Radically art historical : Attila Richard Lukacs and the weight of history
department or school: Arts, Faculty of
department or school: Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCV
creator: Willis V, John (Johnny)
issued: 2023-08-31T19:17:07Z
issued: 2023
related degree: Master of Arts - MA
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: “Radically Art Historical” presents a critical overview of the first decade of the Canadian painter Attila Richard Lukacs’s infamous career as Canada’s “bad boy artist” in the 1980s and 1990s. Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the thesis underscores the degree to which Lukacs’s appropriation of art history, and Caravaggio in particular, enabled his monumental scenes of queer male sexuality to enter into the spaces and collections of major international museums at the height of the AIDS crisis. I demonstrate that, passed through the art historical sieve of respectability, Lukacs’s work enabled gay sex to finally have a place on the wall of museums. Lukacs’s objectives, however, were much too deconstructive to be summarized as mere identity politics. Throughout the thesis, I demonstrate that Lukacs was engaged in a Derridean campaign of deconstruction, simultaneously citing and undercutting binary oppositions such as East and West, gay and straight, and past and present. Through careful examinations of his massive tableaux featuring hyper-eroticized skinheads as historical actants, I clarify Lukacs’s thematization of German division, reunification, and historical memory in relationship to both deconstruction and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I illustrate the degree to which Lukacs’s antibinaristic epistemology forms a distinctly queer ethos that harks back to a long lineage of transgressive queer thought from Genet to Foucault, and further, how it evinces a “criminal” strategy that corresponds with the history of art and homosexuality. The thesis also interrogates Lukacs’s deconstructive treatment of masculinity, revealing a parallel between the imitative nature of masculinity and Lukacs’s imitative yet parodic approach to art history. Lastly, the thesis investigates the relationship of Lukacs’s work to the transformations and devastations of the queer body politic during the 1980s and 1990s, elucidating the artist’s antibinaristic, horizontal ontology …
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/85743
note: RADICALLY ART HISTORICAL: ATTILA RICHARD LUKACS AND THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY by John (Johnny) Willis V B. A. (Hons), University of Pennsylvania, 2021 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art History and Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2023 © John (Johnny) Willis V, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Radically Art Historical: Attila Richard Lukacs and the Weight of History submitted by John (Johnny) Willis V in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History and Theory Examining Committee: Dr. Erin Silver, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisor Dr. Joseph Monteyne, Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract “Radically Art Historical” presents a critical overview of the first decade of the Canadian painter Attila Richard Lukacs’s infamous career as Canada’s “bad boy artist” in the 1980s and 1990s. Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the thesis underscores the degree to which Lukacs’s appropriation of art history, and Caravaggio in particular, enabled his monumental scenes of queer male sexuality to enter into the spaces and collections of major international museums at the height of the AIDS crisis. I demonstrate that, passed through the art historical sieve of respectability, Lukacs’s work enabled gay sex to finally have a place on the wall of museums. Lukacs’s objectives, however, were much too deconstructive to be summarized as mere identity politics. Throughout the thesis, I demonstrate that Lukacs was engaged in a Derridean campaign of deconstruction, simultaneously citing and undercutting binary oppositions such as East and West, gay and str…
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2023-11
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0435710
language: eng
degree discipline: Art History & Theory
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
contributor: Silver, Erin
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85743