High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter provides a textual expansion of ideas explored in Kristen Brooks’s practice component of the PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice.

The condition of the “sonic spectre” is a form of “thickened” media or material culture with connections to sound theory and history—an invisible layer of noise that results from the self-obfuscating conditions of retreat found within the history of technological objects. The degradation of use-value, disconnect of knowledge—the use and misuse of obsolete technological objects and media formats—are recurring examples that amplify the presence of such spectral conditions.

Historical artifacts, architecture, and recollections are invoked as primary research texts, exploring the intertwined boundaries between material culture, sound, and folklore. Methodologically, the essays, object lessons, and fictocritical interludes are arranged here to evoke a network of ley lines for the sonic spectre to travel along—and in-between. Each section takes on a theme: traditional haunting, sky borne frequencies, interactions of sound with the body, manifestations of spectrality in media and broadcast, performance rituals as contamination rituals, and finally—landscapes and their sonification.

The objects and stories themselves are varied, spanning the mid-19th century to present day. They touch upon military, communications, music, and cultural history—examined when appropriate through lenses of media archeology, folklore studies, landscape theory, the Anthropocene, Thing theory, and object-oriented ontology. Connectivity between these essays is found in the overarching presence of sound—audible sound, microsound, self-generative sound, the sonification of objects, remembered sound, and the contentious territories of supernatural sound.

This dissertation draws upon the curatorial tenets of Istanbul, the 2005 Istanbul Biennial. The dissertation aims to make observations about visual art reception in the early twenty-first century. To this end, the focus is audience: namely, how it collectively absorbs and formulates meaning when faced with art in offsite exhibitions removed from the traditional enclosure of the art museum. Audience members in urban exhibitions such as 2005's Istanbul Biennial resemble older forms of urban wandering central to history modern art, embodied in the figure of the flaneur. As Istanbul exemplifies the globalized visual art distribution system by the cultivating an ambulant and recurrent audience, it also characterizes visual art's progressive elements. Istanbul stands as a model for how itinerant communities and unconventional exhibitions can displace artworks themselves as primary resources. Unlike art movements defined by historical objects, the affective dispersal of reception has redefined contemporary art in the last two decades.

My research focuses on how feelings and thoughts about ethics are created or constructed with imagistic materials such as painting, photography, or film. While the matter of ethics has been deeply examined from the metaphysic point of view, relatively few have studied the subject by looking at the images themselves. My research methodology is to focus on visual materials in order to observe how ethics is involved in forming how we turn our gaze on others.

First, I trace Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, including its vast collection of images in the form of maps, histories, figures, and myths of the various regions in the Renaissance. Cosmographia was designed to help readers experience the divinity of God, which meant the absolute morality of the Renaissance, by seeing the diversity of God’s creations through images made by highly skilled artists of the era such as Holbein the Younger. In particular, I examine how Renaissance artists transformed the abstract idea of goodness into a realistic visual order of it through accurate depictions of the world as the creation of God; further, I trace how this accurate or realistic visual knowledge eventually weakened belief in morality, contrary to what these artists intended.

Second, in contrast to the Cosmographia, I examine Caesare Lombroso’s claim in the late nineteenth century that evil was innate, which he tried to prove scientifically with visual materials or evidence such as photography. I focus on El Atlas Criminal de Lombroso (The atlas of the criminal) along with L’uomo Delinquent (Criminal man), a visual atlas of immorality containing images of “bad” people such as prisoners, whom Lombroso predetermined to be the opposite of “good” citizens in order to support his theory.

Third, I trace how Lombroso’s imaginative science of criminality, coupled with people’s imaginary typological views of others flowing in cultural memory, was further refined through accurate, verifiable, and standardized procedural methods such as Alphonse Bertillon’s identification system. I focus on how these refined systems transformed the matter of ethics into technologies that can be processed massively and efficiently without the delays caused by emotional fluctuations associated with ethical conflicts.

Finally, I examine how the Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky in his film Solaris attempted to restore the old masters’ views from the Renaissance to contemporary society without relying on ethical emotion.

In the writing that follows, I argue that the artistic oeuvre of Jimmie Durham constitutes a critique of dominant epistemological worldviews. This project approaches Durham’s writing and artwork using dedicated sections as lenses through which to analyze and interpret his visual and linguistic output. The individual sections cite sociological and historical sources such as Michel Foucault, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer; anthropological sources that address materials such as stone, dirt and debris, including Mary Douglas, Tim Ingold, Leslie Marmon Silko and Nurit-Bird David; art historical sources such as Laura Mulvey and Rosalind Krauss; literary/philosophical sources that discuss intimacy with objects and materials of interest to Durham, namely the writing of Roger Caillois and Francis Ponge on stones; as well as sources discussing colonial encounters with differing cosmological ordering systems and methods of engaging with materials––namely those material operations categorized as “fetishes”–– supported by the scholarship of Peter Pels and William Pietz. Though the sources are mainly used to address Durham’s work through sections, the sources themselves cross over categories or disciplines, and are therefore deployed throughout. This weaving together of scholarship aims at addressing Durham as a complex artistic producer who functions within the elite establishment of the art world while simultaneously critiquing dominant modes of structuring knowledge and aesthetic production. Durham’s sculptures and writing foreground the human manipulation of language and material as a central stage for negotiation with what is deemed correct, developed, or logical material use–– further investigating the human tendency to place nature and culture in dichotomous positions. The stone, as an object, is thus launched as an agent of critique.

This dissertation examines the roles and legacies of atomic weapons in the formation of post-World War II United States national culture and the post-1945 U.S. art canon. While the consideration of the presence of nuclear weapons in postwar art history has often been constricted to specific atomic imagery existing within an accepted historical framework (e.g. the “Atomic Age,” c. 1945-1960), this dissertation traces a much deeper level of influence beyond the standard “atomic” imagery and outside the received (art) historical framing.

The argument begins by exploring the distinct rupture that occurred within United States public consciousness in the wake of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and identifies how, as a recuperative gesture in the wake of this rupture, a new problematic rhetoric of life, under a rubric of “vitality,” emerged across mainstream U.S. political, economic, and art discourses. The dissertation then extends this framework forward to provide new studies of three important U.S. artists, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Ana Mendieta. Together, the studies show how, often contrary to their standard receptions and placements within in the art historical literature, their transformations of the U.S. avant-garde landscape, beginning in 1960, were deeply informed by questioning the troubled, paradoxical idea of life that had become dominant in mainstream postwar United States discourse in the wake of the U.S.’s development, use, and proliferation of atomic weapons.

Street art is a term that has historically specified its site of display: the street.  With its increasing mainstream popularity, however, the term “street” has become abstracted from this definition which implies a direct reference to art that is literally painted on the streets to refer to a much broader movement, which is often marked by defining principles rather than a uniform medium or location.  This is not to say that street artists do not sometimes perform illegal actions, but that for them, street art is becoming more of an ideology rather than a particular aesthetic style. In other words, street art is not restricted to any medium, format, school, or technique; but instead, is centered around messages. Moral Vandals: Street Artists in the service of Change, examines the ways in which contemporary street artists have shifted their practices from traditional, vandalistic graffiti to more socially based practices in order to effect more immediate and direct change. These artists dispel the notion of street and graffiti artists as vandals to reveal an ethical dimension of street art practice. This dissertation moves beyond the examination of simple, territorial interventions such as wall painting to examine artists who work with global communities, sometimes much like aid workers, but in the service of their art practice, which has social and moral aims. The traditional ethos of this contemporary street art has evolved into a complex matrix encompassing the ethics of philanthropy, social work, and colonization. This necessarily gives rise to many ethical issues and repercussions. This dissertation aims to reorient the reputation of street art as an outsider practice and situate it as a global contemporary art practice that not only has very real linkages to the high art world, but also aims to better society.

VIGNETTES ON CATEGORIZATION AND AESTHETICS is a multi-tiered series of entries weaving history in relation to storytelling, science fiction, poetry, art and visual culture, akin to the “constellation thinking” of Walter Benjamin. Various methodological approaches are used to illuminate how systems of categorization influence aesthetic discourse. The project jumps historical time periods and styles, a problem navigated by focusing on vignettes as instances and experiential cases that relate together the “cacophony” of history and aesthetics. The concept of “cacophony” is used in line with Jodi Byrd’s argumentation in The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, as a means to connect divergent histories and stories. Entry 1: Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes was edited by several of the participants in the narrative, a move towards personal accountability in writing outside of the self. The first entry serves as an introduction to the subsequent two entries and their attendant themes, Entry 2: The aaaccc(k) is a healing correspondence co-authored with Angela Jennings and Entry 3: Almost Invisible Pleasures is a conversation with a collection of drawings and writings by Suzanne Herrera Li Puma. Entry 1 takes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a point of departure regarding cultural and social othering as a broader issue, elaborating throughout how social othering relates to aesthetics. Other vignettes detail structures, such as Marxist thought, the history of Western ideas like the Great Chain of Being and institutions such as the College Art Association as participants in knowledge construction within aesthetics and art history. Each “idea” is analyzed as a participant in cultural tendencies, extending to how artists become authentic hierarchicalized producers of culture, or are excluded altogether by ongoing structures of separation. Systems of connoisseurship and validation belie how subjective preference precedes canonization, with language implicated as a tool for serving dominance or subverting it. Language is approached as capable of causing further rifts despite aiming to clarify or communicate. Concepts that decenter and shift emphasis, such as “liquid blackness,” a research collective and a term used by Black Studies scholars, “polysemy,” a term for multiple meanings used by Christopher Bracken, “haunting” used by C Ree, Eve Tuck and Avery Gordon to denote the incommensurability of history as a secure presence, “shapeshifting” and “forcefields,” coined in collaboration with Sarah Dziedzic and Suzanne Herrera Li Puma, are invoked towards hopeful futures where methodologies will melt, combine and start anew. Sneaking in through the fissures of polemics are interspersed fragmentary quotes, speculative science fiction narratives, poetic asides, all used as potential resistances to dominant paradigms expressed through content as well as deviation from singular writing styles. The aim of this project is to point to tensions within disciplinary narratives that trouble the stability of monolithic canonical histories. This seeking of hybridity and fragmentation as a methodology, admittedly troubled and imperfect, seeks to continue what Byrd describes as “opening doors” on the complex issues relevant to how colonialism, diaspora, cultural othering, politics, social life, phenomenology and aesthetics are inextricably interwoven. A variety of paths are presented for the reader, using words as personal and collective acts that trouble the canons with poetry, truncated stories, weird asides, and various other discordant tunes.

This dissertation centers on the formation of socialist lianhuanhua in China in the 1950s and 1960s. Lianhuanhua is a special genre of comics that was widely welcomed by urban readers in China from the early twentieth century to the mid-1980s. Aiming to reform readers into socialist subjects, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) instrumentalized lianhuanhua for didacticism and propaganda. Following the Stalinist dictum of “socialist realism,” which mandated proletariat art to be “national in form and socialist in content,” lianhuanhua artists selected pictorial elements from European academic painting, folk art, and Chinese classical painting from different regions and periods in history to create an effective visual language that answered both the Party-State’s demand and urban readers’ taste. The dissertation first illustrates the CCP’s tactics for reforming the lianhuanhua industry in Shanghai in terms of production, circulation, and censorship. In the subsequent chapters, I examine three iconic lianhuanhua published by Shanghai People’s Art Press, including Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai’s Sun Wukong Thrice Beats the White-Bone Demon, He Youzhi’s Great Changes in a Mountain Village, and Ding Binzeng and Han Heping’s Railroad Guerrillas, to inquire into the following questions: What innovations and conventions were adopted by artists in the making of lianhuanhua? How have lianhuanhua artists recycled, reinterpreted, and redeployed cultures through time? How do these various reuses reflect their particular political, social, and cultural contexts? By dissecting the visual components in the lianhuanhua, I explore how socialist realism, as an aesthetico-political project, evolved and adjusted to fit the conditions in China after its introduction from the Soviet Union. The research adds to recent studies of Chinese socialist culture that question the common perception of socialist realism as a method imposed by the state and therefore is rigid, monolithic, and monotonous. In this research, I demonstrate lianhuanhua making as a complex process that involves negotiations between high politics, cultural policies, the target readers’ preferences, and artists’ understanding of their task of creating new works for a new nation.

My project examines the effect of the inter-Intifada period (1993-2000) on Palestinian art produced by artists living in Palestine and Israel. I argue that political disillusionment resulting from the failed Oslo Accords (1993) and outbreak of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), increased globalization, and the rise of the Internet during this period altered Palestinian mentality regarding the occupation, Palestinian government, and daily life. Moreover, I contend that this shifting mentality is articulated in the art produced in the post-Second Intifada period. My chapters examine three thematics wherein this shift can be seen.

The first chapter investigates changing notions of Palestinian time from one of stagnant waiting in the hope of a return to an idealized past to a waiting wherein time gives the illusion of forward motion, while in reality events recur cyclically without any real progress. This is evident in post-Second Intifada Palestinian art in the use of repeated imagery in video and film, the insertion of historic imagery into a contemporary context, and the image of the circle. Chapter 2 examines the presence of humor in post-Second Intifada Palestinian art. While art had previously served to promote Palestinian nationalist ideology, disillusionment with the possibility for peace or progress in the wake of the failed Oslo Accords resulted in the rise of dark humor as a means of artistic critique and expression of frustrations with the realities of daily Palestinian life. The final chapter investigates the expansion of critique among Palestinian artists from one that focuses solely on the occupation, to a self-reflexive critique. This chapter consists of three parts, each of which investigates a different critique: political (the actions of Palestinian leaders and their use or sacrifice of the arts in service of the resistance), religious (the rise and influence of conservative Islam), and gender/sexuality (Arab masculinity and homosexuality). Each of the thematics discussed in my project interacts and overlaps in artists' works to reveal how Palestinian attitudes about their daily lives and the potential for the future have shifted after the failure of Oslo.

This dissertation brings together four case studies of U.S.-based choreographers to present and analyze various aspects of utopian artistic practices from conception to process to performance. Anna Halprin, Deborah Hay, luciana achugar, and Miguel Gutierrez are discussed together for the first time to draw connections and form a history that sheds light on artistic goals. I examine dance practices as ideologies inscribed onto the bodies of dancers and disseminated to the public not just as artistic production but as social choreographies. Each choreographer’s ideals around how the body ought to move and behave are examined as “utopian” for their proposal of an alternative, better way of being. The term “utopia” implies a striving-toward and comes from a conversation in Dance, Theater, and Performance Studies to which this dissertation contributes.

From extensive experiential research, I put forth four distinct arguments about how utopian practices function. Chapter 1 explores Halprin’s effort to create peace in the world through her practice. Chapter 2 examines Hay’s goal to de-choreograph the body. Chapter 3 focuses on achugar, who aims to remove visual and physical boundaries between dancers and among audiences. Chapter 4 looks at Gutierrez’s aggressive self-expression through the lens of queerness. Coming out of the post-modern tradition, Halprin and Hay set the stage for the utopian practices achugar and Gutierrez propose in the 21st century. This study expands the conversation around the value of an embodied practice and contributes to an understanding of choreographic intent.