Ordinary pictures and everyday language: Photography and *text in 1960's American art.
Item
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Title
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Ordinary pictures and everyday language: Photography and *text in 1960's American art.
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Identifier
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AAI3083689
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identifier
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3083689
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Creator
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Marks, MaryJo.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Anna Chave
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines a group of 1960's photographic-based works, frequently joined with texts, by Hollis Frampton, Edward Ruscha, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman. It explores the role that deskilling---as the intentional use of unskilled means---played in these particular works and its relation to photography in general. Photography has historically been regarded as requiring less skill than other visual arts. This accessibility has made photography an ordinary activity and an everyday object. Pierre Bourdieu's 1965 book, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, argued that photography with aesthetic aspirations distinguishes itself negatively, by refusing the features of ordinary photographic practices and the middle class tastes with which they are associated. The artists I address instead redoubled the medium's affiliations with the commonplace, using average or mundane formal devices and banal subject matter in an attempt to reconfigure the parameters of high culture and low.;The characteristics of these works most often cited include their everyday subject matter, their ordinary stylistic features, and their pragmatic approach to photography. What is rarely cited, however, are the discourses that developed around these topics at the same moment. Beginning in the later 1950's we witness a heightened attention to the everyday as an object of theoretical analysis by such writers as Bourdieu and Roland Barthes; a focus on the routines of ordinary life which marks the New Novel of the 1950's; and the revival of American Pragmatism in the early 1960's. One thing that these critical, literary, and philosophical writings shared with the art under discussion was an interest in qualities of literalness and an indifference to traditional metaphoric or metaphysical concerns of fine art. With its disregard for established aesthetic tastes, this indifferent or neutral disposition is also manifested in deskilling; it is, however, quite different from aesthetic disinterest. Literalness is also a fundamental trait of the photographic document as a seemingly objective and neutral form of representation. I will trace the history of this neutral sensibility and its allure during the 1960's for artists such as Frampton, Ruscha, Graham, and Nauman who deployed photographic mediums in ways both unremarkable and---for high art---remarkably unorthodox.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.