Subject Area
Art History/Criticism/Conservation
Abstract
Since the 1970s, American artist Beryl Korot (b. 1945) has been recognized as a pioneer of video art who has combined new media with textiles and drawing in her multimedia installations. Much of the existing literature on Korot focuses on positioning her within the emergent video art movement and contextualizing her work in relation to later video art. This thesis takes a different approach, examining themes of Jewishness within a selection of Korot’s video art – Dachau 1974 (1974), Text and Commentary (1976-77), and Babel: The 7 Minute Scroll (2007) – and, more specifically, explores how the three works manifest different Jewish responses to the Shoah.
By emphasizing the importance of Korot’s Jewish identity within her video art, I hope to move beyond the existing scholarship that contextualizes Korot with reference to video art and the feminist art movement. In examining the previously understudied role of religious identity in Korot’s work, I explore how it intersects with themes of memory, gender, and textuality. Throughout this thesis, I assert that new relevance can be found within Korot’s visually complex and conceptually sophisticated works by attending to the theme of Jewish identity.
Degree Date
Spring 5-10-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Department
Art History
Advisor
Anna Lovatt
Second Advisor
Elizabeth Eager
Third Advisor
Serge Frolov
Number of Pages
87
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Woods, Emma, "Text and Commentary: Jewish Identity in Beryl Korot's Video Art" (2024). Art History Theses and Dissertations. 22.
https://scholar.smu.edu/arts_arthistory_etds/22
