2020
BA + MA THESIS SYMPOSIUM Wednesday, May 13 | 10am
Virtual event
2020 BA + MA SYMPOSIUM EVENT SCHEDULE 10AM
WELCOME SESSION ONE
12:30
BREAK
1PM
SESSION TWO
3PM
BREAK
3:30PM
SESSION THREE CLOSING REMARKS
WELCOME Claire Daigle Director of MA and Dual Degree Programs
SESSION ONE | 10AM–12:30PM Whitney Humphreys
(MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020)
Gendered Machines
T Shell
(MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020)
Fragile Contains Feelings--Public Intimacies: The Stressed Body in Contemporary Performance Art
Sami Cutrona
(MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020)
Queering Representation: Abstraction and Autonomy
Blanca Bercial García-Bayllo
(MA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, 2020)
Listening to the Inframince—An Artistic Sensibility to Listen to the Liminal Crossings of Sound in San Francisco
Followed by Q&A with Nicole Archer, Assistant Professor, Art and Design Montclair State University
BREAK 12:30PM–1PM SESSION TWO | 1–3PM John James Hartford V
(MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020)
Bloom & Decay: Beyond Opulence
Sophia Cook
(MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020)
Haunted Houses: Mike Kelley, David Ireland, and Alex Da Corte at Home
Seraphina Lorenz Perkins
(BA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, 2020)
Race Mixedness and American Folk Art
Henry Chambers
(MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020)
Anonymous Activist Artist Collectives and Occupation of Space through Remnants of a Performative Assembly
Followed by Q&A with Nicole Archer
BREAK | 3–3:30PM SESSION THREE | 3:30–5:30PM Merve Sahin
(MA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, 2020)
A Case Study on Harold Cohen
Yang Bao
(MA, Exhibition and Museum Studies, 2020)
The Powerful and the Powerless: The Struggle of Social Practice Art in Mainland China
Giuliana Funkhouser
(MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, Art & Technology, 2020)
Software for Vibrating Bodies: Scores in Sympathetic Translation
Followed by Q&A with Nicole Archer
Closing Remarks + Thanks by Claire Daigle
ABSTRACTS Yang Bao MA, Exhibition and Museum Studies, 2020
The Powerful and the Powerless: The Struggle of Social Practice Art in Mainland China At the beginning of the 2010s, China witnessed the burgeoning of social practice art in both urban and rural areas, where a number of art projects focusing on social issues, especially those issues of China’s urbanization, began to emerge. With exposure in museums, institutions, biennials, and publications, the nature of social practice art became dynamic. Many young artists joined the field. In this thesis, I analyze how socioeconomic forces and political environment paved the way for the development of social practice art in China. By looking back to the changes in Chinese economic reform beginning in 1978 and focusing on the collapse of the Danwei system, I address how these changes laid the groundwork for the rise of social practice art in China. Additionally, by examining different social practice projects in China—including Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society (2014– present), Qiuzhuang Project (2012–present), and New Worker Art Troupe (2002–present)—I analyze how artists integrated participation into everyday life and made small but concrete changes in their communities. Despite the initial rise of social practice projects, a decline began in 2017 and worsened in the years that followed. I illustrate what caused the decline by focusing on the changes that occurred in Chinese society during that period. In addition to the efforts that artists have made in the past, I attempt to explore what role art can still play as a force for social change in the present day even after its decline. Committee: Betti-Sue Hertz, Bo Zheng, Frank Smigiel
Mao Tse-Tung at Lu Daode’s Home 2018 Li Mu reprinted Andy Warhol’s Mao Tse-Tung (1972) as triplet posters. He distributed over 100 sets of posters to villagers and asked them to put up the posters in their homes. This photo was taken in Lu Daode’s home. Photographed by Yang Bao © Yang Bao
Blanca Bercial García-Bayllo MA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, 2020
Listening to the Inframince—An Artistic Sensibility to Listen to the Liminal Crossings of Sound I propose listening to the possibilities of sound and place. Our everyday sounds shape our identities. As inhabitants of a city, we have agency to mediate sonic relationships with others through the spacetimes we move within. This thesis is a phenomenological examination of the sonic possibilities within San Francisco, the city I am listening to while writing it. In the San Francisco atlas Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit argues that “cities approach immortality while everything within them rises, falls, is erased and transformed and replaced.” The sounds of transformation are silent in San Francisco. San Francisco is a place that promotes hygienic soundscapes or noisescapes—spaces that do not foster listeners, but silencers. An impossible silence fulfills the individualism that permeates the city. Instead of spiraling down an impossible silence, I suggest efforts to listen to the unlistened, and in doing so, to understand and analyze this impossible silence. Following listening methodologies in the field of acoustic ecology—from Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening and contemporary artists that followed, to my recent listening score—I embody and narrate my listening experiences through this thesis, suggesting my own subjective sensibility to the sounds around me. In the last chapter, I focus on the sonic inframince and the sounds embedded in silence—sounds passing, ephemeral encounters of sound. I attempt to engage with the space and with others by listening to their sounds. Listening scores guide my listening and help heighten an awareness of place and an engagement with others around us. Committee: Cristóbal Martínez, Guillermo Galindo, Frank Smigiel
Blanca Bercial GarcĂa-Bayllo Inframince of Sound: Listening Score Reiteration No. 3 2020 Digital print, ink on mylar Dimensions variable
Henry Chambers MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020
Anonymous Activist Artist Collectives and Occupation of Space through Remnants of a Performative Assembly In this thesis I propose that anonymous activist artist collectives InDecline and Brandalism are shaped by recent movements like Occupy Wall Street in their response to ongoing income inequality. This thesis works, in part, to develop the idea put forward by Yates McKee and others that Occupy Wall Street resulted in a “post-social-practice� era in which new branches of socially engaged art can be recognized and defined. Anonymous artists operate at the methodological intersection of precarity, culture jamming, online documentation, attempted accumulation of social capital, and the illegal occupation of commodified space. This intersection creates an emerging form of contemporary activist art installation, and billboard liberation, which reclaims commodified space through occupation with remnants of a performative assembly that speaks out against income inequality and related social injustices. These collaborative installations are designed to have a short public life of site-specific occupation, during which they become digitally documented for online archives in an effort to amass large amounts of creative, political, and social capital in a production process similar to that of social media influencers. Taking up Judith Butler’s theories of performative assembly, this thesis argues that recent collaborative installation performances naturally embody the threat and power of a much larger politically charged community of activists, artists, and other members of society acting together in unity. The social capital generated through support of the artwork from popular news media attention, in combination with accumulating social
media fame, ultimately fuels the artists’ attempts to spread awareness. The accumulation of social capital also provides the artists with an avenue by which to compete with the popularity of, and occasionally cross over into, the highly commodified white walls of the gallery from the outer realms of the art world. Committee: Dale Carrico, Andrea Dooley, Frank Smigiel
*Image Credits at the end of brochure
Sophia Cook MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020
Haunted Houses: Mike Kelley, David Ireland, and Alex Da Corte at Home This thesis unravels ghost stories, products of the cacophonous hauntings of three houses by three artists: David Ireland, Mike Kelley, and Alex Da Corte. Each of these artists created a specific language and an interaction with objects and architecture that lingers. Ireland and Kelley haunt each other as first evidenced by their inclusion in Savage Garden, a 1991 group exhibition in Madrid. Kelley’s work was exhibited in a group show by Capp Street Project in San Francisco in 2003. Most significantly, Kelley’s work was shown at Ireland’s home, The 500 Capp Street Foundation, in the 2018 exhibition Pushing and Pulling, Pulling and Pushing. In turn, Da Corte— haunted by Kelley—deepens the conceptual questions Kelley posed during the last half of his career. An analysis of his 2018 work, 57 Varieties, with its shift of emotional register, brings these untimely relationships into the contemporary moment. Using Mark Fisher’s writings on hauntology, I follow the ricochet effect of these artists and their projects, paying particular attention to the capacity of objects to embody and produce empathy. Committee: Claire Daigle, David Kasprzak, Frank Smigiel
Mechanical Toy Guts in 500 Capp Street in Pushing and Pulling and Pushing 2018
Sami Cutrona MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020
Queering Representation: Abstraction and Autonomy Paul Mpagi Sepuya, a Black queer photographer, deals largely with the relationships between the camera, artist, and subject. Working in the vein of studio portraiture, Sepuya collaborates with his subjects to deconstruct and challenge the history of studio portraiture and the archetypes associated with the gay male nude. Through his use of mirrors, collage, and staging, Sepuya complicates the image plane and the subjective relationships within the image. His studio becomes a space for commentary on studio portraiture, the artist’s process, and queer identities. Sepuya is informed by a critical understanding of art history, and the ways in which Black queer bodies have been represented in photography. How are contemporary queer photographers considering their history of representation of visual culture? Within the culturally specific Western art historical framework, queer art practices after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 have largely been a means of testifying to the existence of individuals that differ from heteronormative social constructs. Our artistic Forequeers have been preoccupied with the production of evidence, by making oneself visible with the intention of gaining acceptance. This thesis explores how contemporary photographer Sepuya considers this history of legibility and subverts it through his various strategies of illegibility to ensure autonomous perception. Many contemporary artists, like Sepuya, are using abstraction as a method of revealing and concealing themselves on their own terms to dismiss ideas of assimilation and subordination to normativity. I map the ways in which Sepuya subverts the photographic traditions of his
Forequeers to create a space for autonomous representation. I compare and contrast the methodologies of Sepuya and his photographic Forequeer, Robert Mapplethorpe. I examine Mapplethorpe’s representation of the Black gay male body and how this legacy has informed contemporary Black representation in photography. I examine the two artists’ stark approaches to working in the studio space, their gaze, and their methodological approaches to fragmentation and abstracting the body. Committee: Jordan Reznick, Andrea Dooley, Frank Smigiel
*Image Credits at the end of brochure
Giuliana Funkhouser MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, Art & Technology, 2020
Software for Vibrating Bodies: Scores in Sympathetic Translation Critical, transdisciplinary investigations of Maryanne Amacher’s “Adjacencies,” Pauline Olivero’s “Sonic Mediations,” and Guillermo Galindo’s “Echo Exodus” allow for analysis of experimental notation, verbal instructions, and graphical scores as translators for sonic embodiment, meditative integration, and storytelling. While all three have utilized advanced audio production technologies in their careers as composers, their primary artistic concerns focus on expanding beyond the limits of institutionally ingrained ideas through the production of knowledge via embodied listening. These artists use techniques of sonic embodiment through metaphors of sympathetic magic and resonant vibrations to address areas where each encountered dispossession within their disciplines, themselves, and society at large. This project investigates the historical context, methods, and intentions of three American composers-turned-artists in the development of scores as generative tools for bodies of artwork from the 1960s into the 2010s. The proliferation of mass media and telecommunication systems in the 20th century required creative experimentation in their potential applications, aside from military and surveillance uses, before becoming commonplace in the home. Composers and artists made special use of audio equipment originally developed for war in their experimental sonic works and scores. The emphasis on embodied practices grants those involved in the performances of these scores a greater awareness of the world around them. In conclusion, the efforts of these three artists offer or suggest alternate realities to those whose place
in society affords them less space physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Committee: Dale Carrico, Meredith MartĂnez, Frank Smigiel
Guillermo Galindo I Dreamt of Amena Last Night 2016 Acrylic ink on refugee scarf 40 x 52 inches Image courtesy of Guillermo Galindo and Magnolia Editions
John James Hartford V MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020
Bloom & Decay: Beyond Opulence My thesis is an examination of the term Post-Opulence, as well as the contextualizing of its place among other previous attempts toward anti-art forms. Moreover, it defines opulence as the way in which we manifest, cast out, and assert objects of production into systems of promised value and preservation. This happens only through service to such systems’ own greater heroism schemes. Lastly, through the scope of iconoclasm, the document reevaluates the operations of such institutionalized objects (icons) and what they become following their literal and theoretical destruction. Post-Opulence, then, is a theory aimed at dismantling and reversing the deconstruction/reconstruction process. Though the relationship to the art object is similar to that of destructionist practice, it is also a recycling practice between a material’s root thingness and objecthood. Post-Opulence introduces unpredictability in material presence rather than finding comfort in the stable image or object. It aims, first, to reveal the sought ideal and iconic states as nothing more than subjected reflections of questionable institutional/social standards (Destruction of Art). Secondly, it actively creates afflictions and ambivalence toward a conventional aesthetic through the destruction of the art object itself (Destruction in Art). Throughout the western art canon, destruction both in and of art have served as actions of protest and direct criticism of art as an institution. By drawing a historical thread through nineteenth-century Dadaism, the destruction of recognizable form in Abstract Expressionism, and the later Auto-Destructive Art movement, I argue that these iconoclastic attempts often
failed to genuinely challenge both the social and institutional ideologies at the time. Instead, they perpetuated such institutional/social ideology and heroism projects through the processes of preservation, monetization, and iconization. This project offers examples in which Post-Opulence addresses such issues leading into the contemporary moment while encompassing the practical, philosophical, and aesthetic character of reclaimed iconoclastic practices. Committee: Frank Smigiel, Andrea Dooley, DeShawn Dumas
Burning I, still 2019 Captured still image from the first Burning Photographed by Josh Sevilla Š John J. Hartford V and Josh Sevilla Courtesy of Josh Sevilla
Whitney Humphreys MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020
Gendered Machines Gendered machines: any non-human, mechanical objects that are associated with, signifiers of, or explicitly assigned a gender. Through my project, concerned with understanding how this act of gendering manifests in both lived and fictional realities, a typical polarization is revealed in these relationships. Labeling that reflects limiting understandings of gender identity is imposed on the objects that people create, use, and identify with, where things are generally understood to be either objects of service or of domination. This is a patriarchal oversimplification that my work seeks to complicate. Guiding this project is an intent to understand the effect that tropes within pop-culture representation actively have on our shifting relationships to mechanical objects—from common utilitarian tools to instruments of monumental power. Through this research, I probe intersections between humans and machines as a means of identifying how such constructed affiliations originate and perpetuate. This project analyzes the treatment of iconic robots within significant works of science fiction film through lenses informed by gender and film theory, with attention to the ways these works exist within larger historical contexts. Here, I position particular pairings in alignment across a continuum of traditions as a framework for examining how they extend or disrupt themes of power and resistance that are built into the mythos of a robotic figure. I focus this work within three scopes—Body, Voice, and Spirit—each acting as a nexus where patterns of signification are often located across works within a century of robot films. Through these, I address how common socio-spiritual
relationships converge within figurations of the mechanical, both worshiped and feared for the power they hold. As these intersect with constructions of gender expression, a particular impact is made on the ways we are encouraged to associate with machines. The imagined ideal of perpetual progress, featured throughout the sci-fi genre, is both a figurative and very real expression of patriarchal dominance over the world, through a mastery and wielding of science. And when fantastical figurations of the future sync the creation of humanoid technology with traditions of powerful feminized tropes, audiences are destined to wrestle with her simultaneous signification as both an idol and a demon. Committee: Claire Daigle, Dale Carrico, Frank Smigiel
Whitney Humphreys Instrumentalized Bodies 2020 Collage comprised of manipulated imagery sourced from advertisements for computing equipment, as well as stills from films addressed throughout the project’s chapters, including Metropolis, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Ex Machina Courtesy of Whitney Humphreys
Seraphina Lorenz Perkins BA History and Theory of Contemporary Art, 2020
Race Mixedness and American Folk Art Exploring the complexities of mixed race, I am offering a personal investigation of racial positioning through an exploration of key objects of American Folk Art. Consisting of two often opposing cultures in the United States, my experience of whiteness and blackness are conditions rooted in a racist history of slavery. This history offers a transformative experience of folk art through a hybrid experience. Committee: Elizabeth Travelslight, Megan Bayles
Portrait with Banjo 2019 Photographed by Shinta Lauw
Merve Sahin MA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, 2020
A Case Study on Harold Cohen AARON is a computer program designed by the Abstract Expressionist painter Harold Cohen to generate original artworks at the booming time of research on artificial intelligence—namely the postwar era. This thesis creates a case study, examining the career of Cohen to formulate the road he took in relation to the history of conceptual art by working with an artificial language to create visual imagery. The introduction of science and technology into the arts as fundamentally a conceptual work was an idea that was initially coined by Edward A. Shanken with the methodological vocabulary of Jack Burnham. The ontological investigation toward the essentialist notions of formalism led Cohen to find original solutions to the basic problem of painting that is voiced by the influential art critics Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg. Cohen’s motivation to learn computer programming and create AARON gives art history and criticism an example of a post-formalist artist who was investigating conceptual notions through the lenses of art, science, and technology. Cohen is one of a few artists who set the goal for AARON to be an autonomous entity without its creator—and the way to accomplish that was through teaching the machine to emulate or mimic human behavior. However, teaching a machine drawing and coloring is a non-trivial activity compared with teaching the machine how to play chess, since the act of artmaking is a subjective and creative behavior. AARON is a cybernetic artist who can be qualified by having the observable behavior of creativity in that it can learn from mistakes, create a memory of reflection, and produce itself a new way of artmaking. Committee: Meredith Tromble, Vanessa Chang, Frank Smigiel
Harold Cohen 82P2 1981 Dye on cotton
T Shell MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2020
Fragile Contains Feelings Public Intimacies: The Stressed Body in Contemporary Performance Art Performance art has always been contingent on its ability to hold space for marginalized people to embody personal stories and experiences. Holding space is a practice of awareness, listening past one’s own defenses and deflections, and validation. The medium of performance art has a deeply embodied history as it infiltrates a ramifying variety of spaces. LGBTQAI+ and BDSM communities have long turned to performance art to testify to and transform their experience, as have many activists in feminist, civil rights, and other social justice movements. This project holds space for contemporary performance artists Doreen Garner, Cassils, and Jennifer Locke. These intersectional identities are important to consider, especially here and now, as they foreground issues of race, gender, and sexuality; they relate to generational traumas. Each of these three artists build from the foundation of performance while responding to social or personal injustices steeped in their own histories and abiding existence. This work resists while at once it is freighted by the exertions and exactions of the current sociopolitical climate, a debased time and place in which people wear shirts that say fuck your feelings and hats that read Make America Great Again. We as a country seem to be submitting for now to more self-serving systems and depictions of being. This project seeks to enact the concept of holding space, reinstating it as an alternative to conservative and unsympathetic systems. Hyper-binarical categorizations and institutional frameworks
empower the alienation and erasure of marginalized bodies under stress. Performing identities refuse compulsory binarity and resist heteronormative gate-keeping narratives that would otherize or victimize them. Each artist I address queers their relationships to power, control, and consent within their practice and on their own terms. In a world of social norms and institutional forms that treat their identities and experiences as problems to be solved, this project argues that it is necessary for these artists to imagine, demand, and create spaces in which such roles, expectations, and conventions are reversed or rejected altogether. Committee: Dale Carrico, Laura Richard, Frank Smigiel
To protect the identities held within this project no images will be released.
*Image Credits
Henry Chambers
Sami Cutrona
Activist Artist Collage
Study for a Self-Portrait (1504)
2020
2015
Digital screen capture collage
Archival pigment print 80 x 60 inches
Upper Right Corner: Neko NEKO—BRANDALISM MAESTRO 2015 Video youtu.be/zOGd5966oeY
Middle Right: InDecline Collective #BlackLivesMatter: Hollywood 2016 Video vimeo.com/160043635
Upper Left Span: InDecline Collective BILLS 2017 Video vimeo.com/187575815
Lower Right Corner: InDecline Collective, Neko, and Sugarbombing A HOUSE IN OAKLAND—InDecline 2015 Video vimeo.com/204100424
Lower Left Corner: Brandalism Collective Brandalism—Showreel 2017 Video vimeo.com/253307640
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Many thanks to the following SFAI Faculty, Administration, and Staff Members Laura Richard Chair of History and Theory of Contemporary Art
Frank Smigiel Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies
Claire Daigle Director of MA and Dual Degree Programs
Special Thanks Nicole Archer Rebecca Alexander Zeina Barakeh Bernadette Bellomo Dale Carrico Jack Darawali Ashley Clarke Andrea Dooley Hugo Estrada Jeff Gunderson Betti-Sue Hertz Heather Hickman Holland Niki Korth Tony Labat Legion of Graduate Students Claudia Marlowe Christopher Paddock Bojana Rankovic Jennifer Rissler Carly Shuman John Seden Ana Suek Kat Trataris Michelle Trattner Diana Vasquez
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