| 1. |
- Pecorari, Marco, 1981-
(författare)
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Fashion Remains : The Epistemic Potential of Fashion Ephemera
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates fashion ephemera as objects of knowledge. By focusing on a category of fashion ephemera (invitations, catalogues and press releases) created by contemporary ready-to-wear fashion designers, this study moves beyond the canonical idea that fashion exclusively endures in the form of garments or other wearable objects, while shedding light on an overlooked category of fashion objects. Although the practice of collecting ephemera is established in many types of museums (e.g. social, ethnographic, historical) and archives (both public and private), very few fashion museums have paid attention to these materials, which are usually collected through sporadic private donations. Similarly, fashion scholars have only intermittently employed these materials, mostly using them as mere supportive evidence or as auto-explanatory in the study of dress, fashion shows or fashion designers’ agency.This dissertation fills this gap, focusing on the epistemic capacity of fashion ephemera. Through a case study on the collection of invitations, catalogues and press releases conserved in the Mode Museum of the Province of Antwerp (MoMu), this study investigates what knowledge about fashion these ephemera enable, and how they do so through their material, textual and visual features. The dissertation concentrates on the capacity of fashion ephemera to evoke and to call into question material and immaterial knowledge about fashion, focusing on issues of authorship, time and materiality.Thus, this thesis interprets fashion ephemera as fashion remains. To speak about ‘fashion remains’ aims to stress how ephemera are commonly discarded and how they represent a form of materiality that reflects the ephemeral nature of fashion. Further, ‘fashion remains’ explains the capacity of fashion ephemera to perform and bear traces of fashion and its immaterial practices. Due to their capacity to both ‘live’ and ‘escape’ the ephemeral, these objects record and echo the ephemeral nature of fashion, becoming crucial devices through which to know and experience fashion, its actors and its practices.
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| 2. |
- Petersson, Sonya, 1977-
(författare)
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Konst i omlopp : mening, medier och marknad i Stockholm under 1700-talets senare hälft
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this doctoral thesis is to explore how art was mediated and given meaning in the environment of an urban media culture in Stockholm during the second part of the 18th century. It comprises studies of how art was distributed on the market, how it was discussed in the press and how it was exhibited in public. It also includes an analytical orientation toward mixing of concepts and values, rather than purifying them into categories such as elite and popular. Art is approached as an open concept of investigation.The thesis presents three studies. The first discusses art as concepts and subject matter in papers, pamphlets and encyclopaedias, with a critical stand against the historiography emphasizing the establishment of the 'fine arts'. The second situates art in two parallel practises of showing art in public, exhibitions arranged by the Academy of Arts and the Auction Chamber's public sales. The third deals with prints on the market, a medium equally recognized as one of the fine arts and as a visual mass medium. All studies also consider notions of interaction, public, and social class.Two overarching arguments are developed. The first concerns media cultural functions as mechanisms of cultural transgression. This argument points to the mixing of international and local, regarding both themes in the press and prints on the market. It also stresses the mixing of art, commerce, and entertainment, in the dual character of both the academy's exhibitions and the auction's sales. The second argument consists in pointing to alternative cuts, by which I suggest discursive relations between art, luxury, entertainment, and knowledge. These are areas that, since the 18th century, have often been kept apart, but were nonetheless deeply interwoven. One overarchig pattern studied throughout the thesis is the 18th-century linking of the fine arts as well as luxury, entertainment, and knowledge to a perceptually defined subject.
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| 3. |
- Hinners, Linda, 1971-
(författare)
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De fransöske handtwerkarne vid Stockholms slott 1693–1713 : Yrkesroller, organisation, arbetsprocesser
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis deals with French sculptors and painters active around 1700 at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. They were summoned from Paris by the architect Nicodemus Tessin the younger (1654–1728). This study analyses the Frenchmen’s professional roles, how Tessin organised their work and the working methods applied in the decoration of the Gallery of Charles XI and the adjoining parade rooms. It also involves questions concerning the artist’s roles and the status of artistic professions at the early modern period.The artisans were a group of some fifteen sculptors, painters, founders and a goldsmith. Several of them were accompanied by family members, some of whom were active in the workshop. In France these sculptors and painters had worked in the Bâtiments du Roi and particularly at the Gobelins. Although they were not part of the artistic elite at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture they had vital knowledge in classical pattern/design, le bon goût and drawing. The artisans were also members of the guild system and were thus permitted to accept private commissions.My aim has been to clarify the artisans’ background in Paris and the recruitment undertaken by the diplomat Daniel Cronström (1655–1719). With regard to their activities in Sweden, it has been important to clarify their conditions in the building organisation at the Royal Palace, including social contexts such as their family situation and the possibility to practise their Catholic faith. Equally important is the professional relationship between the Frenchmen and Tessin, who was appointed Superintendent in 1697. Through detailed archival studies, the working practices and the creative process are analysed, especially the collaboration between Tessin and the painter Jacques Foucquet and the sculptors René Chauveau (1663–1722) and Jacques Foucquet (1639–1731).
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| 4. |
- Melin, Pia, 1970-
(författare)
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Fåfängans förgänglighet : Allegorin som livs- och lärospegel hos Albertus Pictor
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this dissertation I have accounted for the manner in which Albertus Pictor and his workshop actively used dress codes, gestures, and other formal characteristics in the paintings as markers, with the intention of accentuating and elucidating the communicative messages of the pictures. The research material comprises five motifs in the sequence of paintings signed by Albertus Pictor, or ascribed to his workshop, in 15 churches in the Mälaren region. The primary material consists of 32 paintings, 18 of which are subjected to an in-depth study. The criteria for my selection have been that the motifs should belong to, or touch upon, the category of memento mori motifs.I view the material partly from a semiotic perspective with the starting point in the assumption that communication and cultural phenomena are coded systems in which every coded phenomenon is part of a larger system of signs or contexts.The method I used was to research readable signs found in dress codes, appearances, and gestures, in order to narrow down, in Albertus Pictor’s imagery, a deliberate use of markers with a communicative aim. Costumes are used to emphasise sex, status, age, wealth, and profession, as well as to convey traits of character, and they receive their meaning at moment when they are worn. Correctly interpreted, costumes can shed light on prevailing societal attitudes. The research material demonstrates clear differences in the dress codes of the figures. Costumes as a pictorial rhetorical device are used as a form of address that is accessible and comprehensible for a large group of viewers. By categorising the dress codes in the workshop’s paintings, one can establish the fact that the choice of costumes, in the motifs that were the subject of an in-depth study, follows a particular pattern with the intention of narrowing down a specific type of man with traits of a nobleman or a knight. The male costume in Albertus Pictor’s Memento mori-motifs possesses an extrovert and communicative function. The choice of clothes, colours, gestures, and facial expressions functions as a rhetorical device in the execution of the image, aiming to communicate a specific message to the viewer.
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| 5. |
- Roussinova, Roussina, 1972-
(författare)
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The Art of Pleasing the Eye : Portraits by Nicolas de Largillierre and Spectatorship with Taste for Colour in the Early Eighteenth Century
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study examines the interaction between portraits by the exponent of French colourist painting Nicolas de Largillierre (1656–1745) and elite spectatorship in the early eighteenth century as enactment of the idea of painting as an art of pleasing the eye. As developed in the theory of art of Roger de Piles (1635–1709), the idea of painting as an art of pleasing the eye coexisted with the classicist view, which in turn emphasised the potential of painting to communicate discursive meanings and hence to engage the mind. The idea of painting as an art of pleasing the eye was associated with a taste that valued the pictorial effects of painting and related to the ideal of honnêteté, which expanded on the art of pleasing in polite society by means of external appearances as a sign of social distinction.The aim of the study is to explore how portraits by Nicolas de Largillierre address the spectator and how such paintings might have come to have meaning for spectators in the early eighteenth century. To do this, the study takes a performative approach and defines meaning as a product of the interplay of pictorial effects and spectatorial response, progressing from the initial encounter throughout the sustained exploration of the paintings. Building on close analyses of selected paintings and readings of texts that bear on issues of pictorial imitation, spectatorship and social interaction, the study brings into focus the interplay of cognitive and sensory activities, including verbal articulation and bodily movement, which come into play in the production of meanings through the act of spectatorial experience. The study also emphasises the interplay of the mimetic and the material aspects of the paintings as an important bearer of meanings and identifies several interrelated sites of tension in which the pictorial effectiveness of the portraits resides.The study concludes by suggesting that to infer such meanings, the spectator should be prepared to respond to the address of the paintings actively, by engaging the mind, the senses and the body. Such an interpretation of the interaction between portrait paintings and spectators proposes a complex view of the ways in which artistic and spectatorial practices in the early eighteenth century might have interacted to create meanings while reproducing at the same time social and aesthetic conventions and ideals, such as the art of pleasing the eye.
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| 6. |
- Uggla, Karolina, 1976-
(författare)
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Konst och kartläggning kring 1970 : Modell, diagram och karta i konstens landskap
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The years around 1970 saw the emergence of an artistic fascination with maps and mapping. In the present thesis this fascination is conceptualised as a mapping impulse, acknowledging how the discourses of art and mapping, respectively, intertwine and merge. The aim of the study is to analyse this mapping impulse and to identify recurring themes and concepts in artworks and texts on art where maps and mapping processes are used as a visual expression and method. In order to demonstrate how the scope of the thesis is shaped by later interpretations of art from around 1970, three exhibition publications from three decades are examined to illustrate how boundaries between the discourses of art and of mapping are renegotiated from the late 1960s up until the 2010s.The representing line of the map is analysed via the concepts of diagrams, maps, and models, such as the re-appearance of Claude Shannon’s and Warren Weaver’s Communication Model in the Swedish late 1960s, Öyvind Fahlström’s World Map (1972), and Sten Eklund’s paintings on glass from 1968 where he transfers ideas from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into visual representations.The procedural aspects of encounters between the discourses of art and of mapping from around 1970 are analysed in Hans Haacke’s Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile Pt. 1 and Sten Eklund’s Kullahusets hemlighet (The Secret of Kullahuset). The latter work is interpreted in the light of the role of the mapping, surveying individual, and in a figurative sense, the individual in the system. Here, the concept of alienation is used, as the work delineates the mapping subject who itself is being subject to mapping. In this thesis the mapping impulse is identified as a way to deal with territory and truth in Western art around 1970. The map as a sign system and a practice is representative of a recent stage where art in various ways deal with a world undergoing rapid change. The mapping impulse circa 1970 can be identified as a visual regime of cartographic reason, characterized by legibility, clarity and lucidity. This also suggests alternative interpretations of the impact of the linguistic turn in the art of the 1960s and early 1970s, revealing a more ambiguous relationship between text and image.
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| 7. |
- Weibull, Nina, 1947-
(författare)
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Spegling och skapande : En studie i Lena Cronqvists "Målaren och hennes modell"
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- For their self-representation painters are referred to the use of existing codes of representation. These codes can be modified by displacement of conventional meaning. In the historically central discourse of the figure of the artist, the model functions as a complementary aspect of the painter. If, as in the work analysed in this thesis, the conventional code is changed into "the painter and her model", the outcome will be not only a deconstruction of the concept of "the painter and his model", but also a new meaning.Cronqvist (b. in 1938) represents herself with paint brushes and a hand mirror. Whereas the brush signifies the artist's potential for creation, the mirror introduces an imaginary aspect of the painter. The mirror is a critical factor in self-portraiture in the sense that the mirrored image may convey both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of its spectator. The mirror is a source of ambiguity. I maintain that the mirroring theme relates to three separate discourses; Vanity, Narcissus and Medusa. The theme of Medusa provides a productive, if not all-inclusive, context for the interpretation of the androgynously signified body of the painter, of the mirror face and of the petrification of the painter's body.Cronqvist also investigates the potential for representing herself within the codes of the nude, a metaphor for art, which is here characterized by ambivalent gestures and the ambiguous whiteness signifying the untouched picture surface. While an imaginary aspect of the maternal body can inspire male artists, it tends to represent a source of ambivalence to the female artist.
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| 8. |
- Åkestam, Mia, 1954-
(författare)
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Bebådelsebilder : Om bildbruk under medeltiden
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates the Annunciation motif and the use of images in a medieval socio-cultural context. There are almost 400 medieval images of the Annunciation from the period 1150–1550 in Sweden today. It is found in murals, baptismal fonts, paintings, wooden sculpture, stone reliefs, liturgical vessels, textile works and altarpieces. The aim of the thesis is to present this rich and varied material, and also to relate the images to the milieus where they were used and viewed as objects of cult, and to elucidate the historical situation in which they were used for communicative purposes. It is argued that an “image-culture” perspective and a long-term investigation can reveal other aspects than a specific study, and that it is fruitful to equally emphasize the rhetoric of the image, the beholders part and the historical context. Hence the picture analysis is based on semiotics and rhetoric analysis of pictures and reception theory. With this point of departure the thesis addresses iconographic problems and shows that text as a source and explanation of historical image can be insufficient. The study shows that the figures’ gestures and body language, their contenace, is crucial for our understanding, and remains the most important mark of identification. The motif can be identified even with an angel without wings. The meaning of this universal picture could then be enlarged with specific attributes and symbols with a purpose to emphasize specific ideas. In context this elucidates bishopric, monastic as well as worldly use of imagery. The image context includes motifs from classical antiquity, references to the pious Christian worshiper, as well as symbolic staging of the Gospels and Christian faith. More expected is the biblical history. The motif can also be displayed alone, and thus it can be regarded as a sign. An important outcome is that the Annunciation not is used in legendary suites or in narratives of the Virgin Mary. Hence, the relationship between image and text is not uncomplicated. The thesis shows that people in the Middle Ages were fully aware of the use of pictures and skilfully used the rhetoric of the image.
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| 9. |
- Banér, Anne, 1946-
(författare)
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Uppkäftiga ungar och oförargliga barn : Barn i svensk skämtpress 1894-1924
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Drawings and anecdotes involving children in the two satirical magazines Söndags-Nisse and Strix during the years from 1894–1924 constitute the material. The main aim of this thesis has been to study how children are portrayed and what roles have been assigned to them. A secondary aim has been to highlight the relationship between text and pictures. In connection with this, the cartoonists’ contributions in the satirical press have been analysed. The third aim is to put the jokes in a humour theory perspective to obtain an answer to the question of what type of joke occurs in the magazines.The material has been analysed in seven groups on the basis of the characteristics assigned to the children: “the revealing child”, “the truth-telling child”, “the cheeky child”, “the clever and inventive child”, “the mischievous child”, “the wicked child” and “the naïve child”. In the first four groups, it is a strong and rebellious child who appears in the pages of the magazines: a child who dares to go against the adult world and stand up for itself. These children reveal a great deal about the period in which they lived. These drawings and jokes have been analysed in relation to the contemporary context.In the other groups the child created is not distinguished by such strong characteristics. Here, a joke is made of the child’s wickedness, stupidity or naivety: more general concepts. It has not, therefore, been possible to put these anecdotes into a contemporary context to the same extent.Throughout, it is the adults asking the questions and the children answering them. This has been interpreted as an expression of the power of the adults vis-à-vis the children.The seven groups represent two types of joke. The research shows that, in the satirical jokes, the role of the children is, in the first instance, to inform about contemporary circumstances while the role of the children in the amusing jokes is principally to entertain the adult readership.
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| 10. |
- Elmqvist Söderlund, Inga, 1967-
(författare)
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Taking possession of astronomy : Frontispieces and illustrated title pages in 17th-century books on astronomy
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis is a survey of 291 frontispieces and illustrated title pages in European books on astronomy from the 17th century. It is a quantitative and qualitative survey of how motifs are related to consumption, identification and display. Elements in the motifs related to factual content as opposed to those aimed to raise the perceived value of astronomy are distinguished.The quantitative study shows that astronomical phenomena (90 per cent) and scientific instruments (62 per cent, or as much as 86 per cent if only titles with illustrations occupying an entire page are considered) are the most common motifs to inform the reader of the genre. Besides these, a wide range of depicted features indicate the particularity of each title. Different means for raising the value of astronomy and its attributes are identified. The interplay of “real” or “credible” elements with fictional ones was used to attract attention, create positive associations and promote acquisition and reading. The motifs mainly promote delectation and erudition, although some attract attention through their deliberately enigmatic design and a few through fear. The survey determines prevalent settings (palaces, the theatre, gardens, the wilderness and the heavens), activities (skilful use of instruments, conversations or disputes), references to the ancients and heraldic components. They present both the self-image of astronomers at the time and ideal components that contain connotations of an enhanced reality. This self-image also contributed to the definition of normative values for astronomers in the 17th century. The affinities between painters and astronomers are examined.In addition, an analysis of descriptions of frontispieces is undertaken, which shows that the user of the book was expected to devote considerable time to the frontispiece in order to understand all of its particular features and that the illustrations were suitable for display and learned digression.
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