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Title
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Process art and pictoriality: Reading the work of Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson.
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Identifier
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AAI3148718
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identifier
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3148718
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Creator
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Paice, Kimberly Ann.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jack Flam
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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 study examines the practice and theory of process art of American artists Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson during the period of 1967 to 1972. It provides a sustained analysis of the ways that painting and vision became subject to critique in process art. The purpose therein is to redress critical traditions in which process art remains inadequately theorized and its concerns, undistinguished from those of painting, Minimalism, and picturesque tradition. The continuous themes in this study are: process art's opposition to the authority and hermeticism of painting and formalism, the ways that perspective and vision became objects of political struggles in process art, and the indictment of nontropic, alienated, commodity-like, and experientially conservative aesthetic form by Morris, Serra, and Smithson.;These artists celebrate the unstable gaps between everyday gestures and artmaking, critical and scientific statements, and manual and intellectual labor. Their entropic and disorienting works underscore breakdowns in the perceived homogeneity of the manufactured environment. Their process art's creative and sacrificial materiality, hinges on the situational qualities of knowledge, anti-vision, perceptual dissonance, anti-composition, and dedifferentiation. Specific sources addressed in this study are: the writings of Georges Bataille, the Beats, Anton Ehrenzweig, Morse Peckham, and George Kubler, scientific studies of cognition, learning, and gestures, models of perception and visual perspective, and modes of travel.;The analytic focus on operational discourse makes process art meaningful and influential. It remains more relevant to understanding process art than the shared procedural emphases that have stymied traditional explications of this work. While Morris Serra, and Smithson insist on their work's abstraction, they also emphasize the ways in which their works are read, made, and used like everyday objects. Their works make political, semiotic, and perceptual demands of spectators by bringing junctures of the everyday, the postindustrial landscape, and labyrinths of the city to the fore. The "landscape mode," which emerged in process art, is neither purely abstract nor conventionally picturesque. In a volatile milieu, it exposes the power and values that are assigned to landscape through discourse, the administration of resources, critical, perceptual, and visual vantage, militarism, taboo, trespassing, and vagabondage.
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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.