Abstract

This thesis argues that indeterminacy, stalling, and centering absence are key aesthetic strategies for addressing the absurdity of late capitalism. These strategies do not erase, ignore, or foreclose conflict, but rather hold discord as a prerequisite to mutuality. Employing tropes from the absurdist tradition, noted for its ability to confront the spectator with apparently insoluble problems, these works do not provide didactic answers. Instead, they surface and insist on difference, disagreement, and opacity as necessary to the social fabric. In so doing, they expose the fallibility within systems of knowledge, dominant narratives, and institutions sustained through imposed consensus.
Each chapter is structured around a single strategy, through a constellation of artworks by contemporary artists from 1980–today, in the fields of performance, mixed media, and installation. Mirroring the circulation of art today, this project is inherently transnational, focusing on works by William Kentridge, Nick Cave, Rebecca Belmore, Regina José Galindo, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Raeda Saadeh, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Francis Alÿs, Jill Magid, and Sophie Calle, artists working across geographies, from Canada to South Africa, in countries with their own disparate yet interrelated legacies of colonialism, resource extraction, and resistance.
Furthering Diana Taylor’s argument for the ability of performance to both record and intervene, this thesis traces the material, historical, and political conditions each singular work exists within. These strategies are critical tools for working against dominant narratives, though they are by no means inherently emancipatory. A contribution of this thesis is an increased literacy of the absurd at a time when fascist leadership globally wields its tools fluently.