Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Herzog, Richard

Keywords

Sculpture, TMT, Burial

Area of Concentration

Art

Abstract

With the Vanisher Series I interpret the fear of death as derived from its fundamentally premature nature. Like any other, the fear of death is a fear of the unknown. It is my claim that through culture we may exact a measure of control in our lives to make death appear less unpredictable. The two-fold aim of the work is to draw parallels across time between flawed fear-limiting strategies and to undergo a conceptual experiment to unearth something universal between spatial relationships in sculpture and human behavior. I align the rampant fear of the Schientod, or death-trance, in late 18th century Europe, and the provisions against premature interment, with a contemporary system of maintaining symbolic prestige through the automobile espoused by TMT. Additionally, through the extended analysis of a spatial thought problem, I attempt to objectify the hole as an archetypal space of death for the purposes of exploring spatial relations in sculpture through a process of inversion. It is my intention that if the fear of death is a human universal, then distilling essential spatial elements in the sculptural form, will necessarily lead me to that fear.

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