy of power to establish a theory that aims to reach beyond what Foucault developed.

  Further, it intends to highlight the issue of “gap” in general, and the gap in particular that existed between the major Islamic text/principles—a variation of the Platonic “gap”—and the ideas/actions that have unfolded to this day, but has never been questioned. The objective of this study is to create a space in which the Middle East and the West, each through its “other,” can recognize the importance of the process of the formation and preservation of individual within a collective subjectivity. Finally, this research through a new theory, aims to make more visible the current movements underscoring the individual subjectivity in the Middle East and work toward protecting and preserving individual rights.

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  Dialogic Dissensus: The Postmodern Sideshow

  Toni-Lee Sangastiano Mackin

  In the United States, the sideshow occupies a marginal and often controversial space in popular culture. Despite a decline of the sideshow during the early twentieth century, its postmodern reinvention in 1980 has inspired a proliferation of the aesthetics of the sideshow within mass media and culture as a highly profitable commodity. The current existence of the sideshow as a thriving genre can sometimes be met with surprise, disbelief, or disgust because of the history of sideshow and existing codes of “normality.” Although there is pre-existing scholarship on Bakhtin and the sideshow, what is missing is an exploration of Bakhtin’s dialogism in relation to the art of the postmodern sideshow. This dissertation argues that the postmodern sideshow as an art form is an example of a reinvention of intersubjectivity through Bakhtin’s dialogic and still relevant for understanding contemporary aesthetics. Furthermore, I propose that the carnivalesque is an aspect of the dialogic because the carnivalesque renews hope for a better future which reverberates through unfinalizable time. Instead, I will propose an intertextual genealogy between philosophical thought and the first-hand voices of sideshow performers and related show people in the spirit of dialogism. However, I assert that the dialogic is nearly impossible without a dissensus because of precarization and our permanent cellular connection as a result of our technological progress, which did not exist at the height of postmodernism. This new tyranny of normality has depersonalized our time, dissolved our friendships and communities, our ability to communicate, and our social consciousness to empathize with others in a fundamental shift to our notions of exploitation. A revolution of the aesthetic regime through the maternal will create a new paradigm that reorganizes our senses, our social consciousness, and the conditions for possibility in the dialogic.

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  Aesthesis Universalis: Reconciling Aesthetic Philosophy and the Cartesian Paradigm

  Taryn Sweeney

  The Cartesian paradigm, in its modern existence, can be understood as comprised of four pillars—the founding principle of cogito ergo sum, dualism, a mechanistic worldview, and mathesis universalis. Each of these four pillars contributes to aesthetic philosophy in foundational ways that are largely unacknowledged. This error is owed to literal readings of Descartes’ works that neglect the operational intentions of his paradigm. When one approaches the Cartesian paradigm operationally, it is revealed that aesthetic philosophy owes a tremendous debt to Descartes’ works. Moreover, modern philosophers have dedicated substantial efforts to connecting subjective concepts such as mood and sensation to Descartes’ paradigm. These connections, which all rely on literal readings of the paradigm, are often tenuous and depend heavily on large extrapolation from small notations. However a broader reading of Descartes’ model of the soul reveals a unique niche for subjective expression which provides a distinct role for aesthetic considerations in his epistemology. Revelatory knowledge—knowledge of a nonscientific nature that reveals things as they are—need not be marginalized from mathesis universalis. What is more, it is revealed that aesthetic philosophy is one of the largest contributors to the overall project of mathesis universalis in modernity. This contribution is based on the act of poiesis—a form of knowledge-making that is grossly overlooked as an epistemological process. A series of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby provide a case study of how revelatory knowledge can be integrated with, and inform, the Cartesian paradigm.

  Concepts of modernity by Hans Blumenberg illuminate the need for understanding revelatory knowledge as integral to mathesis universalis by imaging the pillar as an evolving mechanism of human construction. In conclusion, a discussion of the parallels between aesthetics and other marginalized epistemic sources (women, artists, and fiction) reveal consonant efforts to reshape mathesis universalis as more inclusive of revelatory knowledge.

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  In Response to Heidegger’s Plea: Alētheia and the Open Space for Thinking and Freedom Through Art

  Louise Carrie Wales

  This dissertation is a response to Martin Heidegger’s call to action asserted at the conclusion of his oft-cited essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he offers the realm of art as the mainspring for our emancipation from the grip of technological enframing. The following chapters investigate artists Martha Rosler, Christian Boltanski, Krzysztof Wodiczko and finally, collaborators Noor Mirza and Brad Butler, whose artworks offer a counterbalance to the erosion of the human capacity for thought as a particular feature of our Being, or Dasein, as proposed by Heidegger. Their shared characteristic lies in truth’s manifestation within artworks as happenings or events rather than a quest for fixed certainty or correspondence. Through their work, the artists catalyze a reckoning, compelling the viewer to question and reflect on his intersubjective ethical responsibility for the other. The common thread connecting them is a powerful shifting of thought — in a distinctly revelatory acting upon the viewer’s awareness. I will argue that, as technological aesthetic narratives are increasingly sophisticated and nuanced, politically conscious artists such as these become better able to harness their potential voices in deeply critical ways allowing the inter-subjective ethos of care to manifest and thrive in dialogic expressions of truth. Furthermore, they begin to formulate a way of considering and using technology that not only resists enframing by interrogating the very essence of our relationship with it, but also functions as a way of engaging with the question of Being itself (which encompasses Heidegger’s fundamental project). In the end, this dissertation will demonstrate that Being comes to itself in the site of exchange as his/her awareness of responsibility grows and thought is returned to its poetical dwelling. In these times of narrowed perspectives and technological addiction qua enframing, Heidegger’s call to action and the works responding to it must be brought to the fore and celebrated

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  THE AMBIGUOUS OBJECT: TOWARD AN ECONO-AESTHETIC THROUGH A HISTORY OF PORCELAIN

  Mary Anne Davis

  Toward an econo-aesthetic points to a much needed shift to recuperate, or at this point, to imagine a comprehensive approach to being in the world. As such, the artist contains the promise of a reconciliation of the lost connection linking aesthetics and economies. The relationship between art and money has ambiguous overtones increasingly inherent since the end of the renaissance. Porcelain contains clues to that ambiguity because of its tight relationship with both. The history of porcelain or ‘white gold’, so called since its advent in Europe during the 18th century, is the paradigmatic material for deconstructing what I consider a false schism between finance and aesthetics. In this dissertation, I argue that through a conflation of economics and aesthetics, using the history of porcelain as an art material, the role of the artist in community is more clearly identified as essential, in opposition to the marginalized position the artist currently employs in the west, especially the United States. I approach my argument through the history of porcelain in Europe and the US, and by linking that history to a history of economics I found a strong case for a hidden component of vitality through the expression of aesthetic materiality in the processes held within porcelain and economics. The marginalization of the artist is part of a hegemonic imperative seeking to repress the free expression and visionary potential of the creative spirit. Exercising the agency integral within aesthetic practice, in particular through the materiality of porcelain’s vernacular, the most basic characteristic of a free and vital condition contains the seeds of alternative futures leading out from a darkness born of an increasingly myopic view of the modern world.

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  THE MACHINE ANXIETIES OF STEAMPUNK: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY, NEO-VICTORIAN AESTHETICS, AND FUTURISM

  Kathe Hicks Albrecht

  This dissertation examines the steampunk movement as a significant contemporary expression of the human condition. Although its aesthetic inspiration comes from the Victorian past, as re-tooled, re-imagined, and re-energized for the twenty-first century, steampunk’s underlying interest is in a speculative view of the future and a concern for the contemporary individual’s struggle to retain autonomy in a de-centered, deterritorialized world. As such the steampunk movement participates in, and contributes to, an important ongoing philosophical and aesthetic dialog. The project examines the motivations for steampunk’s visual inspiration in the Victorian. Technological and scientific advancements in that period greatly impacted societal traditions and the role of the individual within it. Economic, social, and political changes revolutionized daily life and the individual faced a new self-consciousness as she confronted, and adapted to, these significant changes. Today, similar technological advancements force new tensions between the individual and the world around her. Astounding developments in computing and artificial intelligence, and the concept of the cyborg and other hybrid beings challenge the contemporary individual’s sense of self. By looking to the past, steampunk seeks to recuperate the Victorian individual’s successful navigation of technological change. She does so in order to facilitate our own navigation of current waters. vii The project traces the movement’s modest roots as a literary sub-genre of science fiction, explores its sources in the Victorian, and describes the movement’s rapid evolution to global phenomenon. Today steampunk is fully integrated into contemporary culture as an aesthetic observed in visual, decorative, and fashion arts, comic books, movies, and television. The project explores the current landscape of art and philosophy in order to position the steampunk movement within the larger scope of the contemporary scene. A triad of prevailing philosophical trends—postmodernism, transhumanism, and posthumanism, help to reveal steampunk’s involvement in the contemporary philosophical and aesthetic dialog.

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  Idenitity and eRacial: Representing the Other in a Screened World

  Kalia Brooks

  The research that I am about to embark on focuses on the shift in expressions of gendered race in a screened world. This study is primarily centered on this mode of representation as it has been transformed through the evolution of image technology in film, television, and cyberspace. These three media platforms, in particular, are greatly influential on our cultural understanding of self-image, and the image of others. I will look closely at how depictions of gendered race have been authored in each medium, and the mental impact of these images on our individual and collective consciousness. I will argue that race, although not an invention of mass media, derived its meaning in large part from the mythology of images. And mass media, film and TV most specifically, used images of race to invent narratives about collective identification. There is an inherent connection between the images we see and how we identify or are identified, and the screen has been highly successful at mediating this delicate relationship to both detrimental and productive ends. I will be examining gendered race, as a performance of the double. The double is a mental function and an appearance. The appearance of the racial double, in its earliest form in Hollywood film and television, was a corrosive image. This was the case for the predominate image of blacks, which pointed back to the black body and reified the experience of racism and oppression within American culture. This is the image of the racial double that I reference throughout as the unproductive other because it is meant to draw sharp, impassable lines vii between white and black, or more theoretically the self and other. This traditional way of image-identification comes from a colonial structure of white/European supremacy, from which the subjugated position of the racial other was founded. In this dissertation I make the claim for a productive other. This form of doubling acknowledges but is liberated from the old practices of racial individuation. The new form of the productive other accepts images as pure copies, without origin, that do not point back to a single, organic source. It is an appearance that embodies transcendence, and is constantly seeking to be in connection with others. I refer to the process of embodied transcendence as eRacial, and it is the method by which we obtain a new, tertiary experience with image-identification in cyberspace.

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  SURVIVAL AND CHANGE IN THE PAINTINGS OF WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

  Jean Wellington Nelson Bundy

  During Winston Churchill’s long career he painted hundreds of landscapes which have been viewed as picturesque, a British genre popular to painters and landscape gardeners, mimicking nature. Artists sold flatwork, architectural designs, or led countryside tours; for the gentleman, painting was merely an aristocratic pastime. I will argue that analyzing Churchill’s bright palette used to saturate spatiality on canvas, often resembling military field mapping, uncovers considerations beyond a pastime. Russian Constructivism permeated Britain’s art groups between the wars, acting as a backdrop to Churchill the painter, thus providing contextual contrast in the form of abstracted works to his representational landscapes. Applying a cultural Marxist methodology in the guise of Russian Constructivism to his art elucidates his unintentional responses to social and political change, along with his commitment to the survival of Britain, while allowing for aristocratic ideologies expected in Churchill’s aesthetics. Overlooked contextual underpinnings such as Britain’s struggles with two World Wars while maintaining the eroding Empire, are layered into Churchill’s Romantic and Modernist stylizations. Artists, primarily Cézanne with his determination to objectify Impressionistic light, appealed to Churchill who painted Britain’s place even when abroad. I will argue that the category of amateur placed on deceased artists continues to be illdefined. Insightful content found beneath Churchill’s paintings has been overlooked because vii he was deemed a gentleman painter during his life. Churchill’s aristocratic lineage, evident at Blenheim, his ancestral home, left him the social status of amateur artist no matter how much talent he exuded or how many works he sold. The importance of place as embodied in his love for country and found in his paintings is preserved at Blenheim and Chartwell. Post World War II commercialism produced Kitsch which Churchill readily embraced, thus eroding his amateur status which contributed to increasing the value of his artwork. Contextual analysis of Churchill’s landscapes through a Constructivist-cultural Marxist framework allows contemplation of his paintings not just as a gentleman’s pastime but also as troped imagery imbibed with social and political thought complimenting his writings and orations, leading to a better understanding of the man and his times.

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  Indefinite Openness: Thinking Love in Art

  Kathryn A. McFadden

  What happens when someone confronts a work of art—the inexplicable connection to something brought into the world by an artist? Might we call this moment love? If so, how does this love differ from other loves, like eros or philia? Love originating in the interconnectedness of viewer, artwork and artist resists conventional positions; art is in fact a philosophy of love in action. I argue the primary action for love in art is thinking. Thinking about art is a manifestation of love when the viewer is overcome by wonder when contemplating a work of art. This love arises from a movement—yet something beyond the semblance of logical movement—that occurs in the viewer and artist. This conveyance offers the potential of a rupture, a burst that takes place in the between, a theoretical zero space of love. As a space of pure potential, the between allows for the connection necessary for thinking love, a love that asks unanswerable questions. Love in art offers indefinite openness because it initiates endless possibilities for what a subject can feel or know. Love as I define it is not necessarily dependent on empathy, struggle, hierarchy or equivalence; it is not dogma, ideal or truth; it is neither rational nor irrational. It is not to be desperately sought and located; it is a matter of presence and duration. Love in art waivers between understanding and ignorance; it is embodied, immeasurable, generous, fleeting and vii erratic. It is a manner of thriving in the expansion of self. With this paper I stake a claim for the importance of love in contemporary aesthetic practice.

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  Anti-Establishing: Contemporary Graffiti's Contra-Community

  Homer Charles Arnold

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  The Numinous Gate: A Philosophico-Phenomenological Study of Wonder and Image Consciousness in the Fabulist Art of Varo and Borges

  Robert Kalivac Carroll

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  Animals, Ethics, and Aesthetics: Expanding Lexicons

  Joni Doherty

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  Meditative Interactivity: The Power to Create the Self Through the Virtual

  Jessica Doyle

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  Place-produced Thought: The Agency of Place and the Co-production of Knowledge in Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Others

  Gregory Blair

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  Never an Alibi: The Dialogical Museum

  Cornelia G. Bogaard

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  Interactive Art and the Action of Behavioral Aesthetics in Embodied Philosophy

  Jennifer Hall

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  In/Art: An Inquiry into Cultural Framing for the Twenty-first Century

  Evelyn Armstrong

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  Forty Years of Change: How Genetic Technology Altered Gender Roles, Care-giving, Family Structures, and the Artworld

  Heather E. Dunn

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  Venice Biennale: Staging Nations

  Emily Lauren Putnam

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  Hospitality of Aesthetics

  Amy A. Cook

  Cultural exchanges, family life, and community engagement, both local and global in nature, are all sites wherein the ethic of hospitality is active, yet, the complexities of hospitality are not commonly understood in these venues of socialization. Therefore, I have approached this work with the intention of it serving as a primer on the ethic of hospitality; the first two chapters are particularly important in that regard, as they explicate the lexicon and practices of hospitality historically. The challenge for a contemporary ethic of hospitality is to move through the fearful notions motivating hospitality historically toward more conscious and realistic affirmative relations among humans and between humans and other sentient beings. In Chapter 3, I argue that the need for the present configuration of hospitality might be eliminated upon the dismantling of patriarchy and through a contemporary orientation to the concepts of peace and love. I explore alternatives to the dichotomy of self/other that encompass mutual rights, responsibilities, and opportunities vis-à-vis ontology and space. With this in mind, in Chapter 4, I consider what gifts a philosophy of physical geography has to offer the ethic of hospitality. No doubt the geography of home informs our psyches in foundational ways. How does art similarly mediate the liminal grounds of these external and internal territories? I begin Chapter 5 with a discussion of art that utilizes hospitality as an organizing feature. I then posit the ways in which art made from natural materials is uniquely orientated toward the ethic of hospitality and advance the notion that works of art that exemplify this connection can bring us to more nuanced articulations of hospitality and further, that art generally is hospitality embodied.

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  The Anatomy of Spirit: Art, Philosophy, and Anatomical Illustration

  Christopher E. Lonegan

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  Videosthetics: The Relationship Between Video, Art, and Technology

  Josenilson Pereira Santana

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  To Begin at the Beginning: Wittgenstein and the Problem of Metaphysics

  Michael R. Smith Jr.