How do photographic archives “animalize” or “humanize” animals in enclosed cultural spaces, like museums and zoos? I analyze the work of photographers Eadweard Muybridge, George Wheelhouse, Jill Greenberg, and Britta Jaschinski, and taxidermist Damien Hirst to interrogate the terms “animalize” and “humanize” by attempting to distinguish between animal/animalized and human/humanized couplings. To understand the term “animalize” and our aversion to being likened to animals, I argue what we are so afraid of is not being animal, but occupying the attached social position—being objectified and dehumanized. In visual media, this objectification manifests through the visual capture and frozenness of animals. Meanwhile, there are two approaches to “humanization.” The conventional one—“humanization through familiarization”—engages with the similarities between humans and animals through the anthropomorphized positioning of animals. The second, less conventional approach, which I argue deserves more attention, is what I call “humanization through defamiliarization.” This concept draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “becoming animal,” entailing a direct addressal of the animal that bypasses its appropriation for aesthetic or symbolic means and presents it outside of familiar contexts. Inspired by Jaschinski whose photography of zoo animals exemplifies the process of “becoming-animal,” I created my own images of animals from the Woodland Park Zoo that are both in accordance with and a direct response to her portrayals. While the animals in her photos draw their ostensible power from the darkness of the exposure, the animals in my photos reclaim the “voracious” and “all-exposing” light with the aid of my compositional and technical choices. Finally, I discuss the politics of looking at captive animals and decenter the very medium of sight to perhaps make space for the multisensorial encounters our bodies (human and other-than-human) are capable of.

In times of conflict, art becomes a beacon of resistance and hope. During the military dictatorships in Latin America from 1960s and 1980s, defiance was fundamental in working against such oppressive regimes. First emerging as a way to communicate between artistic centers as a conceptual art practice and later transforming into a form of resistance as it bypassed censorship, mail art operated as a covert artform that spread ideas and pushback both internally and externally. This research explores how the medium of mail art, specifically in Argentina and Chile, was employed by artists to disseminate messages and oppose dictatorship. Mail art has existed more peripherally in the art historical scholarship and my paper resolves how intrinsically tied to resistance this medium is, specifically as it provides anonymity to artists, counters widespread censorship, and later serves as a testament to atrocities that occurred. Thus, looking at Argentine artists such as León Ferrari and Edgardo-Antonio Vigo, alongside the Chilean Arpillera movement, my paper situates what might be defined under the rubric of 'mail art' and moreover, the 'success' of the medium during repressive regimes. Such characteristics I consider are mail art's effective communication, its establishment within the larger scholarly field, and artistic engagement in political oppressive political arenas, to demonstrate a variety of cause and effects upon which mail art relies.

Most cultures have some aspect of puppetry from history, ranging from single puppeteers to three expert manipulators using one doll to express human emotions, but Vietnamese water puppetry, or Múa rối nước, has been a staple of Viet Nam’s culture since it was introduced by the Chinese thousands of years ago. Performers standing waist deep in water (originally rice paddies) use bamboo sticks to manipulate vividly painted puppets to entertain the public and tell legends through this aquatic method. It is estimated to be over 1000 years old in Viet Nam alone. Given China was the largest occupier for centuries, Vietnam was once a protectorate under ancient China. Current assumptions are that Chinese occupiers brought teachings of the puppeteering craft and passed their knowledge onto northern villagers, and after the cultural influence had faded as occupation was replaced by Vietnamese nationalism, the culture of retelling history via water puppets transformed into a uniquely Vietnamese tradition. Each puppeteer would carve and control their own puppet, passing the knowledge to the next generation through self-training and shared community. Through my close readings of live and recorded Múa rối nước, and by examining others' writings about this practice's evolution throughout history as well as local reception, I will seek to answer why such a unique form of theatre has gone unnoticed and under-appreciated in our modern era of spectacle. And with tourism already being a primary draw to Viet Nam, how can those working on Múa rối nước harness its potential for global recognition?

Q: And Babies? A: And Babies. was one of the most prominent antiwar posters produced by the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) in 1969. The combination of the shocking image of the My Lai massacre with text excerpted from an interview of Paul Meadlo elicited a strong reaction from its viewers. Shown first in the hands of protestors and now stored in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) collection, my paper examines how the changing location of the poster affects the function of the work. Building on scholarship surrounding the complex relationship between AWC and the MoMA, I examine the power relations imbued in institutions, alongside the portrayal of truth that the photograph provides. The photograph’s “truth,” as argued by John Tagg, can be multiple. When in the hands of a protestor, And Babies holds singular truth and at MoMA, it shifts to amplify the hegemonic forces behind an institution which dictate what's true or false. When And Babies is placed inside the white cube with multiple truths and is surrounded by works that lack the truth of a photograph, the viewer becomes more drawn to it and the multitude of its truth creates more empathy. Research has been done into the historical context of And Babies, as well as its complex and political relationship with the MoMA. However, my research differs by building on John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. I do this by expanding the ideas of photography being used by police as a signifier of guilt and how power structures relate to the nature of truth through resistance and a regime. This work demonstrates And Babies shifting meaning between the protestor and the museum.  

Leather culture—and its proximity to militarism and racialized difference—is gravely understudied in queer scholarship. The historical identity construction of leathermen–a subcultural strain of queer masculinity–is transnational, syncretizing aesthetics from German, European American, and Black American cultures. This cross-cultural exchange is due in large part to the World Wars. White Fantasies of Black Leather is a radical unsettling of the foundational aesthetics of post-WWII leather culture with an emphasis on Nazism and animality. I interrogate leather as a symbol of power, the anti-Black coding of sexual exoticism and its attachment to black leather as an animal skin, and the eroticization of fascist aesthetics as a valorization of hegemonic hypermasculinity and white supremacy. I aim to answer three questions: What role does militarism play in constructing masculinity in leather culture? How did eroticized Nazi aesthetics gain coherency in leather culture and what are their implications? How and why are hegemonic constructions of gender and race reproduced in queer counterculture? Because leather functions as an embodied gender and sexuality, visuality is paramount. I employed visual and textual analysis in tandem to best understand leather as an incarnation of racialized and gendered fantasies. I conducted archival research at the Leather Archive and Museum in Chicago, pulling leather goods, ephemera, illustrations, and written works. In examining the aestheticization of symbols of power and their discursive representation in community literature, I deconstruct militaristic and animalistic references in the visual culture of queer erotic self-identification. As the genesis of leather culture is entrenched in empire and militarism, leather is a symbol of power; as it is entrenched in outlaw practices covertly defying criminalized homosexuality, leather is a symbol of difference. Deconstructing leather symbolism on a spectrum, from fascist hypermasculinity to countercultural rebellion, is necessary in attempting to exorcize racist specters haunting leather culture.