| This dissertation examines the work of international contemporary artists, addressing its commodification and embeddedness in the terrain of institutional categorization. With consideration for matters of geography, the market, and artistic influence, as well as for the cultural positions of the artists, their viewers, curators, and consumers, this study identifies alternative models of representation that reside outside of the hermetic and taxonomic spaces of the canonical non-Western/Western dichotomy of art historical discourse, in the service of the academy, the museum, and the market. The contemporary artists taken up in this dissertation propose spaces that fuse and/or refuse the established cultural spheres to which they are commonly relegated, accounting for the migratory status of the artists and artworks, as well as for the mobility and multiplicity of positions, languages and levels of identification and representation. The artists examined are engaged with complicating models of cultural subjectivity and are discursively aligned with diasporal and transnational stratagem. The dissertation is anchored by two parallel positions---the archive as a catalogue of images and the archive as paradigm, both interrogated by international artists in their efforts to counter hermetic taxonomies of identity and politics of place.; The first chapter "Autonomizing the Archive in America: Re-examining the Intersection of Photography and the Stereotype" traces a tendency on the part of artists, primarily working in the United States, including Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon, and organized through the framework of the 2003 exhibition Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, who interrogate the construction of difference in the visual field using the archive as vehicle for literal appropriation and theoretical deconstruction. The text traces a shift from an early nineties articulation of difference to a late nineties abstraction of identity, corresponding to a transformation in discourse---from multiculturalism to internationalism. Chapter 2, "Representing the Body Archivally in Contemporary South Africa," considers similar tendencies and transformations in contemporary art practice in South Africa, featuring artists Santu Mofokeng and Zwelethu Mthethwa and focusing on the archive's double function---as a material mechanism for re-signification and recovery of memory and trauma and as a colonialist structuring device for constructing subjectivity. Chapter Three "Negotiating the Taxonomy Contemporary African Art---Production, Exhibition, Commodification," addresses the field of Contemporary African Art in the terrain of Western categorization. The individual artistic practices examined, including Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ike Ude, Touhami Ennadre are invested in re-animating subjectivity by prioritizing indeterminacy over legibility. This investigation promotes a critical dialogue amongst contemporary practitioners living and working in the metropoles of Africa, Europe, and America, and thus, puts forth a complex network of formal and conceptual encounters. In turn, this framework marks an immobilization of taxonomies based on ethnic or national artistic identities inherent to the archive, and moves beyond what curator Okwui Enwezor has termed an outmoded and asphyxiating citizenship of aesthetic objects. |
