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Scenes of Stamina: Endurance and Post-Plantation Geographies in Black Contemporary Video Art and Performance Art, 2003 - 2022 Tamir Williams
- Format:
- Book
- Thesis/Dissertation
- Author/Creator:
- Williams, Tamir, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Art history.
- Black studies.
- Art criticism.
- Performing arts.
- 0377.
- 0325.
- 0365.
- 0641.
- Local Subjects:
- Art history.
- Black studies.
- Art criticism.
- Performing arts.
- 0377.
- 0325.
- 0365.
- 0641.
- Physical Description:
- 1 electronic resource (230 pages)
- Contained In:
- Dissertations Abstracts International 86-07A
- Place of Publication:
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2024
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Scenes of Stamina: Endurance and Post-Plantation Geographies in Black Contemporary Video Art and Performance Art, 2003 - 2022, examines the historical linkage of black bodies with endurance as it manifests in the realm of the "everyday." Turning to select performances and video works by Jefferson Pinder, Steffani Jemison, Nari Ward, and Sheldon Scott, this project explores how these four artists both highlight and subversively engage the endurance embedded in the seemingly banal bodily actions/gestures/practices of running, sweating, and lying supine. When enacted by black bodies, running, sweating, and being supine take on an element of theatricality, becoming what I term "scenes of stamina." Pinder, Jemison, Ward, and Scott create such scenes that cunningly attempt to disrupt and thwart historical medical/scientific myths surrounding the black body's durability and susceptibility to fatigue. Scenes of Stamina offers three case studies of everyday black endurance. Chapter one places Pinder's Marathon (2003) in dialogue with Jemison's Escaped Lunatic (2010-11) to offer playful studies of black kinetic exertion that disrupt both our conditioned readings of running black bodies as fugitive and historical myths of the black body's immunity to fatigue. Chapter two explores myths about black thermal endurance via Ward's Sweat (2011). The chapter interrogates how Ward's use of the close-up camera shot prompts viewers to consider the radical possibility of linking black sweat and black thermal endurance alongside scenarios/spaces of pleasure. Chapter three turns to Scott's eight-hour public piece Altar of repose: I'm gonna lay down... (2022) to examine how the black body has historically been casted as perpetually "waiting" and "patient." Scott radically reappropriates this ascribed inertia in the service of accessing black leisure. This project departs from previous scholarship on black bodily-based endurance art by critically addressing the crucial role of geography within these scenes' revamping of endurance. The issue of black endurance is, too, a spatial matter
- Notes:
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-07, Section: A.
- Advisors: DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn Committee members: Redrobe, Karen; Copeland, Huey
- Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2024
- Local Notes:
- School code: 0175
- ISBN:
- 9798302182968
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license
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