Abstract

The Thick of Things, Framing, Fetishism, and the Work of Art History develops an approach to thinking and writing about works of art based on close readings of Jacques Derrida's The Truth in Painting and Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art." My approach emphasizes the mutual engagement of object, viewer, and "contextual" discourses, and I analyze its implications for the continuing practice of art history and criticism. The following three chapters put my definition "to work" in various debates concerning art historical exhibition and interpretation. First, I examine a debate between Mieke Bal and a museum curator over the installation of her 1998 "Femmes Fatales!" exhibition; relating the debate to Derrida's analysis of Kant, I formulate Bal's approach as a "bloodletting," a way of simultaneously acknowledging and resisting the violence implicit in the attempt to present works as autonomous "masterpieces." Continuing this exploration of the concept of the masterpiece, I next analyze Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in terms of its multivalent relationships to discourses of mastery , again suggesting ways in which these discourses might be both acknowledged and resisted. Building on the previous chapters' explorations of the mutual implication of artwork, observer, and historical discourse, I turn to James Rosenquist's 1992 Gift-Wrapped Dolls series, demonstrating how the "place" of the viewer radically affects the meanings produced in the encounter with an artwork. Issues of AIDS, race, and sexuality lead to another close reading of Derrida in Chapter 5, this time of his treatment of fetishism. Taking both Freudian and Marxian definitions into account, I argue that Derrida enacts the logic of fetishism in his own argument, suggesting that the "truth" of fetishism may in fact correlate to the "truth" of the work of art. I then revisit claims made in previous chapters, considering how they may or may not be altered by a new, "fetishistic" definition of the work of art. Finally, the conclusion attempts to clarify my overall intention in the dissertation, defending the apparent "perversity" of using Derridean terminology to develop "definitions" and even to arrive at conclusions