Focus on Research| What is a Thesis Statement?

One of the most frequent questions I am asked by students relates to defining a thesis statement for a research paper. Simply put, a thesis statement establishes your argument for your overall essay. The statement can be brief or several sentences long and appears in the introduction (i.e. opening paragraph of the essay).

Staring at the blank page doesn't help materialize a thesis statement

Critically, what distinguishes a thesis statement from a regular statement is that it is OPINIONATED and ARGUMENTATIVE. I often tell students that they have to imagine that while they are researching and writing their paper that they are like lawyers developing a "case" for what they are ultimately saying. Imagine as you are researching and writing that someone (like your professor) is asking you the following questions: "What are you arguing in this paper?" "How do you know that to be true?" "Where and from whom did you get your evidence?" "Show me examples to prove your point." "Describe how you arrived at that argument." "Prove it."

In a previous Focus on Research post regarding how to identify and refine a research topic, I discussed the usefulness of developing a topic question to help guide the process of locating and assessing sources. I also emphasized the point that the answer to your topic question will often help create your thesis statement. This is important in order to avoid ending up with a vague and non-specific research paper.

• Sample topic question: Why is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) important to the Dada movement?

• Sample thesis statement: “Marcel Duchamp’s work Fountain (1917) is a pivotal work of the Dada movement and establishes many of the important features associated with Dada art.”

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

In other words, do not make the deadly mistake of researching a topic and merely describing it (or stating the obvious) without stating an argument of some kind. Also avoid the mistake students often make of simply restating someone else's ideas and viewpoints without mapping out in the introduction what direction your paper will take through a thesis statement. Make sure that you establish what you will be arguing or setting out to show in your essay and use your sources to prove your points. Next week, I will be posting on the importance of outlining your paper before beginning the writing process to help map your argument. In the case of fine and performing art papers, you will also have the chance to add your own personal reading of the images/films/performances (in addition to the sources you find on the topic) to help prove your thesis through visual evidence.

You must state an argument about your topic in order to have a good thesis statement such as:

"Duchamp's Fountain (1917) is a pivotal work of the Dada movement and establishes many of its important features". 

Is this a thesis statement?:

“Marcel Duchamp is associated with the Dada movement and created Fountain (1917)”  

NO, it is simply a statement and not opinionated in any way

Is this a thesis statement?:

“Marcel Duchamp’s work Fountain (1917) is a pivotal work of the Dada movement and establishes many of the important features associated with Dada art.” 

YES, it is a statement that is opinionated and sets forth an argument

Jean-Luc Godard Skipping Governor's Awards: Is Anyone Really Surprised?

French filmmaker Jean Luc Godard turns 80 this year.

When I heard that Godard wasn't going to be picking up his honorary Oscar at a special ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood next month, I smiled to myself and thanked goodness that some things never change. Yes, it is a terribly French thing to do, and yes, Godard seems too old to be keeping up with such an attitude of resistance (I mean even Charlie Chaplin finally made amends with the Academy in his old age), but his actions are consistent with the kind of avant-garde filmmaking and controversial attitudes that have punctuated his career. Just this past week I spoke with a number of students who saw the French New Wave master's Breathless (1960) for the first time at a special screening at Vancouver's Pacific Cinematheque, and I was reminded how powerfully relevant and contemporary Godard's films read to today's audiences. Ironically enough, the banter, tension and flirting between Belmondo and Seberg's characters (petty French thief meets aspiring American journalist) echoes themes of Godard's own love-hate relationship with American culture-- filmic and socio-political-- that relate to his decision to skip the awards. It is also a love-hate relationship that many of us as Canadians relate to well.

In this sense, I would argue that Godard has remained both loyal and consistent with his course of action, something that is highlighted in this brilliant 1960's interview clip embedded below (an interview in French with English subtitles-- I have also embedded the original French trailer for Breathless for those needing a quick Godard fix). Note how his opinions and casual indifference regarding film reviews and criticism are shaped by his own earlier career as a film critic and also note how all of his awards have come from European (and one Canadian!) film institution. Does anyone really blame him for keeping not attending? I just love Godard's wife's cutting response to it all: "He's getting old for that kind of thing. Would you go all that way just for a bit of metal?"

Weekly Twitter Round Up| Happy Halloween!

Halloween Cookies photo from Lunchstudio

Grab your bowl of Halloween treats and check out the following links I favourited from the Twitterverse over the past week. For fun, check out the Global Zombie Invasion series featured on AMC's YouTube Channel. There you will find individual videos of zombie invasions staged in the cities of Munich, Madrid, London, Belgrade, Istanbul, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Boston, San Francisco, Mexico City, Sofia, Lisbon, Rome, Taipei etc.. etc.. etc.. I have embedded the invasion from Rome set in front of the Colosseum below the tweets. Fantastic imagery. Wishing all of you a happy and safe Halloween night!

The 10 Best & Worst Halloween Candies:http://huff.to/b7WYOE (best)http://huff.to/bDAMy5 (worst)

Happy Halloween! Our Five for Friday reveals tricks and treats from MoMA's collection

Will the pendulum in the art market swing back to traditional art?

Visual artists seek a percentage of resale riches

The first photograph of a human

Looks like "Umbrella Etiquette" posts are back in style again - here's a collection from Vancouver Blogs back in 2007

Why get an undergrad degree?

Views:  Students have no idea about the implications of their lives online

Mapping the Art World Then and Now

Alfred H. Barr, Development of Abstract Art (1935) click on image to enlarge

Maps are political objects. To look at one is to look at an ideology and a visual representation of ideas organized in space, highlighting real and symbolic associations. Within the art world, mapping has served an important function in helping determine not only the contours of its history, but also the topography (or the configuration of many features) of its producers and institutions. This past week in a class discussing interwar North American modern art, I introduced Alfred H. Barr’s map of the development of abstract art, a highly influential document that attempted to visually represent and chart the various “isms” of art which contributed to its constructed linear chronology. As the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Barr created the map in 1935 to help visually ground the trajectory of modern art developments as they moved from the cubism of Europe to the abstract expressionism emerging in New York. And even while the map did not point directly to any of the social or political history that framed the context of its “scientific” visual vocabulary, its creation was rooted in an attempt to relocate the center of the art world from the confines of European cities like Paris and Berlin to the emerging modern art center of New York. In this sense, the map served as powerful visual evidence of the inevitability of this progression. As art blogger Lauren Palmor usefully sums up in a close reading of the Barr map, “The chart itself is intellectually complicated and simultaneously over simplified. It appeals to an elite, formalist aesthetic while also functioning as an introduction to cubism and abstract art.” Earlier in Palmor’s assessment, another key aspect of this dynamic is explained related to the context audience’s bring to the map, “The imagery of the chart and the chart’s viewers engage in a process of reciprocal definition. The viewers assign imagery to the un-illustrated terms of the chart, while the chart offers equally abstract connections and definitions.”

George Maciunas, Expanded Arts Diagram (1966) click on image to enlarge

Fast forward three decades later to the moment of modern art’s critical reassessment and critique by a new generation of artists. Barr’s vertically organized and scientific map is transformed by Fluxus co-founder George Maciunas into a more fluid and deconstructed flow chart, redistributed along a horizontal plane. The dates still exist as markers on the far left of both maps, but the possibilities for art’s development are extended beyond the restraints and institutionally defined parameters of abstract expressionism. We are also presented with a map that begins to incorporate the relationships between cultural history and art with acknowledgement of the church, world’s fair, and spectacles associated with royal courts as key examples. As Tatianna Bazzichelli suggests in her fascinating discussion of Maciunas’s links to the networked culture we live in today, the Fluxus diagrams emerge as “hyper-textual maps” that manifest in an attitude of open thought, freedom, and democratic values. It is a represented field that flows easily between art and life, presenting a myriad of possibilities for how and what art is.

William Powhida, A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System (2010) click on image to enlarge

Today, the utopic notion of Maciunas’s expanded arts diagram has undergone yet another kind of mapping in the work of New York artist and critic William Powhida. Last month, I blogged about his controversial diagram The Game, a drawing that traces the dynamics of power based upon the career choices artists make moving from an MFA program towards celebrated art career. In his latest work, A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System, Powhida maps the contemporary networks of power in the art world through an updated and, many would agree, painfully accurate representation of today’s topography. With this and his other diagrams, Powhida has sought to unmask the hidden political dynamics of the art world so carefully effaced in the Barr map while also debunking the myth of democratic access (a discourse that is also applied to the mechanisms of the World Wide Web) and the expanded field of art and possibilities for artists presented in the Maciunas diagram. Unlike the Barr and Maciunas maps, it is presented as a snapshot in present time without a clear temporal progression from past to future. Instead, the inclusion of the mechanisms of market economics together with the impact of social networking are added features which both invigorate and deepen the contours of the real spaces of the art world as one that operates more like a pyramid scheme of its own insular making. In a complete inversion of the Barr map, Powhida’s diagram does not include mention of actual art objects or “isms” at all, punctuating the development of contemporary art as exclusively discourse and power driven, but still emanating from the institutions of art that a person like Barr (with the help of his map) helped foster. Note that in Powhida’s diagram, the art museum sits just beneath the “art stars” they select and validate. Looking at all three maps therefore tells us a great deal about the times they were conceived and created in--picturing the world of art in all of its complexity.

Further Reading:

Kantor, Sybil Gordon. Alfred H. Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. MIT Press, 2001.

Pence, Elizabeth. "William Powhida" ArtUS 27 (2009): 104.

Robinson, Julia. "Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s." Grey Room 33 (2008): 56-83. 

Kanye West's "Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy": Vanity Project or Work of Art?

One of five album covers (this one a portrait of Kanye West) reportedly chosen for the hip hop artist's newest album. Artwork by George Condo

Much like Lady Gaga, hip hop artist Kanye West has positioned himself as something of a performance artist, establishing a kind of carefully honed visual aesthetic that incorporates references to both the world of contemporary art and the art of the historical avant-garde. As such, it is an aesthetic that is recognizable to many in the art world as evidence of West’s engagement and understanding of many of its core questions. He did after all attend the American Academy of Art in Chicago briefly before dropping out to focus on his career, a theme that runs all the way through the conceptual grounding of his music in albums titled The College Dropout (2004), Late Registration (2005), and Graduation (2007). But it is also an aesthetic that I would argue has mostly been deployed without much criticality and often to extend and magnify what many also argue is one giant vanity project celebrating (and profiting from) all that is “Mr. Kanye West.” Simply Googling his name immediately results in stories of West’s outrageous behaviour--especially it seems at music award shows-- where West has made a spectacle of himself attempting to capture audience attention at the expense of his colleagues. But is this perhaps just part of his performance? Can we actually take Kanye West's aesthetic vision seriously?

Takashi Murakami's artwork was featured on Kanye West's Graduation (2007) album

Over the past week, the questions of West’s artistic integrity have once again surfaced with two separate but related visual arts projects that form part of the release of his fifth studio album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The first concerns the controversial art work he chose to feature on the album itself (see image at top of post), and the second relates to the half hour music video--or “art film” as West calls it-- that he produced to feature all nine of the album’s songs. Some of you may recall West’s collaboration with Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami on Graduation (2007) where he asked the artist to help represent his alter-ego “dropout bear” chased by demons and moving through obstacles to make it to his graduation ceremony. In a similar way, West’s latest album is also a portrait, although this time a more literal one with direct representation of the artist himself. Working with artist George Condo, an individual who came of age in the New York art scene of the 1980's and whose art practice centers on themes of surreal sexual energy filled with existential angst, Kanye is presented as a reclining nude straddled by an armless winged white female.

Nudity and provocative posing aside (the main reason for the broader public’s raised eyebrow), the image is filled with loaded art historical references and problematic juxtapositions of academic nudes, the black body, a winged goddess, and complex mythological and cultural symbolism. Lots and lots to unpack here. For West however, the implied narrative is completely personal as he suggests in a recent New York Magazine interview: "It's the story of a phoenix fallen to Earth, and I make her my girlfriend, and people discriminate against her and eventually she has to burn herself alive and go back to her world…I've been feeling the idea of the phoenix. It's been in my heart for a while. It's maybe parallel to my career. I threw a Molotov cocktail on my career last year, in a way, and I had to come back as a better person."

Vanessa Beecroft's own controversial fusion of the world of art and fashion makes her collaboration with West a perfect match

West’s video for the album Runaway emerges as a visual extension of the album cover and is said to be inspired by not one, but two, cinema directing legends: Frederico Fellini and Stanley Kubrik. To add further visual complications, the film's screenplay and visual treatment is co-written with controversial contemporary artist Vanessa Beecroft, who is best known for her large scale performance artworks featuring nude fashion models and a narcissistic impulse not unlike Kanye West’s. The casting of Victoria Secret model Selita Ebanks, who has walked the runway in the lingerie company's signature angel wings, also activates a particular kind of spectatorship of the nude and winged phoenix she plays in the film. With each of these disparate influences, the hip hop artist creates a visual landscape for his music that links high fashion, high art, film noir, and epic irony in highly evocative but also deeply troubling ways. I will leave it for you to decide and decipher (I have provided the short video version of the production below; you can see the full version here), but for me the film ends up much like his overdetermined album cover. They are both engaged in visual and conceptual overdrive. Too much going on, too much to absorb, too much to unpack. As NPR music critic Jacob Ganz correctly summed up this past week in his review of the video (and by extension Kanye West’s aesthetic vision), it is all very beautiful but also completely “interminable.”