Education - Theses Register | Irish Georgian Society

Changing Perspectives, Altering Perceptions: Picturing the Victorian London Street as Narrative Space

Simon Knowles
University College Cork
Faculty of Arts and Celtics Studies' Department of History of Art
2011
PhD

Subject: Painting
Country: England
Period: 19th Century

This thesis considers the many ways in which the crowded and contested London thoroughfare functioned as an urban signifier during the Victorian Period. By focusing on the discrete spaces of the real street, its location within the city, and upon the occupants and activities operating within its precinct, this thesis will argue for a synergy between the real and the represented street whereby the latter responded to the experience of the former. The street will be considered in three forms: the real street, experienced as social space; the described street, re-constructed in text; and the depicted street, re-constructed as image. Focusing primarily on the second half of the nineteenth century, the chronological framework of this thesis begins in 1851, when the conflict between the instrumental and social function of the street reached a new degree of intensity as a result of the crowds visiting the Great Exhibition. It concludes in 1900, allowing the incorporation of two areas of visual practice that are normally studied in isolation but which overlap chronologically: Victorian genre painting and the slightly later practice of Whistler and the London Impressionists, normally situated and evaluated within the context of Modernism. The principal theoretical framework of this thesis will be a socio/historical approach, utilizing, as part of this methodology, the reciprocal relation between image and text. This analytical tool is used as means to investigate the correlation between the real street and the street in its represented form, measuring the extent to which the latter provided a means to stabilize the experience of the former.

From Mars to Kassandra: the memorialisation of World War I in the work of Otto Dix.

Ann Murray
University College Cork
Faculty of Arts and Celtics Studies' Department of History of Art
2018
PhD

Subject: Painting
Country: Germany
Period: 20th Century

This thesis argues that the memorialisation of World War I in the work of German artist and soldier Otto Dix (1891-1969) challenged Germany’s prevailing social and political attitudes to war and militarism, demanding action against growing public support for militarist politics in the late Weimar Republic. Scholarship has dwelt on the art-historical context of Dix’s war pictures but not their interaction with the socio-political context, specifically in Dresden, where Dix worked, and where numerous extreme right-wing cultural and political groups were active. The thesis focuses on some battlefield pictures and two triptychs, Metropolis (1928) and War (1929 1932) relating them to the broader visual culture of war in order to assess Dix’s strategies as a transgressive commemorative artist. The relationship between Dix and Dresden’s extreme right-wing groups has been largely overlooked; yet, as the thesis reveals, the extreme Right’s negative reception of Dix’s work significantly complicates the terms by which his art is understood. Employing the methods of the social history of art, the thesis establishes the meaning of these works within their social, political and artistic context. Chapter I reconstructs Dix's first public showing in a soldiers’ art exhibition in Dresden in 1916 in order to trace the artist’s development as an incisive memoriographer of war. Chapter II treats nationalist art, artists and extreme right-wing criticism in Dresden in exploring the provocative nature of Dix’s appropriation and adaptation of the traditional styles and techniques lauded by the extreme Right. Chapter III looks at the role of the triptych Metropolis in catalysing right-wing art criticism during a major exhibition in Dresden in 1928. The final chapter focuses on the relative failure of the triptych War as antithetical to militarist culture, as based on the quantity and quality of its reception at the Prussian Academy in 1932.

Pedem Referens: Art Historical Memory and the Analogue in the Work of Tacita Dean, Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer

Kirstie North
University College Cork
Faculty of Arts and Celtics Studies' Department of History of Art
2016
PhD

Subject: Film and Photography
Period: 21st Century

This thesis explores the new art historical turn in contemporary art through close engagement with three British artworks. These are Tacita Dean’s, Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), 2002, Jeremy Millar’s, The Man Who Looked Back, 2010, and Lucy Skaer’s, Leonora, 2006. Each of these artworks combines an art historical agenda with a celebration of the specificities of analogue film and photography in the context of our digital age. This thesis combines twentieth century photographic theory from Roland Barthes, André Bazin and Walter Benjamin, among others, with the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in order to argue that the indexical qualities of analogue film and photography place the medium in close proximity to the Lacanian Real. In its obsolescence the analogue’s language of both touch and loss is heightened. Each chapter of this thesis explores a different aspect of the Real in relation to specific attributes of the analogue, such as its propensity for archiving cultural traumas, its receptiveness to chance, and its proximity to death.

Nancy Spero: Pain and Politics, 1966-1976

Rachel Warriner
University College Cork
Faculty of Arts and Celtics Studies' Department of History of Art
2016
PhD

Subject: Painting
Country: U.S.A
Period: 20th Century

The ten-year period that started with Nancy Spero’s War Series (1966-70) and ended with the completion of Torture of Women (1974-6) were of vital importance to the development of this key figure of feminist art. This was the moment when Spero turned her focus to politics, departing from a practice that was concerned with personal disaffection, instead focusing on profoundly social concerns. Essential to this evolution is a focus on pain. From the War Series through the Artaud Paintings (1970-71), Codex Artaud (1971-2), and Torture of Women, pain, both internal and external, was imagined in multiple forms. In Spero’s explorations of the theme, pain becomes metaphoric of the experience of women living under patriarchy, an amorphous but still profoundly disabling sensation that attacks both body and mind. This thesis explores Spero’s use of physical pain during moment of feminist art’s emergence, seeing it as a political metaphor for the way in which patriarchy invisibly controls and undermines women. Framed broadly by the question of art's relationship with politics during this turbulent period of anti-war and feminist activism, this thesis closely examines the way in which an analogy to pain figures the body in the work in complex terms, pursuing an ideological ambition through recourse to feeling.

Education Theses Register —University College Cork / Ph.D.

Changing Perspectives, Altering Perceptions: Picturing the Victorian London Street as Narrative Space

From Mars to Kassandra: the memorialisation of World War I in the work of Otto Dix.

Pedem Referens: Art Historical Memory and the Analogue in the Work of Tacita Dean, Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer

Nancy Spero: Pain and Politics, 1966-1976

Education Theses Register —
University College Cork / Ph.D.