Browsing by Subject "Monuments"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Digging through time: psychogeographies of occupation
(2015-12) Simblist, Noah Leon; Reynolds, Ann Morris; El-Ariss, Tarek; Mulder, Stephennie; Di-Capua, Yoav; Flaherty, George
This dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region and its impact on the present, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The historiographical impulse has a particular resonance for artists making work about the Middle East, a political space where competing historical narratives are the basis for disagreements about sovereignty. I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv, Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians. As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history. Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments. At the core of each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive opportunity to work through the ideologies embedded within the psychogeographies of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Within these conversations and other aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia. They react to this challenge by engaging collective memory, producing counter-memories and, in some cases, produce counterpublics.
Escultura y espacio público: Lima 1850-1879
(1994-09) Majluf, Natalia
If stones could argue : the rhetoric of Covenanter memory, media and monuments
(2016-05-06) Steel, Connie Michelle; Longaker, Mark Garrett, 1974-; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Barchas, Janine; Boyle, Casey; Hoad, Neville W
Through the cold, stony context of their relationship to human remains, cemetery monuments blur the disciplinary borders between English, linguistics, archaeology, history, architecture, art history and religious studies through the mixing of language and visual arts into integrated attention-focusing texts. From the Reformation into the Victorian era, intergenerational changes to Scottish Covenanter monumentality reveal the dynamic nature of Presbyterian evangelical rhetoric and Scottish media usage. This project engages with rhetorical genre studies to demonstrate how Scottish epitaphic genres question the cohesiveness of British identity and the assumptions of English departments about what constitutes text, genre, and media. The dissertation makes links between conversations in historiography, memory studies and rhetorics of public display through three case studies of kairos, style and exigency: Robert Wodrow’s History of the Sufferings (1721), The Margaret Wilson Monument (1859) and the Valley Cemetery, Stirling, Scotland. Approaching argumentation as a techne of focusing attention, the project expands existing conversations about plain style, and the later “bourgeois” styles by posing memorability as a special component of monumental style. Wodrow’s foundational history of the ‘Killing Times’ illustrates the role of martyrologies as monuments and reveals their common exigencies with cemeteries. Turning to landmark monuments in the Valley Cemetery in Stirling, the project shows how Wodrow’s martyr histories were re-recorded in stone. The Margaret Wilson Monument’s form, content and gender highlight the challenges of extremes of kairos, mobile readership and ambiguous authorship in outdoor rhetorics of display. The project then looks past the epitaphs to the cemetery through the lens of Foucault’s heterotopia. The Stirling Valley Cemetery demonstrates the way heterotopia work as media of in this case making an evangelical commentary on the changing status of the Sabbath in the Victorian period. The project ends with an epilogue looking at challenges of digitizing landmark monuments and the potential of online social databases for displaying cultural memory in a short case study of Robert Wodrow’s grave page in FindaScottishgrave.com.
Sculpting Turkish nationalism : Atatürk monuments in early republican Turkey
(2006-12) Gur, Faik; Marcus, Abraham, 1948-
Today every city and town in Turkey has at least one monument of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), the founding father of the Turkish Republic, located in one of its most important public spaces. All private and state primary, middle and high schools have at least one bust of him in front of which students have to line up every Monday morning and Friday evening to chant the national anthem. Apart from statues and busts, his portraits and pictures are hung in every office in state buildings and in most private offices. His name has been bestowed upon boulevards, parks, stadiums, concert halls, bridges, forests, and, more importantly, on educational institutions. Among these many public expressions, the monumental statues of Atatürk erected before he died exemplify one of the most effective instruments of the elite-driven modernization in early republican Turkey (1923-1938). These monuments reveal the ways in which Atatürk and his political elites attempted to establish a modern and secular sense of identity as well as a new official public culture and official history, mainly constructed through Atatürk’s Nutuk, the speech which he delivered in 1927. Nutuk was Atatürk’s public defense of his policies during the military and diplomatic struggle for independence in Anatolia between 1919 and 1923. It has not only become a remarkable and extremely influential text both in Turkish and foreign historiographies but also has been the source for visualizing the official interpretation of the struggle for independence in Turkey to the present day. Thus, all the monuments of the early Republic stand for such orthodox interpretations of history, emerging defensive Turkish nationalism and national identity while symbolizing the closure of the predating Ottoman Empire. Codified within this new national identity are the elements of secularization and racial homogenization of the society, a western cult of the “Orient” in the Orient, and an effort to control and limit the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam in the official public culture of early republican Turkey.
Uncertain times : contingency & Black temporal imaginations
(2022-05-16) Moore, Nathan Alexander; Young, Hershini Bhana; Livermon, Xavier; Smith, Cherise; Walter, Patrick F.; Hill, DaMaris B.
This dissertation is concerned with rethinking spatial temporality through diasporic speculative practices. This dissertation will explore how Black diasporic artists use speculative arts practices to negotiate their relationship to the past. Instead of the past being behind us, these artists insist on reformulating how we think about time to address the lingering presence of past violence that is never gone. I look specifically at Blackness, queerness and non-normative gender formations in order complicate the notion of history and the past that appears in these speculative practices. These speculative practices include visual art, performances and novels from the late 20th to early 21st century to restructure how we think about diasporic place and time. This dissertation will focus on the various theorizations of time that appear in these speculative practices as I think these are essential to articulating how Black artists conceive of time against narratives of linear progression.