Bear Shields of Plains Indians : Motifs and Meanings

The study is the outcome of two research projects on the North American Indian traditions: the role of the shields within the Plains Indians traditional culture and religion, and the bear ceremonialism of the Native North America, especially the significance of the bear among the Plains Indians. This article-based dissertation includes seven separately published scholar papers, forming Chapters 6 12. The introduction formulates the objectives and frame of reference of the study and the conclusions pulls together its results. The study reconsiders the role of the Plains Indian shields with bear motifs. Such shields are found in rock art, in the Plains Indian s paintings and drawings, and in various collections, the main source material being the shields in European and North American museums. The aim is not only to study shields with bear power motifs and the meanings of the bear, but also to discuss appropriate methods for studying these subjects. There are three major aims of the study: to consider methodical questions in studying Plains Indian shields, to examine the complexity of the Plains Indian shields with the bear power motifs, and to offer new interpretations for the basic meanings of the bear among the Plains Indians and the interrelationship between individualism and collectivism in the Plains Indians visionary art that show bear power motifs on the shields. The study constructs a view on the bear shields taking account of all sources of information available and analysing the shields both as physical artefacts and religious objects from different perspectives, studying them as a part of the ensemble of Plains culture and religious traditions. The bear motifs represented the superhuman power that medicine men and warriors could exploit through visions. For the Plains Indians, the bear was a wise animal from which medicine men could get power for healing but also a dangerous animal from which warriors could get power for warfare. The shields with bear motifs represented the bear powers of the owners of the shields. The bear shield was made to represent the vision, and the principal interpretation of the symbolism was based on the individual experience of spiritual world and its powers. The study argues that the bear shield as personal medicine object is based on wider tribal traditions, and the basic meaning is derived from the collective tradition. This means that the bear seen in vision represented particular affairs and it was represented on the shield surface using conventional ways of traditional artistry. In consequence of this, the bear shields reflect not only the individual experiences of bear power but whole field of tribal traditions that legitimated the experiences and offered acceptable interpretations and conventional modes for the bear symbols.

Tiedostumaton nykytaiteessa : Katse, ääni ja aika vuosituhannen taitteen suomalaisessa nykytaiteessa

Leevi Haapala explores moving image works, sculptures and installations from a psychoanalytic perspective in his study The Unconscious in Contemporary Art. The Gaze, Voice and Time in Finnish Contemporary Art at the Turn of the Millennium . The artists included in the study are Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Hans-Christian Berg, Markus Copper, Liisa Lounila and Salla Tykkä. The theoretical framework includes different psychoanalytic readings of the concepts of the gaze, voice and temporality. The installations are based on spatiality and temporality, and their detailed reading emphasizes the medium-specific features of the works as well as their fragmentary nature, heterogeneity and affectivity. The study is cross-disciplinary in that it connects perspectives from the visual culture, new art history and theory to the interpretation of contemporary art. The most important concepts from psychoanalysis, affect theory and trauma discourse used in the study include affect, object a (objet petit a) as articulated by Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud s uncanny (das Unheimliche) and trauma. Das Unheimliche has been translated as uncanny in art history under the influence of Rosalind Krauss. The object of the study, the unconscious in contemporary art, is approached through these concepts. The study focuses on Lacan s additions to the list of partial drives: the gaze and voice as scopic and invocative drives and their interpretations in the studies of the moving image. The texts by the American film theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman are in crucial role. The study locates contemporary art as part of trauma culture, which has a tendency to define individual and historical experiences through trauma. Some of the art works point towards trauma, which may appear as a theoretic or fictitious construction. The study presents a comprehensive collection of different kinds of trauma discourse in the field of art research through the texts of Hal Foster, Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys and Shoshana Felman. The study connects trauma theory with the theoretical analysis of the interference and discontinuity of the moving image in the readings by Susan Buck-Morss, Mary Ann Doane and Peter Osborn among others. The analysis emphasizes different ways of seeing and multisensoriality in the reception of contemporary art. With their reflections and inverse projections, the surprising mechanisms of Hans-Christian Berg s sculptures are connected with Lacan s views on the early mirroring and imitation attempts of the individual s body image. Salla Tykkä s film trilogy Cave invites one to contemplate the Lacanian theory of the gaze in relation to the experiences of being seen. The three oceanic sculpture installations by Markus Copper are studied through the vocality they create, often through an aggressive way of acting, as well as from the point of view of the functioning of an invocative drive. The study compares the work of fiction and Freud s texts on paranoia and psychosis to Eija-Liisa Ahtila s manuscripts and moving image installations about the same topic. The cinematic time in Liisa Lounila s time-slice video installations is approached through the theoretical study of the unconscious temporal structure. The viewer of the moving image is inside the work in an in-between state: in a space produced by the contents of the work and its technology. The installations of the moving image enable us to inhabit different kinds of virtual bodies or spaces, which do not correspond with our everyday experiences. Nevertheless, the works of art often try to deconstruct the identification to what has been shown on screen. This way, the viewer s attention can be fixed on his own unconscious experiences in parallel with the work s deconstructed nature as representation. The study shows that contemporary art is a central cultural practice, which allows us to discuss the unconscious in a meaningful way. The study suggests that the agency that is discursively diffuse and consists of several different praxes should be called the unconscious. The emergence of the unconscious can happen in two areas: in contemporary art through different senses and discursive elements, and in the study of contemporary art, which, being a linguistic activity is sensitive to the movements of the unconscious. One of the missions of art research is to build different kinds of articulated constructs and to open an interpretative space for the nature of art as an event.

Jouko Turkan Teatterikorkeakoulun kauden yhteiskunnallinen kontekstuaalisuus vuosina 1982 - 1985

The subject of my doctoral thesis is the social contextuality of Finnish theater director, Jouko Turkka's (b. 1942) educational tenure in the Theater Academy of Finland 1982 1985. Jouko Turkka announced in the opening speech of his rectorship in 1982 that Finnish society had undergone a social shift into a new cultural age, and that actors needed new facilities like capacity, flexibility, and ability for renewal in their work. My sociological research reveals that Turkka adapted cultural practices and norms of new capitalism and new liberalism, and built a performance environment for actors' educational work, a real life simulation of a new capitalist workplace. Actors educational praxis became a cultural performance, a media spectacle. Turkka's tenure became the most commented upon and discussed era in Finnish postwar theater history. The sociological method of my thesis is to compare information of sociological research literature about new capitalist work, and Turkka's educational theater work. In regard to the conceptions of legitimation, time, dynamics, knowledge, and social narrative consubstantial changes occurred simultaneously in both contexts of workplace. I adapt systems and chaos theory's concepts and modules when researching how a theatrical performance self-organizes in a complex social space and the space of Information. Ilya Prigogine's chaos theoretic concept, fluctuation, is the central social and aesthetic concept of my thesis. The chaos theoretic conception of the world was reflected in actors' pedagogy and organizational renewals: the state of far from equilibrium was the prerequisite of creativity and progress. I interpret the social and theater's aesthetical fluctuations as the cultural metaphor of new capitalism. I define the wide cultural feedback created by Turkka's tenure of educational praxis, and ideas adapted from the social context into theater education, as an autopoietic communicative process between theater education and society: as a black box, theater converted the virtual conception of the world into a concrete form of an actor's psychophysical praxis. Theater educational praxis performed socially contextual meanings referring to a subject's position in the social change of 1980s Finland. My other theoretic framework lies close to the American performance theory, with its close ties to the social sciences, and to the tradition of rhetoric and communication: theater's rhetorical utility materializes quotidian cultural practices in a theatrical performance, and helps the audience to research social situations and cultural praxis by mirroring them and creating an explanatory frame.