Naves-Penkwitt, Ananda Kai
ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the use of food as a medium in Daniel Spoerri’s sculptures and performances, with a specific emphasis on the exhibition The Grocery Shop (1961), his dinner, L’Ultima Cena (1970), and lunch, Dejeuner Sous l’Herbe (1983) for Eat-Art, with a focus on their relational qualities. Through the utilization of chance, embodiment, and a multi-faceted use of food, Spoerri generates dynamic social exchanges that he ultimately freezes within his tableaux-pièges, simultaneously elevating the quotidian to the realm of art, questioning the art market, and exploring traditions while also transgressing them. Cultural implications and the physical, ephemeral, sensorial and transformative qualities of food as a medium are manipulated to engender different significances in each artwork analyzed here, particularly considering their different forms of execution. The post-war art world in which Daniel Spoerri worked was characterized by a rapidly expanding culture of intense commercialism and a rejection of established norms, which witnessed a diversification of styles and mediums, reflecting a dynamic and experimental atmosphere. Spoerri was one of the artists in the 1960s who expanded the ontological definition of art. In the context of his artistic milieu, the intersection of everyday life and art became more pronounced, particularly evident in works with performative emphases, such as his Eat-Art projects during the 1970s. Food is certainly a ubiquitous material that is easily overlooked on a daily basis, and through Spoerri’s works, the viewer is encouraged to consider these objects thoughtfully and in new ways. Existing literature on Spoerri has focused on his use of food to comment on temporality, consumption, and how he fits within the context of his time, while this thesis aims to analyze the range of the role that food plays in both the aesthetic object and performative work.
ABSTRACT: The Ecumenical Council of Trent was the nineteenth ecumenical council that was encouraged by Emperor Charles V of Spain and convoked by the Roman Catholic Church under the papacy of Pope Paul III in the city of Trent, as the official response to the Protestant Reformation. This council ultimately would have the goal to re-define Catholic dogmas and with the implementation of several edicts that would be discussed in several of the sessions, it would focus on re-defining the Catholic church amidst the Protestant Reformation. One of the main edicts that the council would issue in one of the last sessions would be the complete abolishment of the iconoclastic controversy. Sponsored personally by Queen Catherine de’ Medici of France and other notable Catholic monarchs, this edict specified how the images of the saints, the holy family and the Virgin Mary should be venerated in the church secular setting. This thesis addresses the edict’s profound impact on artistic production in the Republic of Venice during the late sixteenth century and takes as its focus Paolo Veronese’s 1572 Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto. Veronese was one of the many painters forced to reckon with the strict specifications of this edict, the guidelines of which encouraged artists to portray religious iconographies in a more “pious” way, that is, in a way that would increase the religious piety of the devotee. His 1572 Allegory is marked by a change in iconographical style, which previous scholarship has suggested might be explained by none other than the reformative decrees of the last session of the Council of Trent. Through a contextual methodology, this thesis explores how Veronese adheres to the decrees in his 1572 Allegory. Using Veronese’s 1572 Allegory as a guide, it shall be firstly analyzed how the Virgin Mary in the heavenly realm is given visual priority to convey that this commission follows closely with the decrees of Trent; Veronese inputs secondary and tertiary elements such as the gathering of the saints and the naval battle at Lepanto as least important elements for the viewer to focus and meditate on. This will be the same case for a 1582 commission of the same subject matter, where it will also be contextually analyzed how the figure of Christ the Redeemer is the main focal point and further, how the least important 2 elements such as the two commanders and the naval battle are the secondary and tertiary visual elements for the viewer’s focus.
ABSTRACT: The Roman villa at Boscotrecase was built along the slopes of Mount Vesuvius in the late 1st century BCE and buried during the infamous eruption of 79 CE. Accidentally discovered in 1903, the villa was then partially excavated over the course of three years before Vesuvius erupted again in 1906 and destroyed what remained of the structure. Due to this untimely event, art historical scholarship on the fresco paintings yielded by the villa has been frustrated by the fragmentary state of its archaeological documentation. Nowhere is this more limitational than in cubiculum 19, a small room from which two central panels depicting mythological landscapes were extracted from the east and west walls. Reframed and hung against a white backdrop for display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the paintings have since been divorced completely from the spatial context of the cubiculum for which they were commissioned as well as the holistic decorative scheme of its murals which survive only in conjectured two-dimensional illustration. Yet these panels hold a unique position among the extant corpus of Roman wall paintings. Together they constitute the earliest examples of a pictorial narrative method that conflates disparate moments of time, communicated through the repetition of protagonists within a single spatial setting and visual field. On the east wall of the cubiculum, the hero Perseus rescued Andromeda and met with her father in a conjoined scene; on the west wall, Polyphemus serenaded the nymph Galatea and hurled a boulder towards the retreating ship of Odysseus in a juxtaposed episode. Classified by scholars as strict continuous narrative, this storytelling strategy introduced a new mode of conceptualizing time on the domestic Roman wall. Taking the novelty of this temporal expression as its point of departure, this thesis offers a re-assessment of cubiculum 19 by investigating issues of time. Time as it was artistically manipulated on the walls is examined through narratological analyses of the mythological panels based on structuralist-formalist approaches. A three-dimensional virtual reconstruction of the villa — which restores the paintings to a simulation of their original architectural and decorative context for the first time — is later applied in discussion of the temporal-perceptual rhythms of viewing within the cubiculum. Together these research paradigms seek to synthesize notions of time as it was viewed on the walls of the room and experienced by an embodied viewer within the enclosed space.
