This thesis is a historical and visual analysis of the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) newspaper El Malcriado and their reimagination of the Mexican Revolution narrative to visualize the farm worker movement in the U.S. The UFW newspaper was launched during the origins of the Delano Grape Strike in 1965 to galvanize the masses. Artwork by the Mexican printing collective Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), photography from the Mexican Revolution, and caricatures by Chicano artists Andrew “Andy” Zermeño communicated the goals of the union through allegory, symbolism, and satire. The first two volumes of El Malcriado reproduced prints from the 1940s by the TGP on the cover, which served as revolutionary allegories to visualize a transnational struggle that connected the UFW labor movement and agribusiness in the U.S. with the history of pre-colonial Mexico, Mexican Revolution, and hacienda system. Photography of Mexican generals Emiliano Zapata and Francisco “Pancho” Villa were used as symbols of revolution and leadership, but especially with Zapata, as a symbol for land rights and agrarian justice. Andy Zermeño used caricature and satire to visualize the unjust conditions and power dynamics of the farm worker, foreman, and farm owner—characters that would later be performed under the productions of playwright Luis Valdez by the farm workers themselves. I argue that the radical reimaginings of the Mexican Revolution on the pages of El Malcriado empower the farm workers to visualize their movement during the pivotal era if the Delano Grape Strike and identify not only their cultural origins, but also their connection with a larger global agrarian struggle and fight for workers’ rights.

This thesis focuses on a photograph that captures Charles Bojorquez in the act of painting in 1975. The photograph features two writing columns known as placas juxtaposed with a 5’x 6’ spray-painted image of the stencil Señor Suerte. Bojorquez attributes placas to pachucos from the 1940’s and understands these written documents as representing a form of solidarity. Señor Suerte is an illustration of a skeleton lavishly accessorized with a wide brimmed hat outstretching from its face and a fur wrap draping over its clavicle. The skeleton with a grimacing smile outstretches two crossed fingers to its hallow eye sockets. The image of Señor Suerte is fragmented into three distinct spaces of interaction along with the reproduction techniques, meaning attributed to the image by different audiences, circulation and asserted value. The image has three surfaces and circuits to consider: walls of the public space, flesh on the bodies of members from a particular gang, and on canvas. The original 1969 location is on the staircase of the Arroyo Seco Parkway where Charles Bojorquez first spray painted the image. Images reproduced by the artist are fragmentations of the original image. The secondary is a tattoo on the flesh of those who identify with the gang The Avenues, reproduction and circulation of the image occurs parallel to the prison industrial complex by unknown materials, tools, and producers. The third form of fragmentation is as a painting produced by the artist himself on canvas that is either held in private collections or acquired and exhibited in art institutions.

Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez was born in Los Angeles, California in 1949. He developed his artistic practice in ceramics and painting at Chouinard Art Institute (1968-1970), painting at California State University Los Angeles (1967-1968), and calligraphy at the Pacific Asia Art Museum through instruction by Master Yun Chung Chiang (1966-68). Beginning in 1969, Chaz created large scale ephemeral image and text-based paintings combining his calligraphy practice with spray paint and a large-scale stencil. The image known as Señor Suerte is a skeleton lavishly accessorized with a wide brimmed hat outstretching from its face and a fur wrap draping over its clavicle. The skeleton outstretches two crossed fingers up to its hallow eye sockets and grimacing smile. According to the artist, his writing style is derived from Mexican American youth from the 1940’s and represents a form of identity and solidarity. The structural design of the public writing forms consists of an overarching group name, aliases for those in the group, and individual signature. This research inquiry explores the fragmentation of the image into distinct spaces of interaction along with different reproduction techniques, meanings attributed to the image, and asserted value. The circulation processes of Chaz’s painting Señor Suerte challenges the economic value in the art market and understanding of art appropriation. At an initial level, the image has three surfaces to consider: walls of the public space, flesh, and canvas. The first social register is the public space in Chaz’s immediate neighborhood where he originally painted. These paintings followed the stylistic conventions of a vernacular Mexican American writing practice. Chaz’s artwork acquired an additional meaning when his image was used as a tattoo representing a neighborhood subculture, also known as a gang. Reproduction of the image occurs inside the prison industrial complex by unknown producers. The third form of fragmentation is as a painting on canvas that is either held in private collections or acquired and exhibited in art institutions, these paintings are also produced by the artist. The ambiguity of how the image circulates in an alternative prison market distinguished by the art market is the driving value of the image that we will unravel. My argument is that the various reproductions unveil sociohistorical and cultural traces embedded in the original while contesting viewer accessibility in decoding a vernacular Chicano language. Chaz’s artistic strategy is a singular and significant case where the production of symbolic capital (as art in museums and galleries) remains differentiated from the appropriation, value-formation, and circulation of images in the spaces of marginality and exclusion of the working-class Mexican American experience. Visual analysis, oral history interviews, and archival research provide a critical reading of Chaz’s artistic practice across class and ethnic divides that reframes the formation of Chicano art, social art history, and American Art.

This dissertation looks at artists whose work was closely aligned with research and pedagogy in the American university from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Four institutional projects structure the work: a collaborative research proposal at Rutgers University, a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a series of exhibitions at Finch College, and an experimental school at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). My analysis begins with Gyorgy Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, a center for artistic research meant to bridge the visual arts with the tradition of science and research. The Center’s model of research shared key characteristics with the scientific tradition, such as discovering fundamental principles through experimentation (emphasizing the visible experience) and creative-problem solving. Next, I look at the “Project in Multiple Dimensions,” a research proposal written collaboratively by Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts and George Brecht for Rutgers University. I argue that these artists’ works offer a knowledge alternative not unlike Dewey’s aesthetic experience and intelligent action, or knowing through doing, and that this model worked against the dominant trends of the university. The subsequent chapters look at the Art in Process exhibitions at Finch College, and the collaborative Feminist Art Program (1971-73) at CalArts. Some instances of conceptual strategies that appeared in the exhibitions at Finch College (seriality and the use of information and language in the work of Mel Bochner, for instance) transformed the understanding of aesthetic experience—not abandoned it—by aligning it with the ability to disclose and construct consciousness or subjective experience. The final chapter looks at how this new decentralized notion of experience collided with a political notion of experience at CalArts. Key works by John Baldessari, Suzanne Lacy, and the Feminist Art Program represented the artist in society in competing ways, as either critically detached or socially engaged.

A practice component also contributes to fulfilling the requirements for the degree, included here as supplemental files.

Damage Report is a series of four short 16-millimeter films, projected simultaneously in an installation, each of which focuses on one of the four elements--air, water, earth, and fire. The geographic focus is the so-called "Biotech Beach" area around La Jolla, California where scientists and emergency managers assess the risks of natural hazards--fires, earthquakes, weather patterns, climate change--through simulations.

The project calls attention to the paradox of our intensifying search for control over the elements in an era in which we have become a geological force: the "anthropocene."

Each element has its corresponding site, which together form a square on the map of San Diego County:

--a downtown weather forecasting startup originating in UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography,

--a hydraulics lab nestled in the latter's idyllic beachside campus,

--the University's inland earthquake simulator at Englekirk Center, and

--a fire training center in the County's "Heartland," El Cajon.

Each film deals with a test, or series of procedures by which a given element is simulated in a controlled setting: a laboratory, an office, or an outdoor training ground.

In 1927, American industrialist, innovator, and inventor Henry Ford founded Fordlandia--a plantation city in the Brazilian Amazon intended to cultivate a steady rubber supply for the Ford Motorcar empire. Only seven years later, Ford founded Belterra, a twin town, downstream, a second attempt to implement monocultural agriculture, suburban aesthetics, and paternalistic labor practices in the jungle. By 1945, both cities were abandoned, preventing Ford from completing the full vertical integration of his motorcar empire and leaving an unusual failure in Ford’s prolific modern legacy. This thesis explores the pathologies of platform production embedded in Ford’s persistence of his plantation experiment. It reads the double debacles of Fordlandia and Belterra as a slip in Ford’s capital project that reveals a repressed social desire in Ford’s production platform. This slip exposes the misattribution of circumstance and contingency, context and conditions in the process of platformation. The Fordian Slip is the mixing of motives and intent--the same mistake, repeated twice, in the same way. “The only real mistake,” says Ford, “is the one from which we learn nothing.”

What institutional forms sustain aesthetic colonization today? How do they contribute to Western cultural hegemony? What social groups benefit from this phenomenon? This dissertation evaluates how three biennial exhibitions of contemporary art helped expand the Euro-American art complex to the U.S./Mexico borderlands, Cuba, and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. It analyses the discourses of international solidarity and forms of local recognition behind la Bienal de La Habana, InSITE, and Manifesta, during the forge of supra-national polities in their regions. This study argues that new forms of cosmopolitan curatorial expertise developed art organizations that often acted as institutional outposts of the Euro-American avant-garde and colonized aesthetic regimes hitherto autonomous from its legacy. In my dissertation I show how, although the globalization of the contemporary art industry was sustained in situated forms of social reciprocity in Havana, San Diego/Tijuana, and Rotterdam, the industry ultimately failed to amplify for global audiences the aesthetic traditions upheld at the local level.

Auto: Fordian Parables of Platform Automation rereads Fordism within an expanded genealogy of planetary platform automation, tracing the ways that the Fordist automotive paradigm, and its ideological and infrastructural logics and dynamics, define and delimit computation, urbanism, and automobility. Platforms and automation are typically theorized as exclusively digital phenomena, but this project situates platforms within an expanded lineage of dynamic socio-technical hardware and software systems, framing platforms as coordination systems and complexity management mechanisms that were instantiated through Fordist organizational methods. It also traces the lineage and trajectories of automation, a term coined inside Ford motors to describe continuous production and transfer that did not require a human intermediary. Automation, which is built upon platform capacity, is understood here as part of an epistemological lineage of autonomy as contingency and interdependence rather than as a separation or substitution of human and machine. Auto constructs a “speculative history” that traverses past, present and future. A series of parables that orbit around the Fordian auto-motive complex unfold a theory and design of platform automation that rethinks the ways that protocols, pathologies, and proclivities shape the possibilities for platform automation. The project draws upon methods from science and technology studies, systems and platform studies, management theory, media theory, mobility studies, and Marxist history. These parables about the entanglements of Ford and Fordism expose the dialectic and dynamic interplay between socio-technical adaptation and adoption, the role of devices and environment, the constructs of rationality and efficiency in design, and motive and momentum in the development and automation of platform systems development. The precedent of Fordist planetary proliferation offers design principles and practices that might be rejected or rescued from the Fordian epoch to help reorient the philosophical, social, and technological conditions for platform automation and automobility to come.

This Dissertation attends to examine the significance of the key notions empire, mimesis

and infrastructure through the study of selected historical materials and concepts distilled from

my artistic practice. In the former case, the historical deploys a narrative upon the aesthetic and

material dimensions of monumental heritage in the Austro Hungarian Empire and the Mexican

Second Empire. As for the artistic side, it produces its own diagram, whose material existence

allows to weave theoretical and practice-based concepts throughout the entire work. In this

sense, my approach attempts to treat selected narrative sources as materials rather than themes or

periods, relating them by means of transitions, conceptual ramifications and the consequences of

systematic critique. In this Dissertation there is no central character nor period, for its main aim

is to articulate, through a theoretical pipetting, the interrelations between my artistic practice and

the use of historical materials.

The notion of mimesis is posited as a medium whose uniformity problematizes the

representation of imperial colonialism, establishing a conceptual framework so as to understand

it less as an instrument than a medium tending toward isotropy. This hallucinatory dimension of

mimesis is explored further by examining the interplay between identity and representation

according to its ideological scope, where distinct figures (the subaltern, the minority, the

melancholic) led to fundamental relationships between allegory and death. Understood in

material terms, such interplay can be translated according to tensions between the city and the

urban, the classical and the baroque, the allegory and the metaphor. The imperial city of Vienna

serves as the locus for the materialization of the dilemma between identity and representation,

the place where the existence of monuments build the sense of the antique as by-product of the

modern. The notion of Empathy proves crucial here as it relates the psychological meaning of

architecture and of the modern, but only insofar as it conceals its own hallucinatory dimension,

one that articulates the unevenness between manual and intellectual labor. During the Mexican

Second Empire, the translation of mimesis into the material becomes radicalized with the

implementation of infrastructures such as roads and railways which are indebted to the ruins of

bygone empires. Finally, the empathy toward monuments acquires a messianic dimension, one

that is tracing the promise of an imminent rupture with the imperial sense of time.

This dissertation critically engages with Armenian historiography as a modern example subjected to epistemic violence through forced displacement, archival silences, and cultural appropriations. I first contend that in the early twentieth century, Armenians in their ancestral lands in West Asia were trans-imperial subjects under the Ottoman and Russian Empires—fragmented into Western and Eastern Armenians. This fragmentation underwent multiple erasures through the 1915 Genocide, displacement as refugees, and Sovietization (1920s). I insist that these erasures present a critical intersection of constructs—national subject, Indigenous “other,” and refugee-survivor, and support this through working with postcolonial and decolonial archival and museological discourses. Specifically, I argue that this intersection should be examined through the contemporary frameworks of archival metadata and classification, art conservation and collection to demonstrate the cultural mechanisms of erasures which constitute Armenian subjects, in part through archival concealment, displacement, and gaps. Each chapter studies how “Armenia” and “the Armenian” are constructed in different early-twentieth-century repositories—the Bolshevik vanguard archives of the Russian Museum of Ethnography (St. Petersburg), interpreted as symptomatic of the national misrepresentations of “Soviet” Eastern and Artsaktsi Armenians; the American Board Archives (Istanbul), which serves in my curatorial exhibition "Empty Fields" (2016) to represent the episteme of the Genocide survivor; and the Near East Relief Foundation archives of folk objects created by Western Armenian orphans/survivors, characteristic of the refugee status revealing a subaltern Indigenous subject. Methodologically, I enter each archive through a metadata element—inventory, standard, tag, description, and provenance—by which I theoretically and visually unpack what has been erased, misattributed, and absented in the case of the “Armenian.” My findings direct me to materials broadly described as “folk,” and by working with the concepts of folk culture, folkness, and folklore through aesthetic and critical theories, Black and Latin American craft studies, I propose a notion of folk as a surviving marker of absented histories. Through my analyses, I show how this specific juxtaposition of “folk” and “metadata” aligns with anticolonial and decolonial strategies, disrupts the unifying logic of archives, and allows me to piece together a new historiography of the erased Indigenous, subaltern subjects.