The Art of Discord: Absurdist Strategies in Contemporary Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis argues that indeterminacy, stalling, and centering absence are key aesthetic strategies for addressing the absurdity of late capitalism. These strategies do not erase, ignore, or foreclose conflict, but rather hold discord as a prerequisite to mutuality. Employing tropes from the absurdist tradition, noted for its ability to confront the spectator with apparently insoluble problems, these works do not provide didactic answers. Instead, they surface and insist on difference, disagreement, and opacity as necessary to the social fabric. In so doing, they expose the fallibility within systems of knowledge, dominant narratives, and institutions sustained through imposed consensus. Each chapter is structured around a single strategy, through a constellation of artworks by contemporary artists from 1980–today, in the fields of performance, mixed media, and installation. Mirroring the circulation of art today, this project is inherently transnational, focusing on works by William Kentridge, Nick Cave, Rebecca Belmore, Regina José Galindo, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Raeda Saadeh, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Francis Alÿs, Jill Magid, and Sophie Calle, artists working across geographies, from Canada to South Africa, in countries with their own disparate yet interrelated legacies of colonialism, resource extraction, and resistance. Furthering Diana Taylor’s argument for the ability of performance to both record and intervene, this thesis traces the material, historical, and political conditions each singular work exists within. These strategies are critical tools for working against dominant narratives, though they are by no means inherently emancipatory. A contribution of this thesis is an increased literacy of the absurd at a time when fascist leadership globally wields its tools fluently.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.103 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".