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This thesis posits performance for the camera, exemplified by selected practices of contemporary African American artists, as a means of exploring the construction and fixation of identities and a strategy for dismantling hegemonic conceptions of race and gender. Studying the work of Adrian Piper, Glenn Ligon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Howardena Pindell, David Hammons and Pope.L, it examines the ways in which these artists incorporate embodied performance and personal information into their practices simultaneously foreclosing autobiographical readings and challenging interpretations overdetermined by race, gender and sexuality. In these practices, the image production of performance engages in dialogues with existing representations, highlighting the limited capacity of photographic imagery - and representation more broadly - to give voice to individual positionalities and nonconformist sensibilities. Shedding light on discords between individual and group representations, especially in the wake of the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism, the artists in question gestured towards artistic explorations that decades later became codified as a novel genre of post-black art. These artists destabilised the performative agency of performing for the camera, revealing the biases and abstractions inherent to photographic and video processes. Artistic methodologies examined in this thesis deny photographic technologies of reproduction their often assumed transparency, calling into question the role of the camera as a transmitter of historical and personal truths. Finally, analyses comprising this thesis point to the use of performance-generated images as critiques of entrenched racial biases of camera technologies. This thesis constitutes an intervention into dominant theories of performance, its mediation and mediatisation, and exposes their imbrication in white, Western, neoliberal viewpoints. It argues that the selected practices offer innovative approaches to embodiment, representation, abstraction and performativity - approaches that have been overlooked in theoretical scholarship due to their overdetermination with race and ethnicity.

In a time characterised by the increasing erosion of democratic institutions, processes of depoliticisation, and the imposition of a consensual order, this PhD thesis explores different modes of engagement with cultural institutions, focusing specifically on instituting practices as a model for the reinvention of democratic politics. Building on contemporary political philosophy, post-structuralist theory, and cultural studies, it begins by analysing both dissensus, as the democratic principle that entails the never-ending redefinition of the members of the society (meaning, whose voice is heard and recognised as a legitimate partner in the debate), and antagonism, as the founding moment and constitutive element that grounds the social (in the form of the exclusions that have been eventually naturalised). It demonstrates that dissensus is an inherently aesthetico-political phenomenon that has very distinct performative and spatial characteristics, since it involves the staging of equality, the introduction of new radical imaginaries, and the recalibration of the aesthetic register. Although dissensus is considered a fleeting moment, a rapturous incident, and a disruptive event with no 'proper' place, I set out to conceptualise the possibility of instituting dissensus, claiming antagonism, and channeling them towards the democratisation of cultural institutions. This entails the attempt to envisage an open, dynamic, and self-reflective model of a "dissensual institutionality" that can safeguard the continuous inscription of a multiplicity of social demands. Drawing on my ethnographic research in Europe and the U.S., this theoretical construct is then tested out through a series of under-researched empirical cases. The examined case studies include attempts of decentering and deterritorialising hegemonic machines and mega-institutions (such as documenta 14 in Athens, which foregrounded decolonial narratives and dissident histories from the periphery); endeavours of inventing new flexible organisational arrangements (such as alter-institutions in Athens, Paris, and Bochum that introduced novel parliamentary formats and decision-making processes); and, finally, modes of critical engagement with solidified institutional structures that set out to seize, reform, or even dismantle them (such as artistic activist initiatives in the U.S. that center-staged questions of toxic philanthropy, museum sponsorship, and labour rights). My investigation of 'instituting dissensus' ends by drawing some useful conclusions on the possibilities and limitations of the respective strategies, methodologies, and practices that take place within, at the threshold of, or outside institutional structures, in the attempt to enact new egalitarian political imaginaries.

The thesis is the outcome of research that considers ontological and political conceptualisations of the notion of institution in relation to practices and discourses in the contemporary European art world and the power relations therein. The concept of 'instituent praxis', as theorised in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval's Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century (2019), is centrally employed. The thesis proposes an extended theoretical framework around this concept, taking into account the late capitalist socio-political condition and responding to aspirations for political autonomy. Τhe conceptual move from institution to instituent praxis is advocated in the belief that the second concept enables a more productive angle from which to address configurations of power in the context of contemporary art institutions and across their diversity in Europe. The first part of the thesis delineates this move from institution to instituent praxis. Chapter 1 traces definitions of institution in accounts of European (neo)avant-gardes and threads of Institutional Critique. Chapter 2 outlines instituent praxis, i.e. the collective and common creation of significations that can become rules of law. The concept's engagement with notions of power and the creation of the historically new is accentuated against other (politically transformative) understandings of institution. The analysis also expands on Félix Guattari's ideas on signification and the production of subjectivity through affect - already incubated in Dardot and Laval's definition. Chapter 3 deploys this theoretical framework and speculates on art-institutional intersections with non-art-world practice - around issues of labour organisation, managerialism, algorithmic and institutional infrastructure. In the second part (Chapters 4, 5 and 6), art-world case studies are further dissected in three thematic sets. First, discourse in the art world, in relation to Michel Foucault's notions of power and parrhesia, as well as concepts of (counter-)publics. Secondly, a geopolitically minded contribution to the discourse on experimental European art institutions. Finally, the condition of the real, as advocated by instituent praxis and portrayed in alter-, para- and mock-institutions. Overall, the analysis underlines interweavements between affect / desire and the production of meaning as rule-making; sketches the contribution of instituent praxis to political transformation; and ponders on persisting or parallel functions of power.

This thesis addresses a gap in scholarship by centering curators at often-overlooked university art institutions in the Appalachian region in order to analyze the practical applications of feminist curatorial methodologies in comparison to established feminist curatorial scholarship Three case studies focus on the Reece Museum at Eastern Tennessee State University, the Art in the Libraries initiative at West Virginia University, and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University. This study uses qualitative and anecdotal data collection methods, such as surveys and one-on-one interviews to demonstrate how feminist methodologies are employed as a theoretically informed curatorial practice, following the framework originally developed in feminist curatorial scholarship. An analysis of feminist curatorial scholarship reveals three core principles of feminist curating: institutional critique, collaboration and engagement, and inventive exhibition strategies. Data analysis found that staff at these three university institutions utilize various intersectional methodologies under the umbrella of feminist interventions when creating exhibitions in their respective institutions. The concept of "feminist curating," as understood and expressed by the staff, has evolved from traditional gender-centered approaches to address a broader scope of socio-economic inequalities as well as power dynamics within museums It is intended to serve as an entry point for further critique of self-described curatorial feminist methods and their practical implementations, in order to analyze what these strategies and practices look like, and how they are intended to affect the university community.

'Institutional critique' is a term that refers to a range of diverse artistic practices and discourses that emerged at the end of the 1960s and that continue in the present. In spite of their differences, they all share a concern with the institutional conditioning of artists and artworks. Various historicizations of institutional critique (Alberro and Stimson, 2009; Raunig and Ray, 2009; Welchman, 2006) concur that one could distinguish two 'phases': artists of the 1960s and 1970s allegedly investigated the possibilities of an escape towards an 'outside' of the art institution, whereas those of the 1990s analysed the ways in which the artistic subject reproduced the structures of the art institution. Since the beginning of the 2000s various artists and authors have revisited the histories and legacies of institutional critique. This growing interest was triggered by the perceived intensification of a process that began at the end of the 1960s; it refers to the recuperation and neutralization of artistic types of critique by what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) have called the 'new spirit' of capitalism. In this context, the Austrian philosopher Gerald Raunig and the members of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies have proposed the hypothesis that 'a new phase' of institutional critique was to emerge. However, this proposition was based less on empirical evidence, than on a 'political and theoretical necessity to be found in the logic of institutional critique' (Raunig, 2009, 3). This thesis is a response to this set of circumstances. By asking 'what are the conditions and possibilities of institutional critique?' it investigates the categories of institutional critique's logic. My main argument is that a 'phase change' of institutional critique could and should be understood through the apparatus of Derridean deconstruction. This implies a criticism of the idea that one needs to escape the art institution in order to respond to urgencies stemming from the social, economic, and political realms (Truth Is Concrete Platform, 2012). At the same time, I will also refute the idea that institutional critique is trapped in the art institution (Fraser, 2009a). Institutional critique works on the remainder and rest that necessarily escapes the instituting will and intention of defining and describing in an exhaustive manner the whatness of what (art) is (Boltanski, 2011). I show that between critique and the art institution there is an irreducible relation of symbiosis and cohabitation, and that the deconstructive logic of institutional critique allows it to be both partner and adversary, at the same time, of the art institution.

Over the past decade a range of artistic practices have emerged in and from so-called Australia that seek to work with and within art institutions to advance the urgent demands of decolonial movements. Such movements include Indigenous-led struggles for land rights (i.e., environmental justice, reparation, repatriation), epistemic/ontological justice, self-determination, trans/queer/feminist futures, and the legislation of Indigenous sovereignty. In lieu of a systematic study of these important and emergent modes of art, which respond directly to the most imminent crises of our time, this thesis focuses on strategies indebted to institutional critique in Australian contemporary art that emerge from, or in service of extra-institutional decolonial projects. What characterises these new practices, I argue, is an indifference to art institutions. Instead, they are invested in decolonised futures and decolonial worlding. The question driving this thesis, then, is why (and how) are Australian contemporary artists using strategies indebted to institutional critique to advance decolonial projects? Informed by an amalgamation of de/post-colonial theory, Indigenous theory, critical whiteness studies and intersectional (critical race/queer) feminism, this thesis engages formal, technical, and interpretive analyses of specific case studies – Rachel O’Reilly’s The Gas Imaginary (2013–2021), Richard Bell’s Embassy (2013–), Brook Andrew’s NIRIN (2020), and Bhenji Ra’s MUVA BALL (2018) – to sample this emergent art form. As these analyses illustrate, the artists examined approach similar political and aesthetic concerns in ways that reflect their often incommensurable subject positions, which attests to the diverse, yet ubiquitous, personal stakes of decolonial projects. Existing art history has not yet rigorously explored the intersection of institutional critique and decolonial practice in Australia. As such, this thesis makes a major contribution to largely Euro-American understandings of institutional critique and articulates an emergent and important field within Australian contemporary art, illuminating the urgent ways artists are putting instituting to work on decolonial projects. With this articulation, we can begin to discuss and examine what such practices might reveal about Australian contemporary art’s capacities, or incapacities, to align with decolonial movements, and the extent to which we can reimagine the role of art institutions within broader struggles toward decolonial worlding.

To ensure the financial sustainability of art making, most artists engage in paid labour outside of the time they commit to their art practice. This can often lead to conflicting demands on artists’ time, with formal paid employment in competition with a commitment to art practice. Solutions to this reality, particularly in an Australian context, are often discussed in terms of sector-wide activism or advocacy when campaigning for enforceable payment standards across the arts. While this work is vital, and progress has been made, many artists’ incomes remain below a living wage. This results in artists needing to put structural workarounds in place to ensure the survival of their practice, alongside, and not in spite of, paid employment. I respond to this context through building on the lineages of autotheory and institutional critique as articulated by Lauren Fournier, Andrea Fraser, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten and Walid Raad and the methodology of situated knowledge explored by Adrienne Rich and Donna Haraway. This practice-led research project weaves critical research about artists’ labour by David Throsby, Katya Petetskaya and Pilvi Takala with my embodied experience of being an artist-worker in the context of the office. The research engages with the work of Laura Rascaroli and Hito Steyerl to frame the video essay as a performative text that straddles non-fiction and emotion and results in a new moving image artwork and thesis, which together explore workaround strategies for artists labouring within the office environment. The project highlights and articulates how artists can subvert the tools of administration to claim time and space for their own artistic priorities within their place of work.

This dissertation examines environmental artistic practices associated with Minimalism as they appear at the Chinati Foundation/La Fundaci�n Chinati in Marfa, Texas (pop. ~1800) and traces their social and economic effects within the area. The Chinati Foundation was established in 1986 by the artist Donald Judd (1928-1994) as a contemporary art museum where artworks would be permanently installed within the pre-existing buildings and land formations of Marfa. Judd curated installations that facilitate artistic experiences inseparable from an experience of local history and everyday life. Because the Chinati Foundation was established as an alternative to forms of spectacle Judd associated with temporary exhibitions and modern art museums, focus within the dissertation is given to the curatorial tactics, architectural interventions, and forms of promotion Judd employed to support this ideal. The dissertation theorizes a trajectory from Judd’s environmental art of the 1960s to Judd’s Chinati Foundation and its incorporation of Marfa within a place-based experience economy.In the 1960s Judd inaugurated a new interest in the spatial conditions of the work of art when he created what became known as Minimalist “specific objects.” By making three-dimensional objects that utilized “given” elements, like industrial materials, algebraic formulas and geometric shapes, the meaning of the work of art could be found in its public context. Chapter one considers what it means for Judd to consider Marfa as a “given” when he makes renovations to buildings at the Chinati Foundation that align with the architectural practice known as “critical regionalism.” Chapter two considers Judd’s practice of outsourcing his artwork’s construction to fabricators with specialized knowledge; this became a precursor to the forms of distributive production Judd would undertake to build the Chinati Foundation. In chronologically tracing the construction and evolution of the foundation over a forty-four-year timespan, this chapter underscores the precarious conditions that precipitated its development and argues that it was built at the “frontier of the possible.” Chapter three connects Judd’s curatorial tactics at the foundation to the radical tradition of environmental theater, which emphasized ordinary as opposed to spectacular situations. This chapter argues, however, that by emphasizing an artistic experience grounded in the “here and now” of Marfa, the Chinati Foundation created the potential for new forms of gentrification in the area, referred to here as “settler tourism.” This dissertation advances the notion that Judd’s artistic activities since the 1960s were part of a broader tradition of environmental artmaking in which the specificity of place-based experience represented a domain of resistance to mass culture. By constructing a museum where the boundaries between art and life blur, however, Judd inadvertently made place-based artistic experiences a new product within Marfa’s emergent experience economy.

As neoliberal ideologies have dominated the past four decades we find ourselves navigating the hyperreal, a condition where images have overtaken objects, sign value has undermined material value, and distortions of the lens have colonized our vision. Within online platforms information has become flattened, inconceivable violence appears alongside inconsequential clickbait, and profit motives have excised any liberatory potential. Conspiracy and its theories run rampant as old narratives are abandoned and austerity breeds alienation. Corporate entities resort to more desperate and obscene forms of marketing logic to compete for the attention of an increasingly precarious consumer class. Bandy’s work considers these events through their material residue, brand collaborations, memetic objects, conspiratorial artifacts, and sites of occurrence. Engaging with memetic image culture, the works are unfixed. Objects and images shift form, each version further mediated than the last, pointing us towards the pleasures and perversions of an increasingly virtual world.

This paper is an autobiographical account of the writer’s experience throughout her two years of graduate study. It is a chronological, prose-poetry retelling of the events that befell her, supplemented by art and cultural theories. Eight chapters include an introduction to Allan Kaprow’s theory of avant-guard life-like art, praise for art about mundane everyday experiences, an introduction to queer archiving, an overview of the writer’s multimedia artwork, and a critical analysis of the professional academic artist persona. Misogyny in the arts, academic jargon, technical proficiency in western art modalities, and impersonal material studies are problematized. There is a call for action to include the personal, specific, and odd parts of one’s life into the field of art in order to steer away from the mute and sterile impulses of western art historical traditions. This paper concludes that art is primarily a feeling; a psychic, emotional experience—and this way, it can exist outside of art materiality and art commodity markets.

Grounded in my embodied experiences as an openly-queer faculty member at a Texas public university and drawing from Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and institutional diversity, I argue that nondiscrimination statements at Texas public universities are affective objects which serve as straightening devices on the queer bodies that they affect, even as they purport to and often do protect them. The goals of my critique are twofold: 1) to support the work of those tasked with writing revisions to these policies by offering a few practical suggestions to allow for greater enforcement of the nondiscrimination practices that these policies espouse; and, 2) to encourage further reflection on the creation, implementation, and maintenance of these policies in light of their status as living documents which have real, material consequences for the LGBTQ+ individuals who live, learn, and work in our institutions.

* “Chó bò” is the approximate Vietnamese homonym for “trouble.” Bluntly translated, “chó~bò” is a “dog~cow” or “dog~crawl.” This absurdist linguistic joke for many Vietnamese people learning English represents a capacity to make trouble. This PhD thesis comprises original research and artistic work made with my family. As people from the Vietnamese diaspora, our experiences are formed by dispersals and estrangements as settler-colonists in Australia. Our daily encounters in the realms that this thesis is focused – contemporary art, academia, and family enterprise, are folded into distinct systems of colonial power and violence. I often make work with my family in video-performance and the documentary medium. Our inter-generational, political, and language differences add to the conceptual complexity of what it means to collaborate, make art, produce archives, and confront our position as recent settler-colonisers in Australia. This thesis aims to address how our artistic collaborations utilise linguistic and archival approaches to articulate the systemic racism we encounter as people from a refugee background, but who are also embedded in the colonial infrastructures of our new home. Aligning with thinkers including Gloria Anzaldúa and her critique of coloniality, to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Hito Steyerl on minoritarian forms of translation, and Sara Ahmed on racism in the university - this thesis describes how collaborations with my family can trouble the contradictions of colonial power enacted on our human relationships. Reconnecting with individual members of my family through art, I have gained a better understanding of my language and culture, as well as finding important artistic and political connection to my peers. Collaborating with my family has forced me to rub against the researcher-participant/research subject binary, the archival visibility of being invisible, the rhetoric of institutional inclusion, and the weight of being displaced and displacing colonisers on this continent. The work we have produced together methodologically uncovers and critiques the opaque confrontations of institutional power, racism, and colonial violence embedded in the everyday. As a family, we continue to make uncomfortable pronunciations like “chó bò,” producing the epistemic trouble needed to face the colonial realities of our resettlement. ARTWORK WEBSITE: https://chobotrouble.com/

The artwork described in this thesis suggests that we consider every sensory experience an active tuning of our senses and ourselves in relation to each other and the world. Through a series of interactive sound and light installations composed of microphones, audio cables, a piano, contact speakers, wind chimes, a camera obscura, a sound score, and the body of the artist’s car, this work emphasizes the interrelated nature of human existence and experience within the many contexts of a given site. Each work suggests reflection on the many systems in which our perceptions are embedded socially, physiologically, and phenomenologically. Each work is tuned to human presence in relation to context, specifically the UCSD MFA Main Gallery and the convention of the thesis itself.As installation of this exhibition was made impossible by the COVID-19 pandemic, this document outlines the aforementioned exhibition as a score to be realized and also describes an ongoing photo series, live binaural performance, and site-specific music performance made in the artist’s home and broadcast online during the “shelter in place” mandate. These works parallel core conceptual trajectories from the thesis: reorienting perspectives on the overlooked aspects of home and everyday space, and toward the significance of listening and sincere experience in relation to site, place, and others. This work strives to sensitize every aspect of embodied experience to the poetics of the familiar.

This dissertation intervenes in antiracist scholarship’s recent trend of acknowledging/openly critiquing whiteness as primary means to dismantle white supremacy in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy (Ratcliffe, Inoue). I use intersectional Black Feminist thought (Lorde, Cohen), buttressed by Black Studies (DuBois, Godwin-Woodson, Weheliye) and Afrocentric philosophy (Asante, Mazama), to interrupt that trend by examining marginalized antiracist agency, through analysis of meanings of blackness in the US vis-a-vis institutional power. In centering blackness, I apply “a critical method” that “presents a positive rather than a reactionary posture” (Asante) in mobilizing generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts that often paradoxically center whiteness. At the crux of this project is an attempt to establish a lens for reading rhetorical ecologies of race—race relations interrelated through space, culture, and context. I use that lens to undertake a case study of a large Midwestern historically white institution, Midwestern State University, during a defined cultural moment (post-Ferguson). “Black or Right” foregrounds its Black feminist rhetorical analysis with an eye toward a fracturing multiplicity through a relational methodology, building from Sara Ahmed’s work in On Being Included. In doing so, I expand Ahmed’s focus on diversity practitioners by emphasizing different positions/locations within the historically white educational institution under scrutiny while adopting differing vantage points or roles from which I analyze material: through a concentration on graduate student positionality (autoethnographist) in Chapter 2; in undergraduate student work in my antiracist composition classroom (critical pedagogue) in the following chapter; via the cultural context of historical, populist, and pedagogic meanings of #BlackLivesMatter (cultural rhetorician) in the fourth chapter; and within the praxis of policy (a combination of three previous roles) at the historically white institution in question in the fourth. This study works—through each chapter’s particular argument, and in assuming multiple relationships to those arguments—to highlight the complexity of relations between the Black body, Black resistance, and Black meaning-making at the US historically white university. I call the field’s attention to Black struggles and potentialities within that space.

Within the discipline of art history, the terms “outsider,” “folk,” or “self-taught” have been historically applied to artists who have worked outside of prevailing institutional structures. Such classifications have often marginalized the artistic production of untrained, working-class African American artists in the twentieth century, particularly in the Southern United States. My dissertation reframes the discussion of twentieth-century Southern black art as a thoroughly modern and contemporary phenomenon, grounded in particular material and social conditions that, far from isolated, have instead engendered rich artistic communities. It does so by taking as a case study the Birmingham-Bessemer School, a group of male artists working in postindustrial Alabama in the decades following the Civil Rights movement. Though excluded from the primary narratives of American modernism, the artistic production of Lonnie Holley (b. 1950), Thornton Dial (1928-2016), and Ronald Lockett (1965- 1998) contest received histories of modern artistic production, including, but not limited to: found object assemblage, relational art and performance, site-specific installation, and nonrepresentational painting. First, I examine how the formal and material characteristics of work produced by the Birmingham-Bessemer School—the use of discarded and recycled materials, assemblage-like structures, and the prevalence of yard installations—are tethered to the unique environmental conditions of the greater Birmingham area as it gave rise to industry at the turn of the twentieth century. Secondly, I discuss the entry of the School’s artistic production into the predominantly white art world through museum exhibitions beginning in the 1990s. I argue that the curatorial struggle to showcase the complex social and cultural origins of their work has prevented this form of visual expression from being fully understood within the mainstream art world, as defined by prevailing institutional structures of the museum and the art market. In an effort to historically account for the Birmingham-Bessemer School, my study integrates formal analyses of artwork, artist interviews, exhibition catalogues, and media responses through the lens of queer and critical race theory. This dissertation removes Southern black art from mythologizing narratives of isolated genius or quaint, folk production, by situating it as a challenge to longstanding regional centers of modern and contemporary art in the United States.

This dissertation analyzes the affordances of university structures based on how they value and support community engagement, focusing on common issues for community-engaged scholars. In this case study of the University of Louisville as an institution developing stronger structures for community engagement, I show that current efforts represent important starting points for how institutions support engagement, but I argue that they, and scholarly discussion about them, need to be deepened to meet the needs of engaged scholars. Toward that end, utilizing an institutional critique methodology informed by scholarship in institutional ethnography, I combine analysis of university policies and documents with stakeholder interviews in order to explore the lived realities of these policies. My findings detail how the complexities of three oft-cited challenges faced by engaged scholars—promotion and tenure, learning opportunities, and transdisciplinary projects—are often elided in scholarship, doing scholars and administrators a disservice by misrepresenting how to develop what institutional structures for engagement at a university. Through this study, I add dimension to the relatively flattened suggestions for solving the complicated problems of institutional structures for engagement by making visible a deep professionalization structure beyond just promotion and tenure policy that devalues engaged research over the course of a scholar's career (Chapter 2); showing how individual scholars gain greater understanding of engaged research through community projects that combine meta and tacit learning (Chapter 3); and exploring how organizational infrastructure for transdisciplinary research can both sponsor individual projects and build institution-wide buy-in for community engagement (Chapter 4). Altogether, I argue that making the complications of institutional structures more visible will ease their navigability for emerging scholars interested in pursuing engaged research and help established scholars locate institutional changes that can be made to better support engaged scholarship.

Buy Nathan Sharratt: A Requirement of the Masters of Fine Arts degree of Georgia State University, is a multidiscipline and multiplatform exhibition of post-institutional critique that uses my lived experience of being an academic artist pursuing a terminal art degree at a public university as its point of departure. It evaluates how societal expectations influence the formation of individual and group identity in mediated culture. Buy Nathan Sharratt challenges the hierarchy of economic and social value systems by simulating an institutional museum retrospective of super-famous and super-commoditized artist “Nathan Sharratt.” The exhibition is divided into a gallery space, a project space, a gift shop, and a virtual space. It includes art objects and performances to pose that the art experience has been compressed into a simulation, in which art serves as the trigger for social networking and virtual experiences, rather than critical assessment.

This dissertation is a study of how U.S. artist Michael Asher (1943–2012) integrated what he called a “logic of comparative relations” into his situational, site-based method from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1990s. Art historians have canonized Asher as a pivotal artist who developed the Minimalist strategy of site-specificity into a conceptual critique of art institutions. Asher is largely understood today through his early architectural interventions in the “white cube” space of galleries and museums in the late 1960s and 1970s, in which pre-existing elements found on-site were temporarily removed or rearranged to reveal the physical, social, and/or economic systems on which the commissioning art institution depended in order to function. This dissertation brings into view how Asher’s concept of site transformed by the end of the 1990s to encompass a greater range of spatial, historical, and discursive references by producing comparative relations between elements found at an institutional site to those outside of it, which in turn determined the institutional site in some foundational way.By using “comparative relations” to juxtapose elements found inside and outside an institutional site, Asher’s later works used a relational logic to redefine site as a location that could be understood through both local and global perspectives and as a point in time linked to both the past and the future. Each chapter of this dissertation is devoted to the conceptualization, production, materialization, and interpretation of one work by Asher, covering the arc of the work’s history from its inception to reception. The chapters examine the following artworks: Asher’s “Installation M�nster” (1977, 1987, 1997) for Skulptur Projekte in M�nster, Germany, a recurring exhibition of outdoor public art; his untitled work (1991) for the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego, a permanent collection of site-specific art; and his untitled installation (1998) for the 24th S�o Paulo Bienal in Brazil, an international contemporary art biennial.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1973 performance, Transfer: Maintenance of the Art Object posed a comparison between her own gendered household labor and the labor of a maintenance worker in a museum. The performance also addressed the hierarchies of maintenance work versus artistic work as well as invisible work versus public work, and is often interpreted as serving to equalize these boundaries. While hierarchies are questioned within this piece, this paper argues that the performance primarily serves to acknowledge and maintain the inevitability of these existing hierarchies within the art institution, rather than eliminate them.

Hidden In Plain Sight: La Jolla / UTC Annex, An Edge-City is an inter-textual project (combining theoretical and historical inquiry with performative intervention and documentary filmmaking) that critically investigates the developmental landscape adjacent to the UCSD campus. Via a self-implicating and performative research methodology, the project endeavors to develop a reflexive counter-genealogy and counter-ontology of what Joel Garreau might identify and gleefully laud as "Edge City" in his seminal text of the same name. The project seeks to dissect an aesthetics of banality that conveniently occludes this and such landscape's interrelationship with structural, economic, and physical violence, and by effect works to preclude any resistant cultural response thereto. More broadly, the project endeavors to intervene in a process by which certain myths of progress and exceptionalism are upheld iconographically, in order to develop a new critical hermeneutics of the physical and cultural terrain in question. The illustrated document submitted sets up a specific historical and geographic terrain for the recapitulation of enacted performances. The latter functions as a set of micro-case studies-out of and against which I have developed a set of theoretical and critical positions vis-à-vis the "Technopole" / "Edge City" urban typology in a characteristically Southern Californian context.

Blended learning, a combination of traditional face to face (F2f) instruction and computer-mediated communication (CMC), is a popular trend in many universities and corporate settings today. Most universities provide faculty members course management systems, such as Blackboard, Angel, and others as a way to organize and transmit course materials to students. In order to assess the pedagogical value of blended learning in a university-level first year composition (FYC) environment, it is necessary to view the environment through a critical lens and adequately train faculty in the need for and use of the features of the learning management software (LMS). The setting for this study is the Humanities and Communication Dept. of Florida Institute of Technology, a private university on Florida's east coast, consisting of around 6000 students. As I investigate the various pedagogical and theoretical issues of incorporating blended learning into the FYC environment, I critically examine the issues involved in implementing the program. I employ a blended research method to join the tracks of implementing a blended learning program and developing a culture of support together in the Humanities and Communication Department of Florida Tech. In examining program implementation, I use a combination of institutional critique, as advanced by Porter et al., together with an 'ecological' methodology, as outlined by Nardi and O'Day. In examining the feasibility of creating a culture of support through the design of a faculty workshop, I mainly use Richard Selfe's methodology, although elements of the previous two methods operate as well. The results of my study provide a means by which faculty members can experience and realize the benefits, while avoiding the pitfalls, of implementing CMC into a f2f classroom and provide an action plan for other researchers to utilize in their own educational settings.

This thesis is a discussion of the author’s qualitative descriptive research project, wherein the author interviewed nine graduate students in a mid-sized Midwestern university to investigate their uses of multimodality. Using the New London Group’s (2000) definition of modes and designs for meaning-making, this thesis discusses the discursive and material limitations experienced by participants in the study. The study reveals the participants’ pedagogical uses of multimodality, focusing on the affordances and constraints of working in traditional and computer classrooms. Following Porter, Sullivan, Grabill, and Miles’ (2000) institutional critique, this thesis looks at the discursive and material spaces as they relate to the authority constructs through which graduate students navigate. It indicates a need to further explore the graduate seminar as a site for multimodal learning, as participants reveal concerns about the limitations on modality both within the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and within their own program of study.

This dissertation examines distance learning within a local, particular context: UCF's English department. In order to fully examine distance learning in this specific environment, I employ institutional critique as my methodology, a rhetorical and spatial approach that allows me to map distance learning within UCF's English department. Drawing upon the work of David Harvey, I examine the experienced, perceived, and imagined spaces of distance learning in our department. Through an examination of the history of naming UCF, rhetorical analyses of institutional documents that reference technologies, analysis of survey results noting faculty attitudes and perceptions of online learning, and postmodern mapping of faculty members' perceived and ideal spaces, we can find local solutions for local problems related to distance learning.

This qualitative, participant-observation study examines the political dynamics that affect the preparation of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) by writing program administrators (WPAs) at a mid-sized public research institution, “Ridge University.” As my primary source of data, I recorded, observed, and participated in a teaching assistant preparation (TAP) seminar that prepared new teachers to teach college composition and that met twice weekly during the fall term of 2000. I also rely on data gathered in participant interviews and during GTA orientation, department meetings, graduate program colloquia, and public functions throughout the twelve-week data collection phase of this study. Building most centrally on the scholarship of James Berlin, Bruce Horner, Margaret Himley, and Laura Micciche, I represent the experiences of graduate teaching assistants and writing program administrators and analyze their material, local, political, and emotional contexts. Examining formative events that took place in the teaching assistant preparation seminar I studied, I not only interpret the different ways GTAs and WPAs responded to political approaches to writing instruction, I explore how GTAs’ and WPAs’ respective institutional political locations affected their work. Through an investigation of research data and pertinent scholarship, I argue that GTAs’ lack of institutional authority, teaching experience, and familiarity with political discourse negatively influenced their perceptions about their work. I also demonstrate the ways WPAs inhabited a split subjectivity, one that positioned them to be both disciplinary-activists and manager-disciplinarians and, as a result, caused tensions in their work. In order to combat the disaffection associated with teaching assistant preparation, I suggest that preparation initiatives proactively surface the pressures that erupt in work surrounding the teaching of writing by historicizing relationships among cultural, institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical politics.