Department of Visual Art and Art History

When one examines porcelain, it is often the imagery that is privileged, whereas color is relegated to the background as a decorative element used to enhance the design. This paper will attempt to counter this perception by arguing for the importance of color in Cizhou, Longquan celadon, and Jingdezhen blue and white wares produced in the Yuan dynasty under Mongol rule. It will examine these ware types in the socio cultural and economic context of the time period, paying special attention to the key colors in these three ware types. In this paper I will argue that color has the ability to retain meaning and connotations that have cultural significance. At the same time, unlike imagery and pictorial designs, it more readily absorbs and represents new concerns and tendencies, whether cultural or economic. For this reason, this paper will stress the importance of color, demonstrating that it is worthy of standing alone as a defining feature of a piece of porcelain rather than being relegated to the visual peripheries upon examination.

The work of iconic Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha has long been a source of fascination for its appealing aesthetic qualities, yet there has been little in the way of critical analysis of his work. Considering that Mucha is most famous for the commercial posters he produced around the turn of the century, all of which featured a woman as their subject, this results in a gap in the academic literature that overlooks the fact that it is arguably the women who are the real “product” being advertised. This paper focuses on one of Mucha’s iconic posters, the 1896 poster for JOB cigarette papers, the first of two Mucha produced. It argues that femininity is performed in Mucha’s poster the way that Judith Butler describes in her article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” as the female subject wears modernity like a skin and performs freedom without truly being a liberated woman.  After contextualizing Mucha’s JOB poster in the social and economic climate of fin de siècle Paris, the paper will speak to the complex role women played in nineteenth-century society, as companies were slowly beginning to advertise more specifically towards women, despite the persistent restrictions of patriarchal society. Similarly, I will discuss to the emergence of posters and the debate between their commercial versus their artistic value. I will then look at images of smoking women around this time period, comparing the poster to Mucha’s 1898 JOB poster and to the 1898 JOB poster created by Jane Atche, in order to consider how the highly sexualized and self-absorbed woman in Mucha’s 1896 poster can come across as modern but would have been scandalous at the time. Finally, I will focus on three peculiar details in the image — the figure’s hair, the halo-like O around her head, and the way her knee protrudes outside of the decorative frame — in order to demonstrate not only that the female subject send mixed messages to the viewer, but also that she is more akin to a statue, a form of dehumanization that is escalated by the mechanical reproduction of the poster medium.

This paper focuses on the work of contemporary French artist Marguerite Humeau, specifically her 2018-19 exhibition “Birth Canal” and her 2016-17 exhibition “FOXP2.” Building on Surrealism’s interest in subverting the viewer’s notion of the real, the two exhibitions expand and reimagine the relationship between Woman, Nature, and the automaton. Humeau’s work makes the viewer question their understanding of gender, particularly whether behaviours that are codified as “female” in humans can easily be transposed onto the mechanical and the natural worlds. While the physical sculptures push the boundary between living and non, organic and mechanical, sound also plays an integral role in Humeau’s work by serving as the sculptures’ “voice.” In doing so, Humeau allows the nonhuman body to speak for itself, thereby undermining the Romantic notion of Nature as a sublime but passive muse.

Images as Poetry in Caroline Bergvall's Drift MARGARYTA GOLOVCHENKO W hen a reader picks up a book that includes images, chances are they are expecting the visual component of the book to inform the written one. In doing so, they instinctively characterize the images as diagrams or illustrations. This interpretation suggests that the visuals function almost as crutches that the author has included to help the reader understand the text better, whether through visualization or simply visual organization. Caroline Bergvall's Drift works against this conventional perception of images and their function. Her collection includes four sections-"Lines", "Sighting", "Maps", and "Block 16A6"-that, at first glance, appear to be "merely images"; that is, the reader acknowledges their presence and perceives them visually but does not place any greater consideration into what they are seeing. Yet Bergvall deliberately invokes this instinctive response to purposefully misguide the reader, inviting them to contemplate these four sections further. By making the reader consider the scattered placement of these four sections throughout Drift, as well as the multiple styles and "means of production", Bergvall moves away from the polarizing idea that images work either with or against the text. Instead, the images in Drift enhance. They act as translations of ideas that the reader is then meant to translate further by returning to the text and trying to establish a relationship between what they see and what they read. In doing so, Bergvall challenges the idea that images in a novel or poetry collection are literal translations across different media that should be "accurate" and therefore static in terms of what the reader is meant to "get out of it." Bergvall demonstrates that it is the fluid notion of what exactly constitutes an image, as well as the fact that they appear in a book where one might not have anticipated to find them, that allows the reader to better appreciate the text, providing them with the opportunity to step away from it and consider the role of the images in the context of the book. Before looking closer at these four sections it is important to first consider the two "typical" functions of images: as works of art and as a means of visualizing information. One can think of this as the difference between a painting that is presented as a standalone work of art and a drawing that is presented as a faithful depiction of a scene described in a novel. Johanna Drucker refers to this as the distinction between "visualizations that are representations of information already known and those that are knowledge generators capable of creating new information through their use," where the former "are static in relation to what they show and reference" while the latter "have a dynamic, open-ended relation to what they can provoke" (65). Similarly, the use of the word "image" over "illustration" or even "graphic representation" is also worth mentioning for, in the words of W.J.T. Mitchell, "[w]ith a picture or specimen, we ask, Is this a good example of X? With an image, we ask, Does X go anywhere? Does it flourish, reproduce itself, thrive and circulate?" (87). The pieces in Drift lack the features of a work of art-labels that include a title, medium, etc. under each imageyet although they appear to act like visualizations they also lack one of the key features: evidence of a clear narrative or at least some kind of action that would ground them in the "real". In this regard, Bergvall leaves the images open-ended without making them feel like they are out of place in the collection. This is done by grounding them in the thematic concerns of the poems-migration, language-without making it seem like the reader is meant to strictly move back and forth between text and image through close reading.

The  unicorn  is  a  fantastical  creature  that  has  captivated  the  Western  imagination  since  the  ancient Greeks, although the familiar iconography of the unicorn was consolidated around the Medieval period. Through the narratives that have been crafted for it, the unicorn acquired a  multitude  of  roles  and  meanings,  the  most  ambivalent  of  which  relate  to  the  creature’s  gender. This paper examines the way meaning and gender codes have been applied to the unicorn’s body over time without ever firmly trapping the creature in a single gender identity. The paper examines the historical examples of the unicorn’s role in Christian faith and in the Medieval trope of the Hunt of the Unicorn as Christ and as virgin, respectively. It also looks at more contemporary examples in the case of Ridley Scott’s film Legend (1985), Rebecca Horn’s wearable sculpture Unicorn/Einhorn (1970-72), and Peter S. Beagle’s Fantasy novel The Last Unicorn (1968). In so doing, this paper argues that the unicorn’s propensity to transform from divine to mortal, animal to human, male to female, make it an androgynous and queer being, even  an  ontological  “monster,”  one  that  exists  outside  of  the  human  understanding  of  the  gender binary.