This is a study on the ecological view of Robert Smithson’s reclamation projects. Smithson was a pioneer of Earth art in the late 1960’s. Robert Smithson believed that he could transform industrial wastelands, such as an abandoned oil rig and a no longer used quarry, into “Earth Art." In the early seventies, he conceived of land reclamation as a new art form and called this art “Reclamation Projects.” His attention regarding industrial ruin started from the American political and social situations in the 1960’s. In the late 1960’s, American society was in chaos from the right of movement of African Americans, the women’s rights movement and from the strike for renunciation of the Vietnam War. The intellectual class seemed to believe that it was the destiny of a closed system’s society to run in the direction of entropy. Smithson, who was skeptical about the system of American society, also thought that entropy was the proper diagnosis to describe America’s situation in the 1960’s. The 1960’s civic movements like the civil rights movement and antiwar movements expanded into the environmental movements based on ecological views of the 1970’s. The government had also started to worry about environmental pollution. Thus, the reclamation act was also established in 1972. Smithson believed that the relation between art and social background are closely related and affect each other. He was concerned with how art can join society, and the result was reclamation projects. Such reclamation projects lie on man-made wastelands, like abandoned oil rigs and no longer used quarries, which was an allegory of entropy. He also thought that Frederick Law Olmsted was a pioneer of earth art. The aesthetic category of Olmsted’s view of landscape is to be based on the picturesque of Uvedale Price and William Gilpin. So Smithson, who considered Olmsted as his touchstone, also accepted the picturesque. Such reclamation projects aim to change with nature by adapting the creative power of artists to the ruin which has the highest level of entropy in industrial society. Smithson wanted this to become the bridge between man and nature. His reclamation project’s aim, which shows the system interacting between man and nature as a network, is not different from the ecological view of the 1970’s environmental movement.

This paper delves into the recent 'paintings' of African-American artist David Hammons, which combine rubbish-like plastic wraps with the abstract-expressionist style paintings. In straddling between rubbish and art object, his works tend to blur the boundary drawn between two opposite categories in value, art and garbage, provoking the sophisticated taste of Upper-East-side white community in Manhattan, New York. Choosing the venue of his exhibition at a commercial gallery, Hammons's creative efforts is also a critique of what can be seen as the dominance of abstract expressionism and white elitism in American art history. The artist is known for his use of unconventional materials in art making such as black hair, barbecue bones, and elephant droppings, ones that are often associated with African-American experiences in all different levels. Since his debut in the art scene in the 1970s, Hammons has pursued the view of art-making as a medium for provoking contentious issues of racial relations in the States. On the other hand, the reception of Hammons's work as African-American art can be potentially quite limiting, overlooking as it does multi-faceted meanings of his art practice. His unconventional approach to art often took him outside art galleries and museums, where he was seen using a variety of common materials for site-specific installations and performances. Staged in different parts of Manhattan, these acts of art making traverse seemingly opposite communities and cultures, often blurring their boundaries. Hammons's artistic practice can label him what Abdul Jan Mohamed calls "specular border intellectual", revealing as it does the symbiosis of binary oppositions that is basic to the experience of communnal living.

This paper examines the characteristics of post-modern self-portrait photography. Characteristics of postmodernism associated with the “loss of centeredness,” such as the death of the author, interdisciplinarity, and intertextuality, brought about a number of changes within the self-portrait. The distinction between post-modern and modern self-portraiture can be characterized by the following qualities: appropriation, the use of photography, and the utilization of the human body as an art. The characteristics of post-modern self-portrait photography can be represented through the works of Cindy Sherman, Orlan, and Morimura Yasumasa. By presenting prototypical women in her works, Cindy Sherman not only represents images of those women, but also exposes her fictitious role in the work. She creates a distance between herself in the works and herself in reality and discloses a paternalistic gaze. Meanwhile, Orlan transforms her face into a distorted image and presents it as an alternative identity that is representative of postmodernism. She corrodes the standard concept of identity through plastic surgery and treats the face not as a place where the identity stays, but as a simple body part or fragment of skin. Orlan’s post-human face is malleable according to the artist’s desire to raise the issue of what the human face is, and opposes the structure of modernism. Morimura Yasumasa also appropriates images from masterpieces and presents a hybrid identity between Eastern and Western, male and female, original and replica, and subject and object. In order to dissect social prejudice, he puts forth every single structural dichotomy that coexists in his self-portrait and suppresses a strong ego. He also studies the relationship between ‘seeing’ and being ‘seen’ by trading the painter’s role from that of the subject to that of the object.

The study mainly discusses appreciation of interactive art works seen from the perspective of play attributes that make spectators glimpse the truth of things. The general studies of interactivity, as one of remarkable features in contemporary art, are regarding the relation between the effects of digital media and interactivity as well as video games. From the preceding discussion, I analyze the effects of the appreciating interactive art works which are focused on new sensory systems, the methods to intuit the essence of the art works. Based on the concept, as I investigate the play attributes found in the interactive art works, this study gives attention to the possibility that if the spectators can reach the inherent aspects of interactive art works, while interacting them. Thus to discuss the properties of the play, this article studies play concept of Johan Huizinga(1872-1945), psychologist and anthropologist and play theory of Hans Georg Gadamer(1900-2002) who considers play as a metaphor for art. As Huizinga thinks acting is the important attribute of play, Gadamer argues whenever the term 'play' is used, we should think about 'to-and tro movement' and the movement is absence of goal as well as endlessly renews through repetition. Then what we should pay attention to, seeing the essence of art and play as similar? That is, Gadamer claims, we can understand the truth of things through the play. To apply the play concept to the interactive art works, I research the works of Maurice Benayoun(1957 - ), French interactive artist. By employing interactivity, he attempts to extend and affect the experience of his art works to one of social phenomenon. Striving this, spectators can widen and deepen the breadth of their intuition and recognize the essence of art works. It is the interactive art works that can be the apex of the transformation of structure from the play to the art. The endless repetitive process of play, which is free creation-annihilation process, is similar with the interactive experience of spectators that is variable, de-centered, and multi-sensory. The pure action of the play lets us recognize, sense and accept the world and through the system of interactive art experience, we can expand the horizons of perception. Interactive art works with these play attributes are capable of playing the role that the spectators glimpse the truth of things and experience the world around them.

This study explores gender images represented in the works of women artists from the Middle East, where male chauvinism is recognized to be more predominant than elsewhere. The artists included in this study such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Lida Abdul and Sigalit Landau are Post-Feminist generation of artists who were born in the Middle East but spent significant amount of time in the West. In addition, they were trained as artists under the influences of the Western Feminist Art. This particular group of female artists pays much attention to the ontological question of their identities rather than male/female inequality, and each artist represents men and women in the ways that can hardly be found in the works by women artists in the West. These artists not only connect gender identities to the socio-political geography of the Middle East but also deconstruct Western stereotypes of men and women from Arab world. The paper focuses on the way these women artists incorporate male/female vs. culture/nature dichotomies into their works to subvert the premises on which Western Feminism has been based and not only to cast light on women's freedom and their ontological conflicts but also to emphasize social suppression inflicted upon men. In such process, these artists resist stereotypical images of Middle Eastern men and women widely circulated in the mainstream media of the West.

The prefix 'bio' with the meaning of 'life,' has been used for biotechnology, biochemistry, bioengineering, biomedicine, bioethics, bio-information as well as 'bio art' since 1990s. Bio art is an art as life itself and a kind of new direction in contemporary art that manipulates the processes of life. Bio artists use the properties of life and materials as scientists in laboratory of biology, and change organisms within their own species, of invents life with new characteristics. Technologically and socio-culturally, bio art has been connected with bioengineering. This essay is on the bio art that use vegetables, and on the specified gaze of so-called 'Sci-Artists.' Not only the genetically modified vegetables like works of George Gessert, Ackroyd & Harvey, and Eduardo Kac, but also the works made from the critical viewpoint like those of Paul Vanouse, Natalie Jeremijenko, and Amy Youngs, have 'the molecular gaze'(Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin's concept) of the genetic age in their art works. As the art history have showed, artists' gazes have insights about social problems that surround us. Bioartists' gazes reveal their insights about social and ethical problems, possibly concealed by science itself. Those problems are about results from practical discoveries of the sequencing of the genome, genetic engineering, cloning and reproduction of human and animals, body transformation, and the commercialization of cell and genes etc. We can find the significance of bioart in the molecular gaze about those problems, and we can rethink the identity of human, the reception of social influences from bio-technology and medicine.

This paper explores rich and complex implications of Marcel Duchamp's Mile of String which he created for “First Papers of Surrealism,” the Surrealist international exhibition in New York in 1942. Part of a larger project devoted to investigating Duchamp's role in Surrealist exhibitions and his relation to the avant-garde group, this paper focuses on Duchamp's exhibition installation in the 1942 show. Under the title of “générateur-arbitre” Duchamp played an important role as installation and exhibition designer in a series of major Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930's-1960's. The “First Papers of Surrealism” was held by Surrealists who exiled in New York during World War I, and Duchamp created a labyrinthine installation of string for the exhibition, which physically blocked the spectator and optically hindered his or her contemplative view. Unraveling the intricately related meanings of Mile of String as an independent work of art and an installation for a specific exhibition, I examine the work on two levels: frst, how the work was situated in the context of Duchamp's oeuvre, particularly his earlier work employing string or thread; second, how and in what way the installation rendered a critique on Surrealism as a group and an avant-garde movement. More specifically, by exploring the concepts of ‘pataphysics’ and voluntary ‘nomadism’ implicated in Duchamp's work, I suggest that his Mile of String asserted a critical stance against nationalism and collective identity of Surrealism and manifested a radical individualism founded upon what he called the spirit of ‘expatriation.’