| 1. |
- Persson, Beatrice, 1963
(författare)
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In-Between: Contemporary Art in Australia. Cross-culture, Contemporaneity, Globalization
- 2011
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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.
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| 2. |
- Medbo, Mårten, 1964
(författare)
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Lerbaserad erfarenhet och språklighet
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the course of the twentieth century, a doubt emerged – first within visual arts, and later also within crafts – where the relevance of the traditional way of making art was addressed, as were thoughts on what was termed ‘empty shape’. The notion that shape in itself was no longer artistically valid is closely linked to notions of materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom – all of which have had a major influence on contemporary visual arts and crafts, in general, and, more specifically, on what I term ‘theory-practice’ within the field of crafts. During the past few decades, increasing proof of this influence on the field of crafts as a whole has also been experienced. As a ceramist expressing myself through clay, form has never been empty, and clay never a hindrance, and my dissertation is an attempt to put materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom, in context, as well as to reflect upon questions related to their emergence and what impact they have within the field of crafts. My point of departure here is my own experience as an artist and ceramist, where inquiring and exploring takes places through practical knowledge. I argue that there is no such thing as immateriality in art and that all artistic expression requires bodily-situated craft skill of some kind in order to be materialised and communicated, as well as to take place in the world. I also argue that art should be seen as what I term ‘language-practice’. Through this practice I craft the concept of ‘clay-based language-ness’ and ‘language- like-ness’ in order to come as close as possible to describing, in words, the kind of communication I wish to create as a ceramist, as well as what art-making (‘art-crafting’) constitutes when conceptual artists create their art. Regarding crafts as a language-practice, however, conflicts with the theory that is setting the tone as well as leading the field of crafts today. I therefore wish, and propose, to find a way out of this conflict-ridden situation. As part of this endeavour, I present the text-based part of the dissertation and the clay-based part of the dissertation – side by side.
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| 3. |
- Bengtsen, Peter
(författare)
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The Street Art World
- 2014
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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.
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| 4. |
- Haidenthaller, Ylva
(författare)
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The Medal in Early Modern Sweden : Significances and Practices
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis analyses medals issued between 1560 and 1792 in Sweden and studies the practices and roles related to these objects. It aims to contribute to the understanding of the varying uses and functions of early modern medals by applying a long-term perspective that connects Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical medals. The study asks why are medals commissioned, how the intention is reflected in the visual design and materiality of the medal, how medals were used during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, which continuities and changes the practices show over time, and what cultural significance medals have in early modern Swedish society. Theoretically, the thesis applies an art anthropological approach to the medium, focusing on its materiality, meaning and use. By drawing on visual and archival sources materials and examining material from a Northern European context, the thesis provides an unprecedented wide-ranging study of the functions and meanings of early modern medals.Parallel to Sweden’s historical and cultural development, the analysis follows medal art chronologically and thematically in five chapters. The study addresses the transformation from being a royal gift to prize medals and rewards and from limited use to being available at an open market. It examines how the medal was viewed, handled, circulated, and used plus what significance people ascribed to it. The medium aided the sitter’s commemoration, self-fashioning, and legitimisation while being used as a gift, worn as a jewel, collected, discussed, or viewed as an artefact with antiquarian purposes. The medal was appreciated for its potential to express various themes on a small surface, its exclusive material and practical size. However, much of its meaning was connected to the sensory experience of touching the medal. The medium’s materiality was an essential element of how the medal was used, the way its visual design communicated with the beholder, and the importance that the object conveyed. By its broad and exhaustive timeline, the thesis presents a comprehensive case study on the phenomenon of medal art and aids in understanding how early modern art and visual culture was used and how these uses changed over time.
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| 5. |
- Zetterman, Eva, 1957
(författare)
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Frida Kahlos bildspråk – ansikte, kropp & landskap: Representation av nationell identitet (första utgåvan)
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and her works, with emphasis on her painted self-portraits. The objective is to place Frida Kahlo’s pictorial production in relation to a place and time specific context and to test the theory for Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits as a project connected to a general striving towards a new formulation of a national identity. The majority of Frida Kahlo’s pictorial production coincides with a historically delimited era in which there was a break from earlier role models and ideals, politically, culturally, and ideologically. This phase was an artistically dynamic period with a redefining view of art and the history of the nation, a visualization of the mythology and symbolism of the Indian cultures of origin, and an emphasis on the Indian ethnicity of the nation. Two chapters describe the ideological context in which Frida Kahlo’s works were created. The visual markers around which the post-revolutionary national discourse came to revolve are identified and certain concepts related to race are examined. The subsequent chapters are devoted to Frida Kahlo’s imagery. One chapter examines how her pictorial production in the 1920’s emerged in dialogue with contemporary art theory. One chapter deals with body themes based on the naked female body, and elements of sex education are related to an ongoing debate on sex education in Mexican schools. Thereafter new features are explored that are introduced in her self-portraits during the late 1930’s and that came to be consistent features in her continued production of self-portraits. In the concluding section of the dissertation, the self-portraits are discussed from a more general perspective. Some of the myths upon which earlier biographical interpretations are based upon are questioned. Instead, the themes of suffering found in the self-portraits are related to the reconstruction of the nation’s ethnic identity and problematic issues based on the 16th century Spanish Conquest of the indigenous Indian population. In her complex imagery, Frida Kahlo refers to a broad spectrum of disparate pictorial tradition, stylistic epochs, categories of motifs and symbolic imagery, and to historical, religious and mythical female personages such as Malintzín, la Chingada, Sor Juana, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. These references from different epochs represent the two fundamental components of Mexico’s cultural heritage – the Spanish and the Indian – and these are merged in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits so that they thereby communicate a construction of an identity based on a national heritage. The time perspective of the discussion reaches backwards to before the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century and forwards to the contemporary Chicana/Chicano movement north of border to the United States.
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| 6. |
- Ibrahim, Muna
(författare)
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Effects of Art and Design on Orientation in Healthcare Architecture : A study of wayfinding and wayshowing in a Swedish hospital setting
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates the role of interior design elements, especially artwork, in way-searchers’ wayfinding and orientation in hospital environments. The thesis considers the way-searcher’s background and the impact of cultural belonging, occupation, memories, aesthetic preferences, and language, and the influence that such factors might have on the perception of the hospital environment and its guiding elements. The aim is to increase the knowledge about the role of art objects and how they relate to design processes by studying how art and design appear to users at three different sites at the hospital SUS Malmö, and also to gain insight into decisions made about the design and the placement of public art in a health-care environment.The thesis consists of four studies developed to complement each other. They include three different experiencing perspectives: the visitor’s perspective, the designer’s perspective, and the observing researcher’s perspective. This mix of perspectives helps to obtain a broad understanding of the complex experience and effectiveness of wayshowing design in a health-care environment and of the intentions behind making, choosing, and installing art for and in hospitals. A mixed-methods approach is used that mainly relies on qualitative studies, but that also has some quantitative elements. The techniques used for collecting information are: questionnaire, on-site interviews, semi-structured interviews, walking interviews, observation, and photographic documentation. This mixed-methodological approach is used to attain a successively deeper understanding and acquire more diverse knowledge of the role that interior design and artwork have for wayfinding, and by that also pointing to the development of wayfinding theory, especially as it refers to notions like orientation, wayfinding, legibility, affordance, and familiarity. These theoretical concepts are used here in analyses and descriptions of way-searchers’, especially newcomers’, experiences and perceptions of the interior health-care environment.The four studies of this thesis point out different areas of interest for analyzing wayfinding in hospitals, thus also indicating how they could be considered to guide the design of wayshowing in hospital environments. The areas of interest can be listed as: spatial heterogeneity (about the making of contrasts between spaces); evoked familiarity (about elements in the hospital space that may bring back memories); overfamiliarity (about places taken for granted due to frequent use); broad participation (about consulting a range of users in all stages of the realization of a hospital environment); users’ background (about considering ethnicity, cultural knowledge, occupation, and previous experiences of art), and time- and duration effects (about acknowledging that perception might change during visits or in stays of a longer duration).
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| 7. |
- Parsberg, Cecilia, 1963-
(författare)
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Hur blir du en framgångsrik tiggare i Sverige? : en undersökning av tiggandets och givandets bilder 2011 till 2016
- 2016
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Mitt första möte med en tiggande föranledde mig att under fem år undersöka den nya situationen för tiggeriet och giveriet i Sverige. Förutsättningen är att vardagliga handlingar och reaktioner gentemot en annan människa kan synliggöras estetiskt med en etisk klangbotten. Min undersökning utspelar sig i första hand i gaturummet och i medierna. Det är hela tiden bilderna som är utgångspunkten för resonemangen och de gestaltande verken. Bilder som både separerar och länkar samman kroppar. Vilka bilder är i spel i tiggeriets och giveriets sociala koreografi? Hur kan bilder i detta sammanhang aktiveras på nya sätt? Hur kan nya genereras? Tiggandet är en uppmaning till social interaktion, och vare sig givaren socialt interagerar eller inte med den tiggande människan på gatan så involveras givaren i det europeiska samfundets asymmetriska värdesystem. I min första gestaltning anlitas en professionell marknadsundersökare för att ta reda på hur en tiggare i Sverige skulle kunna göra för att bli framgångsrik. Det blir en film som jag sedan visar mittemot en film där tiggande pratar om hur givare ger. Ur detta verk följer så en rad gestaltningar och en interdisciplinär teoretisk diskussion med bland andra Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed och Hannah Arendt, samt med en rad konstnärers arbeten, kring hur bilder – och kroppsliga handlingar – är kopplade till samhällsbilden och samhällskroppen? Körernas uppställning i gestaltningen Tiggandets kör och Givandets kör anger ett utrymme för social interaktion och demonstrerar därmed en annan ordning som kräver andra insatser, i språk, rörelse och attityd gentemot varandra. Det är en social koreografi: när körerna tränade och sjöng tillsammans uppstod en politisk form. Min förhoppning är att estetiskt synliggöra ett politiskt handlingsutrymme mellan tiggandet och givandet som kan utnyttjas för fortsatta etiska förhandlingar, och nya gestaltningar.
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| 8. |
- Holmstedt, Janna, 1972-
(författare)
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Are you ready for a wet live-in? : explorations into listening
- 2017
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Listen. If I ask you to listen, what is it that I ask of you—that you will understand, or perhaps obey? Or is it some sort of readiness that is requested? What occurs with a body in the act of listening? How do sound and voice structure audio-visual-spatial relations in concrete situations?This doctoral thesis in fine arts consists of six artworks and an essay that documents the research process, or rather, acts as a travelogue as it stages and narrates a series of journeys into a predominantly sonic ecology. One entry into this field is offered by the animal “voice” and attempts to teach animals to speak human language. The first journey concerns a specific case where humanoid sounds were found to emanate from an unlikely source—the blowhole of a dolphin. Another point of entry is offered by the acousmatic voice, a voice split from its body, and more specifically, my encounter with the disembodied voice of Steve Buscemi in a prison in Philadelphia. This listening experience triggered a fascination with, and an inquiry into, the voices that exist alongside us, the parasitic relation that audio technology makes possible, and the way an accompanying voice changes one’s perceptions and even one’s behavior. In the case of both the animal and the acousmatic, the seemingly trivial act of attending to a voice quickly opens up a complex space of embodied entanglements with the potential to challenge much of what we take for granted. At the heart of my inquiry is a series of artworks made between 2012 and 2016, which constitute a third journey: the performance Limit-Cruisers (#1 Sphere), the praxis session Limit-Cruisers (#2 Crowd), the installations Therapy in Junkspace, Fluorescent You, and “Then, ere the bark above their shoulders grew,” and the lecture performance Articulations from the Orifice (The Dry and the Wet).The relationship between what is seen and heard is being explored and renegotiated in the arts and beyond. We are increasingly addressed by prerecorded and synthetic voices in both public and private spaces. Simultaneously, our notions of human communication are challenged and complicated by recent research in animal communication. My work attempts to address the shifts and complexities embodied in these developments. The three journeys are deeply entwined with theoretical inquiries into human-animal relationships, technology, and the philosophy of sound. In the essay, I consider as well how other artistic practices are exploring this same complex space. What I put forward is a materialist and concrete approach to listening understood as a situated practice. Listening is both a form of co-habitation and an ecology. In and through listening, I claim, one could be said to perform in concert with the things heard while at the same time being changed by them.
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| 9. |
- Zetterman, Eva, 1957-
(författare)
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Frida Kahlos bildspråk - ansikte, kropp och landskap : Representation av nationell identitet (tredje utgåvan)
- 2011
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and her works, with emphasis on her painted self-portraits. The objective is to place Frida Kahlo’s pictorial production in relation to a place and time specific context and test the theory of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits as a project connected to a general striving towards a new formulation of national identity. The majority of Frida Kahlo’s pictorial production coincides with a historically delimited era in which there was a break from earlier role models and ideals, politically, culturally and ideologically. This phase was an artistically dynamic period with a redefining view of art and the history of the nation, a visualisation of the mythology and symbolism of the Indian cultures of origin, and an emphasis on the Indian ethnicity of the nation. Two chapters describe the ideological context in which Frida Kahlo’s works were created. The visual markers around which the post-revolutionary national discourse came to revolve are identified and certain concepts related to race are examined. The subsequent chapters are devoted to Frida Kahlo’s pictures. One chapter examines how her pictorial production in the 1920’s emerged in a dialogue with contemporary art theory. One chapter deals with body thematics based on the naked female body, and elements of sex education are put in relation to an ongoing debate on sex education in Mexican schools. Thereafter new features are explored that are introduced in her self-portraits during the late 1930’s and that came to be consistent features in her continued production of self-portraits. In the concluding section of the thesis, the self-portraits are discussed from a more general perspective. Some of the myths upon which earlier biographical interpretations were based are questioned. Instead, the thematics of suffering found in the self-portraits are related to the reconstruction of the nation’s ethnic identity and problematic issues based on the 16th century Spanish Conquest of the indigenous Indian population. In her complex imagery, Frida Kahlo refers to a broad spectrum of disparate pictorial traditions, stylistic epochs, categories of motifs and symbolic imagery, and to historical, religious and mythical female personages such as Malintzín, la Chingada, Sor Juana, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. These references from different epochs represent the two fundamental components of Mexico’s cultural heritage – the Spanish and the Indian – and these are merged in Frida Kahlo self-portraits so that they thereby communicate a construction of identity based on a national heritage. The time perspective of the discussion reaches backwards to before the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century and forwards to the contemporary Chicana/Chicano movement north of the border to the United States.
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| 10. |
- Goldin, Simon
(författare)
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Zero magic : Shifting the Valuation Convention
- 2016
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Zero Magic is a trick for the financial markets, which has the capacity to undermine the perceived value of a publicly traded company and profit from this. Short selling is a way of profiting from loss: Making money if and when a target company loses in value. It is a fundamental market activity that goes as far back as the first stock, yet to this day little is publicly known about the strategies employed by short sellers. On the US exchanges there is no requirement for hedge funds to disclose short positions, and in other jurisdictions such requirements are very limited. Zero Magic was developed by covertly infiltrating a secretive hedge fund specializing in short selling, and reverse engineering its methods. In brief, the hedge fund’s trading strategy is based on identifying suitable short selling targets through analyzing networks of corruption, and then framing critical newsworthy stories about these target companies that can be anonymously distributed among journalists. Profit is gained when a target company loses in value. Rigorous measures are taken by the fund never to be identified as the source of a negative campaign.Access to the hedge fund was gained through the art world. The founder and co-director routinely supports artists and art institutions and is said to have gotten the idea for his fund when looking at a Mark Lombardi drawing (an artist known for mapping networks of power and corruption). It is hard to tell whether the founder’s engagement with art merely entertains personal vanity, or if it functions more strategically as a means of “secret publicity” for the fund; giving access to investors, while staying under the radar of more mainstream public relations. Covert techniques such as hidden recordings and proxy researchers were used to uncover the fund’s methods. With the assistance of Théo Bourgeron, sociologist of finance, Zero Magic not only reconstructs the workings of the trading strategy, but offers a fully operational magic gimmick. The magic gimmick is a computer program providing non-expert users the means to identify relevant short selling targets (companies with weak “valuation conventions”), and a step-by-step guide to undermining their perceived value. With this gimmick one can execute a successful short sale without any previous contacts in the investor community or access to insider information. A US patent application for the trick was filed in January 2016.The artistic PhD “Zero Magic: Shifting the Valuation Convention” concludes with a stage performance and a magic box:The stage performance, “On a Long Enough Timeline the Survival Rate for Everyone Drops to Zero” with magician Malin Nilsson, performed on May 11 and 12, 2016, at Cirkus Cirkör, Stockholm. Through the ticket sales, audience members are drawn into the Zero Magic trick, buying into the predicted future loss of a target company. The magic box, prepared for public archives, contains the Zero Magic computer software, a US patent application for a “Computer Assisted Magic Trick Executed in the Financial Markets” and four historical examples of magic tricks played out beyond the stage, in the world at large.
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