Nowhere existing in paradox pages

NOWHERE:

Existing in Paradox Aaron Kather

NOWHERE:

Existing in Paradox A thesis submitted to the Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of the Arts Philadelphia, PA in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS in STUDIO ART School of Art College of Art, Media and Design

December 2014

Aaron Kather

BA Anthropology State University of New York Geneseo, NY 2011

Introduction

On the roof, installing the NOWHERE letters. August, 2012 Philadelphia, PA Below: Letters ready to be hung from the 9th story roof Anderson to 5th story roof of the Gershman Y.

C

utting into the clear blue sky of a warm summer day was a gently smiling arc of white foam board rectangles bearing in black ink the bold capital letters “N-O-W-H-E-R-E.� The letters floated some sixty feet above Pine Street near its intersection with Broad at the heart of downtown Philadelphia. It was August 2, 2012, the last week of my first summer in the low residency MFA in Studio Art program at the University of the Arts, and with the help of some friends, I had spent the morning suspending the letters between two rooftops with extra strength fishing line.

The message of the letters was intentionally ambiguous, spelling out either the single word “nowhere,” or the two words “now here.” Both readings had an edge of absurdity and contradiction, with “nowhere” marking the negative space between the buildings as somewhere, and “now here” making a self-evident declaration of its own existence in that particular time and place. When the letters were taken down later that afternoon due to the illicit nature of hanging things above city streets, my satisfaction was only heightened since the two possible readings of the letters both related to their removal in ironic fashion: the immaterial concepts of “now,” “here,” and “nowhere” were briefly given physical form, and then they were gone.

View from Broad St. of NOWHERE letters suspended over Pine. 2012

Although completely unintentional, several aspects of the NOWHERE project resonate strongly with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s intriguing concept of heterotopia. In his essay

“Of Other Spaces,” Foucault explains that while utopias, by virtue of Sir Thomas More’s etymological play on words, are places that are simultaneously ideal and impossible, heterotopias are real places that are also “nowhere”; like mirrors, which are an example of heterotopias, they are places “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (Foucault). Foucault also stipulates that “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time,” and either accumulate time and are “oriented toward the eternal” or feature “flowing, transitory, precarious” time and are oriented toward the “absolutely temporal.” The NOWHERE project seems to have fit almost perfectly within the idea of heterotopia as a transient event occupying a real physical place above the street that was also no place, and was even identified as such.

Whether it was a true heterotopia or not, the project felt like my first success in art school. Unlike the more traditional ideas of drawing and painting that I had been accustomed to before that summer, Sign posted after the this project was a reaction to the challenge NOWHERE letters disappeared within of my preconceptions about art that the hours of being hung.

MFA program had introduced through 2012 ideas of conceptualism, relational aesthetics, and social practice. As a result of these influences, the NOWHERE project was constructed from cheap materials, occupied a public space, made use of language, prioritized idea before skill, involved collaboration, and was more like an event than an exhibition. While my future work retained few of these components, there was something important to me about the NOWHERE project that has lingered in the years since the letters were taken down.

Understanding what that something was must be contextualized within the broader evolution of my approach to life and my way of thinking about the nature of reality. This evolution began when I first arrived at my

undergraduate college in 2007, as a chemistry major. In chemistry, all of existence is reduced to energy and building blocks of matter described by universal and absolute truths, like the laws of thermodynamics and the periodic table of elements. When I realized that humanity and creativity are all but lost in this reduction, I shifted my studies to anthropology, philosophy, literature, and art. In contrast to chemistry, these disciplines benefit from the flexibility of multiple perspectives, and focus more on prompting questions than providing answers. These questions and perspectives allowed my imagination to enter new realms of imagery, history, fiction, folklore, and philosophical inquiry.

To make an analogy to art, it was as if I entered school as a modernist seeking definitive rules and answers, and left as a postmodernist asking questions and discovering multiple answers.

Keel of Theseus’ Ship August, 2013 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I began to better understand and explore this intellectual territory in my second summer of the program, when I became obsessed with trying to articulate through artwork the philosophical problem known as the Ship of Theseus Paradox. As first recorded by Plutarch nearly two millennia ago, the paradox describes the preservation of the legendary ship by the Athenians through their replacement of its decaying planks with new lumber (Plutarch). Eventually, all of the original parts of the ship were replaced, leading to the question, ‘Is the ship the same or not the same?’

My response was a twenty-seven foot long wood sculpture representing the keel of the ship. Showing just the keel of Theseus’s ship was a suggestion that perhaps the ship and all things metaphorically connected with the ship, alive or dead,

have a core essence that cannot be replaced. This solution also reflected my own internal struggle between a desire for the concrete answers and truths found in science, and my fascination with the possibility of relative truth.

Upon reflection, the common link between the NOWHERE project, the keel, and my undergraduate experience was the theme of paradox. A perspective based on subjective interpretation and relative truth has carried over from my undergraduate studies to graduate school, where I have used artistic expression in the NOWHERE project to layer paradoxes of language and place, and in the Keel of Theseus’s ship sculpture to symbolically illustrate my response to the paradox of change. I now believe that deep desires to use my hands and to work with images are key reasons why I came to study art in this graduate program, but in these projects, I discovered a way of entering and representing the endlessly fascinating intellectual territory found in the ambiguity of paradoxes.

For my thesis show, entitled NOWHERE: Existing in Paradox, I have made a series of six acrylic and oil paintings on canvas that combine collage-based imagery with paradoxthemed text drawn from my literary and filmic interests in philosophy, fiction, and poetry. Although the connection between these paintings, and the original foam board letters and event of NOWHERE may not be immediately obvious, the creative thought processes of the two projects exist on the same plane. Like the NOWHERE letters, these paintings are akin to heterotopic spaces, “juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces” and containing “an unreal … space that opens up behind the surface” (Foucault). Though not transient like the original NOWHERE event, these paintings are slices of accumulated time spent painting that tend “towards the eternal” through the use of the archival materials of canvas and oil paint. The paintings are paradoxical places and non-places, metaphorical windows into other worlds that provide moments of illusion and escape, but that also affirm their own reality through the materiality of paint, evidence of my hand, and allusions to collage and modernist abstraction. This paper will explore the relationships between these paintings and various paradoxes connected to my views of art, life, and reality.

Ozymandias November, 2014

The Illusion and Reality of Art

I

remember coming to Philadelphia from upstate New York in June of 2012 for the first summer of my MFA program, sitting in the passenger seat as traffic on I-76 slowed, and peering through the windshield at the skyline emerging in the distance. As our car came closer to the city, a massive stone building with a Greek style facade and colonnade came into view. This building, which overlooks the interstate and the Schuylkill River from its prominent location on the top of Fairmount hill, was the main building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

As an institution, the PMA possesses a voice of authority that matches the imposing physical nature of its building. When I visited the museum for the first time that summer, I approached it not only as a place where I could experience the beauty and presence of famous paintings and objects from the history of art, but also as a resource where I could learn more about that history to fill in the gaps in my limited undergraduate art education. My visits to the museum were also an opportunity for me to refine my personal working definition of art, and to gain a better understanding of the ways that art can function.

After two and a half years of graduate school and many visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one generalization I feel confident making is that all art, by definition, is artificial, which is to say that all art is man-made.

But the word artificial, which shares a Latin root with the word art, also has the meaning of fake, and I believe that falseness, illusion, or some degree of hidden truth is also a feature found in most, if not all creative endeavors. Consider as an example from the museum Peter Paul Rubens’ 1618 painting Prometheus Bound. The painting is an incredible, seemingly flawless masterpiece that vividly depicts Prometheus chained to a

rock while his liver is ripped out by an eagle as punishment for stealing fire from the gods. But I contend the apparent perfection of this painting is an illusion: by painting over his original drawing and underpainting, hiding his brushstrokes, fixing any mistakes he may have made as he went along, hiring the animal painting expert Frans Snyders to paint the Prometheus Bound Peter Paul Rubens eagle, and presenting 1611-1612 only the impeccable PMA final result, Rubens concealed the truth of his process. In a similar vein of logic, the thousands of hours of practice that Rubens must have spent to be able to paint with that level of skill (the eagle notwithstanding) are also missing. This painting also has a illusion of agelessness, despite being four hundred years old, due in equal parts to the care of the museum and the use of archival materials by Rubens that have prolonged the inevitable deterioration over time. The concealment of mistakes, process, and the effects of time are so pervasive, and frankly, necessary, in creative activities that they are often taken for granted, and are not instantly recognized as forms of artistic illusion.

In my painting Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem of the same name is written in white letters on a gray field, and obscured in places by white, black and blue shapes taken from an abstract collage. The poem was fully readable before being painted over. Like Rubens, I used archival materials to make this painting, and it should appear to exist

outside of time for many years. While some of my mistakes, including typographical errors, have been covered and obscured, there are errant marks, drips, and other unintended moments left bare. The painting also has clear evidence of my hand, in the brush marks and especially in the handwriting of the written letters, which completely lack the mechanical precision of printed words. The decision to paint in this way is connected to my feeling that there is an element of honesty to be found in revealing the truth of process, which is an idea that I have encountered in the work of many other artists. The action paintings of Jackson Pollock, for example, employ a direct painting style that shows clear evidence of his process. Pollock and photographer Hans Namuth took this reveal to the next level, however, in a short film from 1951 titled simply Jackson Pollock 51, in which Namuth had Pollock paint on a large pane of glass positioned over a camera: in the film, Pollock simply wipes off the paint after finishing a painting, in effect making the film a piece of performance art about how he makes his paintings. Another very different but also compelling example of revealing the artistic process was conceptual artist Robert Morris’s 1961 piece Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. This title itself is honest and revealing, as it lets viewers of the piece know that the sound coming out of the wooden box in front of them is an audio recording of the process of that box being built. While the paintings for my show lean more towards the illusion of Rubens than the openness of Pollock and Morris, both ways of thinking influenced my thought process.

The visual spectacle of the letters N-O-W-H-E-R-E

apparently floating in midair was illusion in art as it usually operates, on a much more easily discernable and direct level. One of the most fundamental ways that illusion exists in art, which is even more obvious and direct, is through representation. In fact, representation is present in the prehistoric cave paintings of Altamira in Spain, Lascaux in France, and the Maros region in Indonesia, which feature some of the oldest existing images known to man. A wellknown representational image from Lascaux is a depiction of a what may be a dead or wounded man lying near a large, partially disemboweled bull, and what has been suggested

to be a bird topped staff. While interpretations of the scene vary, and we can never be certain what this drawing was intended to mean originally, the fact that we can immediately recognize the bull, the man and the bird is a testament to the success of the artist in representing them with charcoal lines and marks. However, success is relative, and if drawn today, the depiction of the man in particular would likely be criticized as a crude and childish stick figure that fails to convey volume, proper anatomy, or individuality. The artist might get a better response by adopting a style of naturalism

or realism, general terms (which become specific to particular periods in painting history when spelled with capital initials) that imply a desire to disguise the fake and man-made artificiality of representational imagery with a more natural and or realistic appearance.

I frequently encounter people who see the ability to imitate reality, whether it be in painting, sculpture, video games, or other visual media, as a standard of quality by which to judge art. By these standards, my paintings would probably be criticized along with the work of my prehistoric cavemen brethren. Judgment of art is related to cultural beliefs and norms, as well as individual taste, which makes

it both culturally and subjectively relative. The widely known expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” when used in reference to art is another way of saying that art, by its very nature, is subjectively relative. When we look at art or anything else in the world, we see it in terms of what we know, how we think and what we believe. In other words, we see it in terms of ourselves, or as Marx put it: “People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves” (Marx). In a recent Radiolab program discussing the topic of interpretation, the influential cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter pointed out that truly knowing someone is not only a very complex thing, but “millions of different things that are united by analogy into something that we refer to as one thing” (Abumrad). The show’s host Jad Abumrad concludes that “any person is kind of a universe.

They’re too big to comprehend in their entirety, and any translation of [their poems or other creative work] is only going to get you a tiny piece of that person, a tiny refraction” (Abumrad).

These eloquent statements closely resemble my way of thinking about art and life. As I have partially described already, the choices made in my paintings are related to a diverse range of interests, but express only hints of myself and my thoughts. My decision to make collages from which I derived the imagery of my paintings is related to my interest in Max Ernst, a surrealist who helped popularize and legitimize collage as an artform and who would also make paintings from his collages. The non-representational nature of my collages also relates to artists like Robert Motherwell, Kurt Schwitters, and more broadly to abstraction in painting. The texts that I used for my paintings are from sources that have had long lasting impacts on me, and, in addition to Shelley’s Ozymandias, include Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, David Lynch’s television show Twin Peaks, the 1939 film the Wizard of Oz, the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Each one of these influences, from Ernst to Heraclitus, exists in their own universe, and their works have been interpreted and borrowed by millions of people besides me. The permutations of the ways that

the ideas, experiences and creative works of individuals can connect and be reinterpreted by others generates a creative and interpretive web of expression and meaning that approaches infinity. Author Thomas McEvilley addresses a similar idea in his essay “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in which he lists thirteen different ways content can be read in art. These various approaches include the topics of representation, medium, formalism, and art history, which

are just four of the thirteen examples that demonstrate the immense room for discussion that each topic provides. After finishing this list, McEvilley describes it as “a series of sample sightings of some great beast (Meaning) whose behavior is too complex to be fully formulated” and goes on to conclude that “As long as we choose to look for different ways to sort these things out we would find them” (McEvilley).

While the number of different criteria upon which art can be judged may be limitless, the recognizability of the thirteen basic points in McEvilley’s essay reveal that many of our beliefs and understandings are shared positions that we have learned through culture. An example of how profoundly important cultural relativity is to the way we interpret art can be found in an brief consideration of traditional Navajo sandpainting. A Western viewer seeing one of these

sandpaintings might connect them to abstract works of art engaged with color, design, and pattern. Believing that capital gain motivates all people equally, this Westerner might even try to buy the sandpainting, despite the impracticality of doing so. A somewhat more perceptive viewer might connect Navajo sandpaintings to process oriented art, like the action painting seen in Jackson Pollock 51, which in Western art is often motivated by a disdain for commercialism. Both of these interpretations are framed by Western culture, in which capitalism is often seen as being of paramount importance.

If understanding capitalism is key to understanding Western culture, the term with equivalent importance in Navajo culture would be hózh, a difficult to translate word meaning order, blessedness, happiness, healthiness, goodness, and aesthetic harmony (Witherspoon 15-17). The Navajo worldview also contrasts with our own on the even more fundamental level of understanding and relating to the world through partwhole and whole-part relationships. While Western thinkers tend to focus on the relationship of the part to the whole, as evidenced by the development of the periodic table of elements or the focus on artists as individuals, the Navajo focus on the whole’s relationship to all of its parts. For these reasons, the Navajo do not see abstract art forms in their sandpaintings, but “sacred forms and visual representations of sacred texts to be used for healing purposes.” For them, the process of making sandpaintings has no relation to capitalism or individual expression, and is an insociable element of a complex ritual focused on restoring hózhǭ throughout the universe. Navajo do not view the English word “art” as even being relevant to their sandpainting because it “is not a separate or a distinct domain” from the entirety of their cultural worldview (Witherspoon 3). Thus, the cultural context within in which we exist affects the way we understand and judge art, just as much as our own subjectivity.

Illusionistic realism is only one style of representational painting, and painting itself is only one way of making art, which is a term that does not even encompass all of the ways that human cultures think about their creative activities. In spite of these facts, it is not unusual to find

people judging a painting based on how convincingly it renders a believable “reality” within the context of my cultural circumstances. I grew up viewing representational works of this nature completed with astounding skill in my hometown’s Arnot Art Museum, which is known for its biennial exhibition in contemporary realism titled Re-Presenting Representation (Arnot). This desire for representation of “reality” has deep roots that reach back at least to the time of Plato, who wrote in The Republic that art is mimesis, or imitation of reality.

Since Plato believed that the world we experience is secondary, imperfect imitations of ideal forms that exist outside of time and space, his idea of art as mimesis was more precisely as an imitation of an imitation. He therefore concluded that “works of art are at best entertainment, and at worst a dangerous delusion.” However, in writing about Plato’s position on art, philosopher David Clowney points out that “artists show us the essence of things, and reveal truths that we wouldn’t otherwise see” (Clowney). This hints at the major paradox of art: art can act as a lie or an illusion, but it can also act as a way of revealing truth and destroying illusion. Pablo Picasso recognized this irony, saying, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies” (Picasso). I believe that this is one of the most important observations that can be made about art, and in my thesis paintings I hope that there is the possibility this type of paradoxical revelation.

While many disagree with Plato’s view of art, the idea of art as mimesis has persisted. Representational artists have developed and accumulated strategies to approach more accurate and convincing levels of mimesis to the point that mimetic representation has been positioned with the privilege of being seen as a major narrative of European art history. This advancement can be traced in statuary from the Greeks’ portrayal of contrapposto or counter balanced weight distribution in the hips, to the Roman tendency to eschew idealized forms in favor of observed flaws, to the lifelike masterpieces carved during the revival of Greco-

Roman representational techniques during the Italian Renaissance. Although few Greek and Romans paintings have survived from times of antiquity, similar hallmarks can also be traced through the history of Western two-dimensional imagery.

The many techniques and theories for achieving the illusion of depth on a flat surface include shading, overlap, the use of scale, sharpness and blur, vanishing point perspectives, atmospheric perspective, foreshortening, chiaroscuro, and theories of color temperature.

The preference for the artist’s ability to make realistic work is far from the complete story of Western art, as illusionistic realism has not been the only approach to representation in all that time. It has ebbed and flowed with the tides of time, and some cultures, like the ancient Egyptians who came before the Greeks, and the medieval Europeans who came after the Romans, opted for more stylized traditions. At its peak, I believe that 19th century American tromp l’oeil (French for “deceive the eye”) painting may have actually achieved the goal of perfect optical illusion, right before it began to fall out of fashion once again. The combination of incredibly accurate, precise and intricate details combined with flat subject matter produced works such as Jefferson Davis Chalfant’s 1890 work Which is Which? In this work, Chalfant placed a real stamp next to a realistically rendered stamp to prove that they were indistinguishable. The paradoxical irony of the endeavor of illusionistic realism is that it strives to be “true to life,” but in approaching that truth, it becomes a more convincing lie.

In all honesty, paintings focus on illusion through laborious and precise infinitesimal detail sometimes frightens and disturbs me. As much as I see the illusion in such works, I also see an obsessive-compulsive personality performing a literally and figuratively shallow task with joyless, slavish devotion. I myself was once enamored with the illusion of realistic drawing, but I now view the ability to find joy, meaning and satisfaction in other types of art as minor

personal victories. The process of collage is fun and free for me, so when I first decided to make paintings based on my collages, it seemed like an equally exciting prospect. However, my paintings of my collages started to become too much about copying the collaged with a high degree of fidelity, and it became unsustainably wearisome. My thesis show paintings use my collages as a source for values and composition, as well as some colors, but I also allowed myself to develop and change these aspects once I had started. The paintings became their own entities, and started to breathe on their own. This freed me from being a slave to copying, and let me instead employ creative decision-making and intuition. Changes from the original collages to the final paintings can be seen in all of the works, but most especially in the improvisation of the painting titled Heraclitus. In this painting, a variety of colors have been added to originally almost monochrome composition of the source collage, and many of the shapes have been interrupted, inverted, and combined.

The invention of photography in the 19th century made the practice of painting as a means of imitating reality obsolete. Photographs could capture reality more convincingly than painting from a purely optical standpoint, and required considerably less investment in time and skill. But rather than dying out, painting simply changed. Unlike the ebb and flow of representational painting in the past, this was a trend toward the complete abandonment of representation.

Elements of illusion and falseness persisted in nonrepresentational or abstract imagery however: painters like Hans Hoffman showed that spatial illusions could be created through the properties of color alone. These early years of modernism broke painting down to the fundamentals of color, line, shape, mark, texture, and composition, which are often referred to as formal elements. As mentioned previously, an appreciation for abstraction has played a key role in my art making, and the source collages for my thesis works follow a tradition of abstract collage developed by Schwitters, Motherwell, and Anne Ryan, to name just a few. The flatness that my paintings tend to have is related to the tendency of collages to look flat, but is also related to the emphasis on flatness found in abstract painting. When abstract art was

championed by art critic Clement Greenberg around the middle of the twentieth century, he strongly encouraged the use of media specificity, which in painting basically meant that painted images should mimic their two-dimensional surfaces (Greenberg). I believe Greenberg’s elevation of the status of flat, abstract painting was necessary for abstract art to be taken seriously, but that in overstating his case, Greenberg unjustly demoted other approaches to art. My paintings are abstractions of collages that are abstractions often of photograph images, so I see my work as existing in a paradox between representational and abstract imagery.

Rosalind Krauss brings up another intriguing way of thinking about the falseness or illusion of art that is completely removed from the ideas I have presented so far. While discussing the faux museum art installations of Marcel Broodthaers in her article “A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition,” Krauss suggests that Broodthaers’ “master medium” is “fiction itself ” (Krauss 46). I believe that this is an intriguing and ultimately important idea that can be applied more broadly to painting and art in general. Like fiction, my paintings provide escape, not necessarily or exclusively into narrative fiction, but into the imagination and the mind. It is this ability to enter into paintings that make them like heterotopias. Art can act as escape not only for viewers, who can get lost in the colors, shapes, spatial illusion or story of an image, but also for artists. When I am making art, I can get lost in the process of collaging, mixing paints, or thinking about paradox. As human beings, we are constantly seeking escape from the anxieties, mundanity, and limited perspective of our lives, trying to find an alternative world to the real one in front of us. I would go as far as to suggest that every human activity that falls outside of our biological imperatives to survive and reproduce can perhaps be thought of as a form of escapism. Though all human activities are by no means equal, I hope my paintings may provide escape into thought, visual interest or even beauty, or perhaps some positive subjective response that I can not even imagine.

Conclusion

L

ee Walton, a visiting lecturer for the 2014 UArts MFA in Studio Art summer lecture series, made the comment that he self-evaluates his art practice by asking himself if it is something he would do if he wasn’t trying to be an artist, or trying to make art. I took this to mean that he wants to live his life in a way so that he is true to himself, rather than in a way that it is dictated by the expectations of others. Contemporary artists are often perceived negatively by the public as aloof, pretentious, or even dishonest, and their estimations are not always wrong. I want to make art that is true to who I am, and that contains elements of sincerity and truth.

NOWHERE: Existing in Paradox is the biggest art show for me so far in my life. It also marks the end of a two and half year journey through graduate school. At times such as these, I feel as though time stands still, and that I exist only in the singular moment of now and the singular place of here. But I know that time will begin to flow again soon, and my life will continue to move forward and change. I hope that this show is more of a beginning than an end for me, and that I will be able capitalize on the potential of all that I have learned in the future.

Everyone wants. Oil on canvas. 3’x4’ 2014

Work Cited Abumrad, Jad, and Douglas Hofstadter. “Radiolab/Translation.”

Radiolab. National Public Radio. 20 Oct. 2014. Radio.

Arnot Art Museum. “About.” Facebook. 12 Nov. 2014. Web. Clowney, David. “Plato.” Aesthetics. Rowan University Department

of Philosophy & Religion, 2 October, 2014. Web. Foucault, Michel. “Debate Noam Chomsky Michel Foucault – On

human nature.” Original debate 1971. Online video

clip. YouTube, March 13, 2013. Web. - - - . “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” by Michel Fou

cault. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Edited by Neil Leach. NYC: Routledge. 1997. Electronic.

Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Encyclopedia Britannica

Online. Encyclopedia Britannica. 12 Nov. 2014. Web. Krauss, Rosalind E., and Marcel Broodthaers. A Voyage on the

North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition.

New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Print.

Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and C. J. Arthur. The German

Ideology. Vol. 1. New York: International, 1972. N.

pag. Print.

McEvilley, Thomas. Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium.

Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1991. Print.

Picasso, Pablo, and Alfred Hamilton. Barr. Picasso: Fifty Years of His

Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955. Print.

Plutarch. “Theseus.” Parallel Lives. The Internet Classics Archive.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Web. Witherspoon, Gary, and Glen Peterson. Dynamic Symmetry and

Holistic Asymmetry in Navajo and Western Art and

Cosmology. New York: P. Lang, 1995. Print.

Note on photographs: All photographs by the author and friends.

Lascaux sketch drawn from public domain photo Rubens’ Prometheus Bound (public domain image) Doryphoros des Polyklet (public domain image)

Thesis Installation

Untitled Collage Paper and glue. 9″x12″. 2014

Untitled Collage Paper and glue. 9″x12″. 2014

Untitled Collage Paper and glue. 9″x12″. 2014

Untitled painting (with collage). Oil on canvas. 3’x4’ 2014

Untitled painting Oil on canvas. 3’x4’ 2014

Collage 2014

Sculpture and video 2012 - 2013

NOWHERE: Existing in Paradox A thesis submitted to the Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS, STUDIO ART In the School of Art of the College of Art, Media and Design December 2014 Aaron Kather BA Anthropology, State University of New York, Geneseo, NY 2011

THESIS COMMITTEE

Cynthia Nourse Thompson, Director Dan Reidy, Lead Faculty Mentor Shelley Spector, Thesis Writing Mentor Rebecca Sack, Faculty Defense Member Tom Vance, Faculty Defense Member Jeremy Foldsey, MFA Thesis Peer