Art Department

“Basketry and a Search for Authenticity in Arts and Crafts” is a creative thesis about an aspiring contemporary artist’s quest for meaning. Basketry is the medium by which this project looks into appropriation, attribution, and education. It focuses on the similarities between arts and crafts, artifacts and folk crafts.

My thesis is an exploration of the process of representation. I did many representational sketches and paintings from direct observation. While developing my drawing skills I researched other representational artists. I gleaned formal qualities from these artists and applied their techniques to my drawing practice. I pursued many different strategies of drawing and painting. Some of the strategies I explored included direct observation life drawings, still lives, popular iconography drawings and self-portraiture. For my thesis show I hung series of drawings and/or paintings from each of the strategies listed above.

Our epoch is one of technological sublation. The prevalence of computer technology, along with the Internet’s penetration of the everyday, has altered the way we produce art; it has constructed new ways of seeing. The first chapter of this thesis develops a progression of technological media toward the ends of immediacy: the negation or erasure of the representational medium as an attempt to achieve ‘real’ experience. The new ways of seeing and producing in the computer age are located along a trajectory of artistic practices in older media. The second chapter is a closer investigation of the desire for immediacy and its refusal in particular works of art. I conclude in the third chapter with the description of my installation work. It is a culmination of the theories and practices discussed in the first two chapters, materialized in an interactive installation.

This thesis summarizes the progress my paintings have made in the past year. It begins with a general summary of my painting process. Chapter I describes how I have used that process in the fall of 2010 and spring of 2011 to complete six paintings. In Chapter II and Chapter III I discuss artworks by the artists Richard Tuttle, Hans Hoffman, Merce Cunningham, Giorgio Morandi, Richard Diebenkorn, Peter Halley, and Joan Mitchell. I follow analyses of their work with some thoughts on how their work relates to my own. In conclusion I evaluate the progress my paintings have made over the past year.

In undertaking this project, my goal was to gain a better understanding of the workings of branding and marketing in contemporary art, and of the ways in which artists brand themselves to further the promotion of their work. In developing my own brand and public persona, I drew upon the work of theorists as well as the example of successful celebrity artists. I also investigated the increasing disconnect between reality and fiction in the post-internet world, examining the ways in which the constant hype and self-promotion of both public and private figures has both contributed to this disconnect and further enabled the development of fakery and facades. With this writing, as well as with the work that was produced alongside it, I hope to shed some light on the complexities of living life in a society increasingly governed by hype and misrepresentation.