Black conceptualism and the atmospheric turn, 1968-2008
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation analyzes the work of six African American conceptual artists from the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century who explored the problem of race and representation in the wake of what I term "the atmospheric turn." Although African American art is often connected to visual representations of racialized experience and Conceptual art is regularly positioned as disinterested in political content, an analysis of artistic practices since the late 1960s reveals that artists, both black and white, regularly investigated race as a site of conceptual significance. Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, transformations in race discourse shifted the idea of race from an embodied essence to a social force, in a kind of "dematerialization." I focus on Black conceptual artists who, despite prevailing expectations that their work reflect the black experience, responded through the critique of representation itself, troubling the role of the visual field as the guarantor of racial expression. Their purposeful denaturing of blackness as a visual signifier of race yielded two possibilities: the mobilization of blackness as a conceptual strategy and the embrace of the extravisual dimensions of racial meaning, such as sound, voice, performance, and proprioception. Over the course of four chapters, I examine the artistic practices and theories of African American artists from the Civil Rights generation—David Hammons, Charles Gaines, and performance artist Lorraine O'Grady—and post-Civil Rights generation—photographer Lorna Simpson and sound artists Nadine Robinson and Jennie C. Jones—as they engaged the legacies of Conceptual art to interrogate and challenge the insistent materialization of race. By situating their practices in relation to historical debates on Conceptual art and African American art, and combining formal analysis of artworks with theories of racialization, this project offers an inquiry into the complex intersections of American art, Conceptual art, and African American art that posit the racial self, and blackness, as a productive site of artistic meaning.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Tani, Ellen Yoshi |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art History. |
| Primary advisor | Lee, Pamela M |
| Thesis advisor | Lee, Pamela M |
| Thesis advisor | Elam, Michele |
| Thesis advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
| Advisor | Elam, Michele |
| Advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Ellen Yoshi Tani. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Ellen Yoshi Tani
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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