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Abstract:
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This dissertation examines the work of artists Vija Celmins , Beryl Korot , and Lee Lozano . I illustrate how these underrepresented artists , working from the mid -1960s to the mid -1970s , used new technologies to develop the relationships between media and what I call the ordinary - -elements of daily experience that form more of a chronicle than a narrative . In an effort to move away from the emotionalism of abstract expressionism and the rigidity of formalist painting , these artists experimented with photography , drawing , performance , and video art . New approaches to various media allowed artists to use facts , evidence , and data as an artistic refiguration of the experience of life . In Chapter 1 , I study the early work of Vija Celmins to argue that her paintings and drawings engage data , a type of information that is verifiable and understandable in and of itself . Celmins depicts images through a translation of media , from the photograph to the carefully mapped out graphite drawing . Instead of producing meaning through narrative , Celmins engages the facts of our ordinary world by provoking the act of looking . In Chapter 2 , I discuss the video installation Dachau 1974 by Beryl Korot . This multichannel video presents a concentration camp as an everyday tourist site , devoid of emotion . By reading Dachau 1974 alongside cybernetic theories by writers such as Norbert Weiner and Marshall McLuhan and by discussing the media of video at its earliest incarnation , I contend that this work approaches information directly as process . It is in the accumulation of imagery through the twenty -two minutes of the video that the viewer is able to discern the structure of the work and experience history in time . In Chapter 3 , I examine the journals and art -life pieces of Lee Lozano . I argue that once data (Celmins ) and processing (Korot ) occur in information systems , so too does change . Lozano harnesses change in the embodiment of her life as work and in the creation of her constantly shifting identity as an artist . In my conclusion , I contend that while information may work within the realm of the everyday , ordinary life , its very existence allows for illumination . That is , the facts of the world rendered through information processing can be another artistic experience . |