Looking for pleasure: Art, spectatorship, and desire in a televisual age

Looking for Pleasure: Art, Spectatorship, and Desire in a Televisual Age posits that the popularity and pervasiveness of television in the past half-century has significantly influenced the ways in which we approach and interpret all visual objects in Western culture. Three terms form the foundation of this dissertation: the televisual age, the televisual gaze, and televisual pleasure. The televisual age denotes our current society in which television, specifically, and a ubiquitous image culture, in general, have increasingly dominated the popular understanding of how things are represented, how images are processed, how what we see garners its social and cultural meaning, and how spectators can and should relate to a world of visual objects. Stemming from this changing outlook towards visual objects, the televisual gaze signifies a way of looking, seeing, watching, and visualizing that is closely linked to this aforementioned image-saturated cultural context. While this gaze characterizes the proliferation of the image within a vast audience that includes more than just a singular viewer, it also delineates the viewer's experience of watching and inscribing her desire within, of, and for the visual object. Lastly, televisual pleasure describes the affective and affected relationship of the spectator and the spectacle, marking the tenuous and permeable boundaries between visual productivity, excess, and desire.;In Chapters 1 and 2, this project considers the situated experience of viewing art in the space of the museum, from the articulation of the viewer's body in relation to Minimalist sculpture to the realization of the contemporary sublime in light-works by artists from Dan Flavin to Olafur Eliasson. Chapters 3 and 4 explore two different types of television viewership: on the one hand, the compulsive, erotic gaze of the voyeur vis-a-vis shows such as Sex and the City and The L Word, and, on the other hand, the inquisitive, sometimes violent look of the investigator in crime dramas such as CSI and Medium. Ultimately, this project examines both the viewer's desire---how her individual gaze and subjective experience reflect on the work or show's ambient community formation---and how we come to understand representations in relation to what they signify, whether nature, truth, justice, or death.;By drawing parallels between such ostensibly disparate media as contemporary art and television, this dissertation asserts "televisuality" as a new model for visual experience in the contemporary age. In a society saturated by the ubiquity of television and its visual aftereffects, the faculty of vision has been presumed a primary mode for communication. Images are always coming at us---whether in art museums and galleries, in the space of our own homes, on busy street corners, in storefront windows, and even in elevators. This project explores how visual culture---in particular, televisual culture---has influenced art production and changed, or in some cases failed to change, the act of viewing and the role of the spectator in the contemporary period.