The body part in contemporary sculpture: A thematic consideration of fragmentation during the 1990s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis identifies sculptures of body parts as a significant, yet under discussed, trend in sculpture production during 1990s By looking closely at key artworks by British, American and Canadian artists, thesis interweaves thematic threads of portraiture, materiality, technique of casting from body, viewer interactions, body depictions of skin, fragmentations of subjectivity and selfhood, reconsiderations of artistic traditions and fragment as a means of accessing history. The thesis focuses upon ways in which feminisms, reconsiderations of phenomenology and scientific and technological developments have shaped changing perceptions of body. I argue that sculptures of fragmented body assert crucial role played by bodies in lived experiences of individual subjects. Chapter one examines Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather (1993) and Christine Borland's L 'Homme Double (1997). Through use of unusual materials, subjects and viewer interactions, conventions of portrait bust as a commemorative object are re-conceptualised. In chapter two, Sarah Lucas's sculptures created from casts of her own body will be discussed in relation to aggressive gesture and female masculinity. In Chapter three, theoretical concepts of traumatic body memory, Skin Ego and haptic visuality will be utilised as tools to consider fragmentation of skin in videos and sculptures by Mona Hatoum. Chapter four examines relationship between Gober's sculptures of disembodied legs and notion of the phantom limb, gay male sexuality and body memory. Chapter five examines sculptures of heads and skulls in Borland's The Dead Teach Living and English Family China. In these two installations, fragment functions as an access point to troubling historical moments when subjects were rendered less than human: slave trade in Liverpool, England and study of Nazi eugenics in Minister Germany.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".