Our annual Visual Studies Spring Symposium features public presentations of senior thesis essays by Visual Studies majors.
Full-length versions of the following students' thesis essays are also published in our annual journal.
Visual Studies Spring Symposium 2012
Kerry Gould
"What Are You Lookin’ At?: The Faces of Cars in Postmodern America"
Download accompanying PDF »
American postmodern culture is one of fear and alienation. People spend more time than ever before isolated in their cars and separated from their communities. The economic structure forces workers to commute great distances between the home and workplace on freeways that uproot and displace them.
In addition, larger cars, population growth, and scant new road construction in the last half-century result in competition for space. Removed from the social realms of sidewalks, busses, and trains, people form substitute social connections with their technologies. Over the last decade, the front ends of cars have been designed with distinctly anthropomorphic features that foster social bonding with these machines.
More recently, these faces have begun to appear dominant, angry, and even menacing. This aggressive styling is not just a reflection of trends in automotive design it is also a reflection of who we are as people. The predilection for bigger, more aggressive looking cars is a reaction to the fear, anxiety, and isolation that pervades postmodern culture.
This paper sets out to explain the biological, psychological, and social factors that have influenced this change in car design and the effects that this new styling trend has on the society.
Caterina Tiezzi
"Where Do Mannequin Legs Go?: The Multiple Lives of a Fashion Photograph"
Download accompanying PDF »
Guy Bourdin’s photographs demand attention. You can’t just quickly pass by them at SFMOMA. When I first saw them there, in fact, I was captivated by a print of French Vogue. This, I would learn, is a 1979 photograph in which Bourdin shot mannequin legs in a pair of black pumps designed by Charles Jourdan.
It was hard to ignore the surrealist juxtapositions in the photograph, but it was impossible to escape its connections to the fashion world. Yet the museum isn’t the only place where Bourdin’s work is displayed, nor was it the first.
This is true despite the photographer’s wishes not to allow photographs he created for magazines, to be displayed outside those glossy pages. Intrigued, I set to follow these fashionable footsteps. They took me from a time-travel through forests of mediums and adventures. I wandered the pages of Vogue Paris, the museum gallery, an online digital archive and beyond.
Alongside the academic allure of this image, I marveled at its plasticity. I saw French Vogue change, shaping itself to different displays. I saw it trap its audience and make people give it new contexts, functions and roles thereby creating new and diverse experiences for delighted viewers. I saw authors being born.
Moreover, I felt my own biases challenged and saw photography break frontiers I thought wouldn’t be possible to transgress, even today. With this paper, I will tell you of my encounters with a photograph that has become a cultural product, share my findings and speculations, and ultimately call attention to fashion photography.
I offer before you the journey that French Vogue has undertaken in order to be culturally accepted.
Katy Tuck
"Double Game à Clef: The Collaborative Work of Sophie Calle and Paul Auster"
Download accompanying PDF »
Throughout her career, French artist Sophie Calle has developed and embodied the identity of a detective in her performances, creating unique works of art that resemble investigations. Among other things, she has followed, photographed, and recorded the movements of others without their permission, drawing aesthetic inspiration from tropes of the classic detective figure in literature and cinema.
However, rather than investigate crimes, Calle turns her magnifying-glass glance in the direction of human nature, particularly private interior worlds. Her artistic investigations have yielded a complex body of work that folds back upon itself with frequency.
Paul Auster writes metaphysical mystery novels that are of equal intertextual complexity. Like Calle, his cast of characters includes the autobiographical detective figure and one French performance artist named “Maria,” whom both Calle and Auster bring to life in a world of their own making.
"Double Game" is the culmination of several collaborative exchanges between the artist and the author. This paper is the culmination of an investigation into the world of their investigations. Prompted by the structure of the book and the project itself, this paper explores the active role of the viewer as an investigator, in addition to an analysis of its philosophical implications.
Between the two of them, Calle and Auster have created a fictitious reality within which viewers are invited to play, provided they learn the rules of the game. I extend to you a key to these rules, in the hope that you too might play.