Examining family portraits from white photographers in the 20th and 21st century.

This project examines Lynda Benglis’ 1971 series of poured polyurethane installations produced on-site at various museums and galleries in the United States. While Benglis’ career has often been examined in light of her involvement in feminist art practices and post-minimal sculpture, the purpose of this project is to offer an expanded consideration of the six installations as a distinct series apart from her other work. Using rarely-seen video and photographic documentation, museum exhibition records, and critical reviews, I parse the intersections among materiality, site, and process. Despite Benglis’ assertion that she was not directly involved with Process Art, my project nevertheless revisits this crucial moment in which sculpture was produced as a byproduct of an ephemeral action rather than as a permanent form.

The first chapter examines the role of documentation in framing the installations. I argue that, while on one hand, documentation flattens, obscures, or otherwise fixes in place the ephemeral objects, it also may offer a way to understand the agency of the material itself. The second chapter turns to another type of frame, which is the site in which they are produced. While many critics observed that the cantilevered pours evoke some kind of environment, I expand on the implications of the term. By situating the cantilevered pours into this significant discourse on photography and site, my project ultimately addresses the seeming disparity between sculptural permanence and ephemeral event in postwar art.

Mieko Shiomi’s creative practice extended beyond the conceptual bounds of her training and the geographic limits of her birthplace, reflecting her willingness to think outside the confines of convention. Born in Japan in 1938 and educated in music, she translated her ideas about space and time, which had genesis in her musical training, into artworks that employ the human body. Her first forays beyond music were her action poems, which she created independently around the same time other artists were writing event scores along the same lines. The first visual object she created was her Endless Box (1963-), a set of thirty-four paper boxes nested inside each other, which turns the idea of diminishing sound into diminishing space into a visual of diminishing boxes. Shiomi’s work as an experimental composer and her Endless Box put her in contact with Fluxus, the international artist collective based in New York. Her involvement with Fluxus epitomized Japanese and American cross-cultural exchange during the explosion of performance art in the sixties. During her year in New York and after she returned to Japan, she orchestrated her Spatial Poem (1965-1975), an extraordinary convergence of conceptual and material art. Shiomi’s created her art to be more than observed; she intended it to be enacted or interacted with. Performing or handling her work is an apt way of gaining knowledge about it as its corporeal aspects are central. Bodily knowledge of Shiomi’s artworks significantly expands understanding. This thesis will look at how selected artworks express Shiomi’s ideas, more closely examine them beyond their guise as Fluxus output, and, by performing, remaking and interacting with selected works, will present the greater understanding gained through these physical explorations.

This project examines the early sound works Michael Brewster produced during the beginning and mid-1970s in Los Angeles, California. Using sound to create an immersive environment was central to Brewster’s methods, and, as such, he has often been assigned the label of a “sound artist” by scholars such as Brandon LaBelle. My text refutes this position. Brewster did not think of himself as a sound artist. Instead, he conceived of himself as a sculptor working in the medium of sound. Through a close examination of previously unseen archival material, this project constructs a new history of Brewster’s methods that include how he conceived of his sculptures as being both part of and apart from their environment. Rethinking the category of sculpture, Brewster was part of the well-documented deconstruction of this institutionalized genre and the subsequent extension of sculpture’s definition that occurred throughout this period of art history. Brewster’s contribution to this expanded pluralism is his rejection of sound as an ephemeral material and, instead, his development of it as stationary and tactile form. In constructing this history, I move Brewster’s oeuvre from an isolated position within the category of sound art to a more diverse area that locates it between the aural and the visual realms.

Contemporary American photographer Catherine Opie's work Being and Having (1991) is a series of thirteen photographic extreme close-up portraits, resembling head-shots, of lesbian women wearing false mustaches, tattoos, and other stereotypical masculine accessories. This thesis proposes that this series works as a visual presence on behalf of the queer community during the threshold moment of gender destabilization. In Being and Having, Opie uses the conventional genre of portraiture to present alternatives to gender, ultimately promoting a protean understanding of identity. Both embracing and pushing against the portrait tradition, Opie turns what we assume about portraiture on its head while effectively historicizing the contemporary portrait. A mixture of documentary and conceptual photography, this series is a complex comment, at once personal and political, on the artifice of gender, the social constructions of power and questions surrounding individual identities and constructions of community.