PhD Oral Exam - Georgia Phillips-Amos, Art History

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This thesis argues that indeterminacy, stalling, and centering absence are key aesthetic strategies for addressing the absurdity of late capitalism. These strategies do not erase, ignore, or foreclose conflict, but rather hold discord as a prerequisite to mutuality. Employing tropes from the absurdist tradition, which Martin Esslin noted for its ability to confront the spectator with apparently insoluble problems, these works do not provide didactic answers. Instead, they surface and insist on difference, disagreement, and opacity as necessary to the social fabric. In so doing, they expose power structures and the fallibility within systems of knowledge, dominant narratives, and institutions sustained through imposed consensus.

Each chapter is structured around one shared aesthetic strategy in a constellation of artworks by contemporary artists from 1980–today, in the fields of performance, mixed media, and installation. Utilizing a method of diffraction, distinct works are seen alongside one another with attention to their individual social, aesthetic, and institutional contexts. Furthering Diana Taylor’s argument for the ability of performance to both record and intervene, this thesis employs an embodied analysis that accounts for the material, historical, and political conditions each work exists within. This method is indebted to queer studies, Indigenous studies, the Black Radical Tradition, media and performance studies, and to the artists whose primary works have given rise to this research.

Mirroring the circulation of art today, this project is inherently transnational, focusing on works by William Kentridge, Nick Cave, Rebecca Belmore, Regina José Galindo, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Raeda Saadeh, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Francis Alÿs, Jill Magid, and Sophie Calle, artists working across geographies, from Canada to South Africa, in countries with their own disparate yet interrelated legacies of colonialism, resource extraction, and resistance.

Indeterminacy, stalling, and centering absence can shift the rules of narrative, relation, and temporality in absurd ways, to refuse progress and certainty, and to pursue possibilities born from misunderstanding, inefficiency, and the incomplete. These are critical tools for working against dominant narratives, though they are by no means inherently emancipatory. One contribution of this thesis is an increased literacy of the absurd at a time when fascist leadership globally wields its tools fluently.