Abstract
This thesis project addresses questions concerning the significance of the title of an artwork (as a category of literature), and the art object, as vehicles for provoking thought, feeling, and imagination. The title of each work—both deceptively simple and provocatively complex—functions as an important mediator between the objects and the viewer, thus revealing the work’s context, history and ultimately establishing its singularity. A central research question is: How does the title—understood as a literary text as applied to sculpture—interrelate and contrast with orthodoxies of meaning, rationality, and signification? Drawing upon literary theory, the project makes explicit a conception of titles as works of literature, formulating and developing categories of the narrative-title and event-title in order to engage deeply with issues of the title and its reception, including questions of reading, writing, affect, and meaning. Using a pataphysical approach, each chapter discusses how artworks—specifically, the literary title—question and complicate conventions of the operation of language and textual meaning. In this way, the thesis explores how the title depends upon the limits and shifting interplay between categories: truth and falsehood, non-fiction and fiction, determined meaning and meaning that is more ambiguous. Among other approaches, the thesis examines a history of the concept of the title as applied to sculpture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries asking questions about how titles have been used to enable a wide array of durations and meanings to emerge and, subsequently, affect how we perceive content in the titled object. Importantly, this thesis project suggests that the viewer who experiences the force produced by an irreducibly ambiguous title is constituted as becoming-being; bestowed ethically with a vitality of ongoing work.
