| 1. |
- Persson, Beatrice, 1963
(författare)
-
In-Between: Contemporary Art in Australia. Cross-culture, Contemporaneity, Globalization
- 2011
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study emerges from the question: what is contemporary art, and mainly what criteria constitute contemporary art in a globalized art world in general? Thus, the focus of this dissertation is on the postcolonial context of Australia and the fact that the contemporary art scene in Australia is divided into Australian and Aboriginal art respectively. This is a division originating from the colonization of Australia that began in the 1770’s, resulting in an Australian art descending from a Western art practice, where there is further focus on two categories within this art. The first category is a so-called “young” Australian art created by young artists who are returning to skills of, for instance, woodcarving and bronze casting, emphasizing the techniques of creation, and the finish of the surfaces in a do-it-yourself-aesthetic. The second category is called Asian-Australian art, featuring diaspora artists, a category pointing to the fact that Australia is situated in the Asia-Pacific region and has a large Asian population. Aboriginal art, on the other hand, is regarded to be an unbroken tradition dating back some 40,000 years, featuring art created by indigenous artists living on ancestral land in remote communities, often being called traditional Aboriginal art, and city-based Aboriginal art produced by indigenous artists who have grown up and are living in Australian cities and have been educated in Western art schools. These four categories are represented by four artists whose artworks are analysed and interpreted from a cultural semiotic point of view in order to be used in practical examinations of the viability of the two theoretical concepts cross-culture and contemporaneity, as well as an investigation of whether the contemporary global art scene is truly global or still tends to emanate from a Western perspective. In this context the concept of cross-culture is examined through the history of how primitive art and primitive artists, and non-Western art and artists in general, have been apprehended, indicating that the crossing of cultures, making transformations and influences possible in the arts, have taken place from a Western perspective, thus demonstrating power relations deriving from colonization. Contemporaneity should be understood as an inquiry into how various artistic expressions with different time conceptions appear when produced simultaneously in different, closely connected, yet mutually incomparable cultures. This is art that communicates across the divide between cultures and as such grasps the driving spirit of the contemporary.
|
|
| 2. |
- Orrù, Anna Maria, 1976
(författare)
-
Wild Poethics - Exploring relational and embodied practices in urban-making
- 2017
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Nature is not something separated from the city. With this in mind, this research emerges from the act of urban gardening, staging space for naturecultures that reinforce a direct relation to an urban nature. Alternate agencies can motivate ecological mindsets in urban approaches, bypass the hegemonic and paralysing attitude of the Anthropocene and render a more profound relation with the spatial environment. This catalyses a potential in embodied methodologies to generate vibrant materialist relations in urban-making. The research is positioned with a two-fold challenge; urban-making and naturecultures. The aim is to reorientate methodologies in urban-making to approach relational space matters, and promote ecological poethics relevant for practice, research and education. Three thresholds of engagement structure the exploration: the embodied, the relational and the situated. Alongside explorative practices are built up cartographies of theoretical neighbourhoods that provide alternate knowledge generation on individual, shared and collective levels. Experimental embodied interventions are grounded in artistic research through choreographical approaches using Butoh, Body Weather and swarm-behaviour practices. These approaches are set in a voyage-metaphor to a fictional Island of Encounters reaching four destinations. Each encounter unravels a particular perspective into relational and embodied practice: Alba (body/curiosity), Agora (fiction/performance), Clinamen (atmosphere/imagination), and Plūris (metaphor/swarming). A methodological choreography which corresponds with the theoretical cartographies, reveals and opens up for an urban-making founded in situated knowledges to generate a corporeal poethics – poetic, politic, and ethical. As the activated practice unfolds, interventions are supported by their theoretical neighbourhoods nested in feminist spatial practice, vibrant relationscapes, worlding, affective atmospheres, imagination, spatial-temporal in-betweeness and assemblage-thinking. Accompanying each destination are five film essay(s), each pertaining to the particular artistic interventions in the research.Using corporeal imagination and re-enactment modes of enquiry such as thinking with paper modelled texts, creating fictocriticisms with clouds, using dynamic biomimesis, and mimicking swarms, generates an enlivened relation with naturecultures that gestures the body into becoming a reflective and profound membrane with space. By encountering and immersing the body in a space/time construct, a critical materiality practice emerges that can infuse urban-making, render the body a more refined medium and reactivate architectural thinking and making.
|
|
| 3. |
- Arnman, Anna
(författare)
-
Hellraiser : om Clive Barkers film
- 2005
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this dissertation I will discuss horror film as a genre and study how Hellraiser relates to its themes and problems. First I describe the production of the film and after that I present Clive Barker - his background, authorship, film-making and artwork. Next I study the problems of the genre and the different ways in which this genre is defined. I look at narrative characteristics as well as, for instance, how a film belonging to the genre is launched and how it is received by critics and the audience. Furthermore, I describe the response this film has had from reviewers and fans and how it is perceived in academic texts. The principal part of the dissertation follows: a comprehensive close reading of the film in which I delve into the film 21 times to describe and interpret scenes. I conduct readings based on the film's substance and form and juxtapose minor details with major developments. The themes I focus on in particular concern the film's relation to the body, gender, sexuality, family, the house, and religion. I introduce a discussion about the genre, e.g. about British versus American horror films, the conditions in which a film production takes place, the status of the genre, censorship and some thoughts about the significance of excess to the film. I have used the narrative structure and plot of Hellraiser as a starting point for the dissertation and I have let the film guide my choice of themes as much as possible. The method of my choice is founded on making the segmentation on the basis of the colloquial understanding that narratives are constituted of momentary parts. With these sequential analyses as my starting point I allow myself to deviate and delve into larger thematic areas that are collected in my summarising discussion of the dissertation. In the third part of the dissertation I thoroughly study how the Cenobites were conceived and designed and how they look and act. Furthermore, I study how they relate to archetypal monsters, such as Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula, in order to look at how Barker is playing with these monstrous characters. I also discuss the Cenobites? peculiar power of attraction at the same time as I stress that it is not necessarily self-evident to regard the Cenobites as the monsters of the film. In the final part of the dissertation I look at the film's approach to body, pain and suffering and how the boundaries occasionally are erased and pain becomes pleasure. I refer to, among other things, to how the Cenobites? appearances have similarities with the aesthetic expressions of the punk movement. Physical violence against the body, in the form of body piercings and tattoos, symbolises resistance against good taste. This form of alienation can also be seen as a characteristic of horror film as a genre and it seems as if the Cenobites only reach the satisfaction they crave through opening bodies and delve underneath the skin.
|
|
| 4. |
- Åberg, Anders
(författare)
-
Tabu : Filmaren Vilgot Sjöman
- 2001
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a thematic and historical analysis of of Sjöman’s œuvre and its significance for Swedish film culture, focussing on his most important films during the 1960s and 1970s. Sjöman started as a novelist in the late 1940s, and has since then accomplished an œuvre consisting of some 60 works, mostly novels, plays, essays, and films. Sjöman is best known as a film director. In 1962, Sjöman’s first film, Älskarinnan (The Mistress), opened to great acclaim. Sjöman was greeted as the instigator of a new wave of Swedish cinema, comparable to the French Nouvelle vague and post-war Italian cinema. Other Swedish author-directors followed Sjöman’s lead. Through the debate on censorship inspired by the official banning of Sjöman’s film 491, Sjöman became known as a serious, but utterly controversial film-maker, treating sexual matters in a provocative and explicit manner. His international fame rests mainly on the diptych film, Jag är nyfiken – gul (I Am Curious – Yellow), and Jag är nyfiken – blå (I Am Curious – blue), from 1967 and 1968 respectively. Sjöman here launched a kind of cinéma vérité-aesthetic, combined with a self-reflexive cinematic discourse verging on self-parody. At the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s, Sjöman struggled to find his proper place in the politicised cultural climate. The title of this thesis is derived from a film released in 1977, Tabu (Taboo). The film was scandalous, its allegory of leftist political activism deemed unacceptable. After Tabu, Sjöman never really recovered as a director. His films tended to be unattractive for the general audience, and, as opposed to his earlier work, they have had no real impact on the discourses of Swedish contemporary cinema and culture in general.
|
|
| 5. |
- Bengtsen, Peter
(författare)
-
The Street Art World
- 2014
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent years, street art has become embedded in popular culture and received growing attention from the art market and art institutions. Work by street artists has entered galleries, auction houses and museums, and some artists have been given the opportunity to create large-scale sanctioned public art projects. Simultaneously, widespread photographic documentation of street artworks and the circulation of images online have provided artists with a potentially global audience. The Street Art World investigates street art as a relatively newly established field within contemporary art. With the American sociologist Howard S. Becker’s notion of “art worlds” as a central point of departure, the book seeks to characterise street art by studying and participating in the everyday interaction among the artists, gallerists, collectors, critics, curators, bloggers and street art enthusiasts that make up the social environment (the street art world) in which the term street art is continuously given its meaning. Major themes addressed in the book include: (1) The social construction of the meaning of the term street art and the resulting difficulties in formally defining what street art is. (2) The often contradictory attitudes within the street art world towards art history and the institutions of art. (3) The relationship between street art, the art market and the institutional art world. (4) The relationship between street art and public art. (5) Street art’s potential to affect the viewer’s perception of public space, and the possible challenges the increasing digital mediation of street art may pose to bringing this potential to fruition. While the book presents central characteristics of the street art movement, it also acknowledges that it is not feasible to pin down the nature of street art once and for all, since street art is a product of complex social processes.
|
|
| 6. |
- Hermerén, Karin, 1963
(författare)
-
Konsten att förvalta. Bevarandets utmaningar och möjligheter – värderingar och beslutsprocesser i 1900-talets Sverige rörande offentlig byggnadsanknuten konst
- 2020
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Denna avhandling har tillkommit i syfte att förbättra förutsättningarna för bevarande av byggnadsanknuten konst i offentlig miljö. Bakgrunden är de stora utmaningar samhället står inför när det gäller att bevara det omfattande antal konstverk som har beställts sedan 1900-talets början, i synnerhet avseende kulturmiljösektorns förmåga att identifiera och prioritera vad som bör eller ska bevaras för kommande generationer. Avhandlingen analyserar val och beslutsprocesser i bevarandepraxis, samt dessas konsekvenser för långsiktig förvaltning, särskilt i relation till kulturarvsbegreppet samt förvaltning och tillsyn. Vilka och vems kunskaper, värderingar och kompetens som påverkar, styr eller avgör besluten i valsituationerna diskuteras, liksom huruvida metoder behöver utvecklas för att tydliggöra, kritiskt diskutera och analysera regelverk och underliggande etiska ställningstaganden. Avhandlingens teoretiska fundament utgörs av några begreppspar (bevarande och kulturarvsprocess, förhandling och makt, val och beslut, kulturarvifiering och kanonisering samt antikanonisering och glömska), där företeelser diskuteras huvudsakligen utifrån konserveringens och kulturvårdens teori, men även strukturerings- och värdeteori. För undersökningen har fallstudien tillämpats som metod, och tre fall har undersökts induktivt, deskriptivt och värderande genom observationer, intervjuer och dokumentstudier. Avhandlingen består av 12 kapitel, där de tre inledande presenterar bakgrund, syfte, teori och metod. Kapitel 4–5 identifierar och kontextualiserar byggnadsanknuten konst beställd av offentliga aktörer under 1900-talet ur begreppsligt, historiskt respektive juridiskt perspektiv. Kapitel 6–9 utgör avhandlingens empiriska del, där fall studeras inom kyrkligt område (Växjö domkyrka och Svenska kyrkan), bostadsområde (miljonprogramsområdet Lindängen i Malmö) och sjukvårdsområde (Vrinnevisjukhuset i Norrköping). Likheter och skillnader fallen emellan analyseras avseende beställning, reception och bevarande. Kapitel 10–12 omfattar diskussion, samlade resultat, slutsatser samt förslag på tillämpning. Fem problemområden för bevarandeverksamheten har lyfts fram, vilka rör dess mål, praxis, styrning, diskrepanser och brister. Utifrån dessa har intressenternas handlingsalternativ, resurser, kunskaper, kompetens, värderingsutgångspunkter och beslut diskuterats. Resultatet visade på en rad brister och problem inom bevarandeområdet byggnadsanknuten konst, givet de värderingar som uttryckts i politiska måldokument, professionens riktlinjer och lagstiftning på området. Dessa brister och problem är kontextberoende, men kan ändå utgöra underlag för i texten angivna rekommendationer. Avhandlingen har särskilt pekat på behovet inom kulturmiljövårdens praxis av gemensamma tydliga mål och dokumenterade bedömningar samt ett nytt konstantikvariskt kompetensområde. Beslutsprocessen bör vara tydlig och förankrad – genom använda väldefinierade begrepp, bredd i kunskapsinhämtning och kompetenssamverkan – för robusta och legitima beslut, också avseende nya konstbeställningars relation till framtida bevarande. En översyn av relevanta kriterier och lagstiftning behövs. Byggnadsanknuten konst borde omfattas av samhälleliga resurser och förståelse för förvaltning, samt tillgång till skyddsbestämmelser. Ingenting i fallstudierna har framkommit som påvisar att nya metoder för värdering behöver utarbetas. Man kan komma långt med att använda redan existerande metoder, som då bör stärkas och utvecklas samt tillämpas konsekvent och långsiktigt.
|
|
| 7. |
- Perers, Maria, 1965-
(författare)
-
Inside the Ideal Home : The Changing Values of Apartment Living and the Promotion of Consumption in Sweden, 1950-1970
- 2020
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores the image of the ideal home in Sweden, an idea closely bound to the spatial dynamics of building norms and the outfitting of the domestic household, from the 1950s through the 1960s. By examining official, commercial, and consumer-cooperative ideals of housing and home, I attempt to understand and analyze correlations between various visions of the ideal apartment home and the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which they were conceived during the heyday of the Swedish welfare state. This subject has been extensively researched for the first years of the phenomenon, the 1930s and 1940s, but is relatively ignored for the years following World War II, when the new housing policy was formulated and the Record Years began. The study ends in 1970, when the construction of apartments and the standard of living peaked, followed by a focus on building single-family houses and the questioning of building norms. I argue that the values and visions of an ideal home were expressed in the rhetoric and representations of state, consumer-cooperative, and commercial publications. While scholars have studied individual aspects of this context, I maintain that the interrelationship between them produced a widely circulated vision of domesticity between 1950 and 1970. I highlight how commercial actors—primarily Ikea and the interior design magazine Allt i Hemmet (Everything in the Home)—interacted with state institutions in creating and promoting a discourse of the ideal home.
|
|
| 8. |
- Driesse, Moniek, 1983
(författare)
-
Leaving dry land: Water, heritage and imaginary agency
- 2023
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This doctoral dissertation explores the interplay between water, heritage and the agency of the imagination. Instead of seeking how to map subjects or heritage, the research focuses on the ways in which mapping and the cartographic gaze have produced subjects in specific categories. It seeks to create moments of orientation and reorientation to experience the effects, affects and possibilities to imagine ways beyond these fixed geocodes and the taken for granted. As such, this dissertation contributes to broader discussions regarding critical design practices alongside critical heritage studies, while channelling design’s ability to shape the world and to explore potential approaches that foster collective imagination and planetary care. Two iterations of a fluid methodology were conducted in Mexico City and Gothenburg, foregrounding precarious issues in heritagisation processes and exploring aquatic agency. The methodology provides a tool for bridging different epistemologies, disciplines and perspectives, fostering transdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge permeation. By engaging with water as a subject and employing imaginative techniques, the research aims to actively (re)imagine the past, present and future of urban environments, enabling diverse infrastructures, ecologies and cosmologies to emerge. Heritage is reconceptualised as a navigational system that traces diverse relations in the world. In this sense, the research challenges modern heritage paradigms by acknowledging the ephemerality of water.
|
|
| 9. |
- Skånberg Dahlstedt, Ami, 1967
(författare)
-
Suriashi as Experimental Pilgrimage in Urban and Other Spaces
- 2022
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This practice-led PhD-thesis draws on an existing Japanese movement practice called suriashi, which translates as sliding foot. Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. It is one of the foundations for how the performer positions him/herself for movement on stage. My thesis asks whether suriashi could also be a method to act, as being active, or to activate, in other spaces outside the theatre. A key feature is the practical application of this artistic practice outside the theatrical contexts where it is usually located. This relocation brings a traditional form into new configurations, connecting to everyday practices and sites of resistance and performance. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of walking arts practice, bringing a Japanese dance-based practice into a dialogue with debates and practices of Western dancing and walking. The practice-led research includes suriashi walks, labelled as ‘experimental pilgrimages’, which are documented especially for the thesis. They have been captured on video and serve as material evidence of what kind of questions and answers suriashi as experimental pilgrimage activated. The video documentations, to which readers are guided to through specific links and timecodes, provide the possibility to experience suriashi walking both visually and corporeally. They also represent the artistic artefact and outcome of this practice-led research. The video capturing suriashi adds to an expanded perspective on screendance as durational artistic practice. The thesis shows how suriashi embodies ideologies, such as gender, as well as discussing how our presence in urban spaces is always gendered. Suriashi as a gendered technique provided a tool for walking with integrity - a flâneuse strategy - which led to the application of suriashi for political engagement through embodiment.
|
|
| 10. |
- Forssell, Jonas
(författare)
-
Textens Transfigurationer
- 2015
-
Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis focuses on the opera text enlightened from four different perspectives: the translator, the librettist, the composer and finally the singer, based on the author’s thirty years of professsional practice, in the spirit of Donald A. Schön’s study from 1983: The Reflective Practitioner; How professionals think in action. The method is basically hermeneutic and the esthetics inspired by Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (”The Open Work”) from 1962. Questions from within the perspective of the translator are: In what ways does opera translation differ from other forms of translation, and how does an opera translator work? What is the history of “opera in the ver-nacular” compared to “opera in original language” and are singable translations needed whatsoever in the modern era of subtitling? The perspective of the librettist examines the opera form’s SWOT-analysis, the differences from other “storytelling” art forms, the task of making an adaption compared to choosing to create an original plot, the matter of taste and building the form from dramaturgical principles, the shaping of aria texts, the importance of tight collaboration and cutting, cutting, cutting (“a libretto cannot be short enough” Edgar Istel, 1922). The composer’s perspective contains practical and theoretical words of advice and examples from practice, together with a so ”think aloud”-study from within a composer’s thought process while working. The final chapter, from the singer’s perspective, focuses on whether modern vocal ideals and singing “in original language”, with subtitles, together with expanding performance halls, have made opera text harder to perceive, and rendered earlier established texting techniques forgotten or obsolete. The answers to all these questions are complex. This thesis concludes that the opera form is still expanding, but not necessarily in the direction of creating a new, contemporary canon. “There are about 600 opera houses in the world, all are ‘National Galleries’, none is the Tate Modern” (Per-Erik Öhrn, 2012), but there are also opportunities. Almost all successful new opera productions in recent years have their librettos written in English, a language traditionnally regarded as “weak” in the field of opera. Opera audiences worldwide are nowadays accustomed to hearing and understanding sung English words and comprehending a dramatic context when expressed in English, thanks to 100 years of Anglo-American dominance in popular music and about 50 years of dominance in television and films.
|
|
