Date of Award
Spring 5-2-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Art & Art History
First Advisor
Howard Singerman
Second Advisor
Maria Antonella Pelizzari
Academic Program Adviser
Lynda Klich
Abstract
This thesis examines the work of contemporary American artists and writers Moyra Davey, Chris Kraus, Frances Stark, and Martine Syms within the context of feminist art history, theory, and practice in the post-1970s artworld. While often read as autobiographical or self-referential, their work across media uses personal narrative as a means of engaging broader theoretical and institutional concerns. Through the literary form of the bildungsroman, these artists employ narrative, fiction, and memoir—often through new and time-based media, but also through interdisciplinary modes rooted in writing—to reflect on their ongoing education as artists within an increasingly globalized Euro-American artworld. By framing their work as feminist bildungsromane or bildungskunst, this thesis argues that they reposition personal experience within a collective, critical discourse, offering both a complex commentary on the structures, values, and contradictions of the contemporary artworld and its institutions of education from within, and a nuanced understanding of what it means to be educated as an artist today.
Recommended Citation
Chapelle, Brianne, "The Imposition of a Narrative Line: The Bildungsroman as Form in Contemporary Art" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1401
Included in
American Art and Architecture Commons, Contemporary Art Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons
