Spanning the archive and the museum : Timothy O'Sullivan's King Survey photographs

Originally created as documents of the government surveys in the 1860s-1870s, Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs were rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century by museum curators, artists and scholars, many of whom argued for O'Sullivan's artistic genius, uniqueness and his proto-modernist compositions. His early champions were the artist Ansel Adams and curator Beaumont Newhall, but others argued for the aesthetic importance of his work at the end of the century, including scholars Joel Snyder, Robin Kelsey, and Museum of Modern Art curator Peter Galassi. In the early 1980s, Rosalind Krauss argued against the notion that O'Sullivan should be included in the photographic art canon in her 1982 article, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View" in Art Journal. This thesis focuses on the changing reception and the functions of O'Sullivan's photographs by an examination of different examples of one photograph, O'Sullivan's "Sioux Hot Springs", held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York), the National Archives Still Picture Unit (College Park, Maryland), and the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York).

Spanning the archive and the museum : Timothy O'Sullivan's King Survey photographs

Originally created as documents of the government surveys in the 1860s-1870s, Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs were rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century by museum curators, artists and scholars, many of whom argued for O'Sullivan's artistic genius, uniqueness and his proto-modernist compositions. His early champions were the artist Ansel Adams and curator Beaumont Newhall, but others argued for the aesthetic importance of his work at the end of the century, including scholars Joel Snyder, Robin Kelsey, and Museum of Modern Art curator Peter Galassi. In the early 1980s, Rosalind Krauss argued against the notion that O'Sullivan should be included in the photographic art canon in her 1982 article, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View" in Art Journal. This thesis focuses on the changing reception and the functions of O'Sullivan's photographs by an examination of different examples of one photograph, O'Sullivan's "Sioux Hot Springs", held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York), the National Archives Still Picture Unit (College Park, Maryland), and the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York).

Toward an Anti-Racist and Anti-Colonial Post-Internet Curriculum in Digital Art Education

This chapter examines how reframing post-internet art through anti-racist and anti-colonial lenses in digital art curriculum can cultivate critical and transformative artist practices for students. Anti-racist and anti-colonial approaches offer frameworks for critically analyzing identity, ideology, and power relations toward decentering the art canon and qualitatively shifting curriculum toward critical dialogues and social action. Through a retrospection of the author’s own active and ongoing transformation as teacher, as well as through an analysis of artist Tabita Reziare’s post-internet practice, this article builds a pedagogical foundation for students to generate their own critical consciousness in learning and artmaking through a digital art curriculum.

The National, the Diasporic, and the Canonical: The Place of Diasporic Imagery in the Canon of Israeli National Art

This article explores Jerusalem-based art practice from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing particularly on the German immigrant artists that dominated this field in that period. I describe the distinct aesthetics of this art and explain its role in the Zionist nation-building project. Although Jerusalem’s art scene participated significantly in creating a Jewish–Israeli national identity, it has been accorded little or no place in the canon of national art. Adopting a historiographic approach, I focus on the artist Mordecai Ardon and the activities of the New Bezalel School and the Jerusalem Artists Society. Examining texts and artworks associated with these institutions through the prism of migratory aesthetics, I claim that the art made by Jerusalem’s artists was rooted in their diasporic identities as East or Central European Jews, some German-born, others having settled in Germany as children or young adults. These diasporic identities were formed through their everyday lives as members of a Jewish diaspora in a host country—whether that be the Russian Empire, Poland, or Germany. Under their arrival in Palestine, however, the diasporic Jewish identities of these immigrants (many of whom were not initially Zionists) clashed with the Zionist–Jewish identity that was hegemonic in the nascent field of Israeli art. Ultimately, this friction would exclude the immigrants’ art from being inducted into the national art canon. This is misrepresentative, for, in reality, these artists greatly influenced the Zionist nation-building project. Despite participating in a number of key Zionist endeavours—whether that of establishing practical professions or cementing the young nation’s collective consciousness through graphic propaganda—they were marginalized in the artistic field. This exclusion, I claim, is rooted in the dynamics of canon formation in modern Western art, the canon of Israeli national art being one instance of these wider trends. Diasporic imagery could not be admitted into the Israeli canon because that canon was intrinsically connected with modern nationalism.

Japanese Ceramics

From its inception in the late 19th century up to the 1970s, modern scholarship in Japanese ceramics was largely bifurcated into archaeology-based studies of pre- and early-historical wares and art-historical investigations of wares from later periods. The former relied on stratigraphic and typological methods. Extensive excavations began in the 1920s, and within two decades a chronology of prehistoric pottery up to the 3rd century had been established for all of the main islands. Successive generations of archaeologists have built on that foundation to create what must be the most complex prehistoric pottery classification system in the world. The efforts of art and craft historians, on the other hand, drew from premodern descriptions of local industries, and especially from the traditions of connoisseurship and collecting developed in the tea ceremony, which focused on form and provenance in a select group of utensils produced or collected in Japan. From the 1910s, influenced by Western aesthetics, the old hierarchy expanded into a “ceramic art” canon that included under- and overglaze decorated wares, notably in porcelain. Supported by a postwar enthusiasm for Japanese traditional culture and development-driven archaeology, ceramics as both art and artifact received broad exposure in exhibitions and publishing both domestically and overseas. Bridges between the archaeological and art-historical approaches appeared in the last two decades of the 20th century with the acceleration of kiln- and user-site excavations. With access to staggering amounts of information on how ceramics of all periods were made, traded, and used, art historians now embrace the findings if not the actual methods of the archaeologist. At the same time, mirroring trends in Western studies of material culture, Japanese ceramics studies as a whole have become more self-reflexive and context-sensitive, and now include critical inquiry into identity-making, collecting, consumer demand, and regionality. Scholarly interest in modern (post-1868) ceramics has also increased considerably since the mid-1990s. Japanese-language literature in every aspect of this field is vast, but here those contributions are limited to reference works, benchmark publications, and select topics that are not covered in English or other Western languages; when English is included in those works, it is noted in the respective entry.

Conceptualizing the Past in Museum Exhibitions of Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern Art

Should Egypt be exhibited as part of the ancient Near East? This chapter considers the museological place of objects that cannot currently be accommodated in either the Egyptian or ancient Near Eastern canons. First, the chapter broadly defines the traits shared by objects in the Egyptian art canon and argues that museum displays have been primarily responsible for its formation. Then a selection of exhibitions that have incorporated Egyptian material with that of the Near East and traditional African art are considered in order to demonstrate the benefits of an international approach to display. The conclusion is that, as a powerful technology of knowledge production, a curatorial vision that integrates cross-cultural and international strategies into the display of permanent collections would encourage a broadening of the types of objects included in regional and global canons.

Between the Art Canon and the Margins: Historicizing Technology-Reliant Art via Curatorial Practice

This article explores curatorial practice that has technology-reliant works at its epicentre, arguing that for an efficient methodology to historicize the latter there needs to be a reconfiguration of the curatorial scope and a holistic approach to viewing and documenting exhibitions. Based on theoretical research and install decisions of recent years, the ways in which curatorial practice can be reconfigured within the art canon to inform art history, as well as to accommodate developments in exhibition practices are examined.