2023 Art History fourth years present their theses

By Nina Baker bakernin@grinnell.edu

Japanese bodysuit tattoos, artificial intelligence and fantasy animation have one thing in common — this Thursday, all three of these topics will be presented separately by Kaya Matsuura, David Gales and Melena Johnson, all `23, as part of their senior thesis projects in art history. Grinnell College requires all students who major in art history to complete the major with “ARH-400: Art History Seminar,” resulting in a final thesis on a topic chosen by the student. This fall, professor of art history Eiren Shea guided Matsuura, Gales and Johnson in the seminar as each student researched and wrote their thesis.

"Art history as a discipline is itself interdisciplinary," Shea said. "I don't know a single art historian who doesn't engage in other disciplines, and these three projects are so illustrative of that."

The presentations will take place at the Grinnell College Museum of Art (GCMOA) from 4-5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 9.

Japanese body tattoos, or Irezumi, cover nearly the entire body, except the neck and hands. The process of receiving these tattoos can last from three years to a lifetime. While tattoos are not illegal in Japan, the government does not issue licenses for tattoo artists, keeping the industry underground.

"Tattoo artists have to be quiet and hidden from society," Matsuura said. "You can't look it up. It has to be word of mouth."

In her thesis, which analyzes both contemporary and Edo Japan, Matsuura examines the public and private artistic relationships of Japanese bodysuit tattoos, arguing that this artwork presents a collaborative yet autonomous relationship between the tattooed body and the public.

"These tattoos are not meant for the public to see or anybody else to see," she said. "It's very much personal, and even more private in the sense that the people themselves can't actually see some of their tattoos because a lot of the pieces are on their backside."

Matsuura said that, for example, tattoo artists typically sign their signature on the bodies of those who receive tattoos. “In a way, it's like the customer's body is being taken away. They're like an art object. And it's literally signed by somebody else. So, in that way, do they have agency?”

After presenting at the museum, Matsuura will present her thesis at the 30th Anniversary ASIANetwork Conference in Columbus, Ohio, on the weekend of April 14.

"The ability to create spontaneous images anywhere, anytime has irrevocably changed the face of the contemporary art world, whether we like it or not. There is no going back," Gales wrote in their thesis’s first chapter, "Robots Ate My Homework.”

Gales said that there is prominent discourse, especially online, centered on whether humans should be using AI-generated art and whether AI-generated art can even be defined as art in the first place. But for Gales, these questions have become increasingly meaningless as AI-generated art continues to be posted online thousands of times a day, with consumers treating these images as artwork.

"I got really angry about it on Twitter," Gales said. "Which, if you use Twitter, happens a lot to you."

Their thesis attempts to look beyond these questions and provide a concrete framework for understanding AI-generated art as its own artistic medium. The tools art historians have for analyzing artwork are inadequate for talking about art made with AI, Gales said.

“I wanted there to be a discussion out there somewhere less so [about] whether we do something with this and more ‘how do we talk about it? How do we look at it?’” Gales said. "The ways we talk about art are directly stemming from how we talk about human art. The big takeaway now is you need to think very differently about what you're looking at."

From its inception to its end, the unfinished animated fantasy film "The Thief and the Cobbler" took 29 years to create before its release in 1993. The lead animator, Richard Williams, worked on the project on and off until 1992, when the Completion Bond Company seized the project, ousted Williams from production and installed Animation Director and Producer Frank Calver to complete the remaining scenes. The film was released later as a box-office flop.

According to Johnson's thesis, Calver’s changes to "The Thief and the Cobbler'' were so widely disliked that Williams' son told his father that watching the released versions would make Williams want to kill himself.

"What is artistic failure?" Johnson asked. "The broader question I attempt to explore in the thesis is failure, why we're so drawn to it and why we jump to the narrative of failure in art."

Johnson said she has always been interested in animation, so when the time came to choose a topic for her thesis, she knew she wanted to focus on the medium. While her original idea was to broadly investigate the labor and ethics of animation, specifically hand-drawn animation like in "The Thief and the Cobbler," Johnson said she reduced the scope of the project to focus exclusively on Williams' film.

"There is the thesis of my own thoughts and opinions, especially when it comes to the analysis of artistic failure," she said. "But a large portion of the paper is documenting the past of Richard Williams, his impact and his legacy."