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This combined studio practice/text thesis analyses links among the Chinese concept of jingjie, the archetypal patterns of sacred places, the picturesque movement in European aesthetics, and site-specificity in 1960s Land Art. In addition to examining site-specificity and the theoretical aspects of my studio practice, I explore the relationship between my ethnicity and my work in the context of contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese art environments. Guided by the principle that "practice and theory inform each other," I restate the significance of jingjie in contemporary art, especially its connection with the physical and psychological patterns found in archetypal "sacred places." Jingjie was fundamental to the spatial fluidity found in Chinese landscape arts, especially garden design. After demonstrating how Chinese gardens influenced English landscape garden principles and the 18th-century European picturesque movement, I argue that similar East-West connections served as direct and indirect influences on the site-specific work of middle and late 20th-century Land Art artists. I then describe how picturesque depictions of the relationship between man and nature influenced 19th-century landscape architecture in North America and 20th-century Land Art throughout the West. Finally, jingjie and Chinese gardens are used to explore archetypal sacred place patterns and their influences on the Western tradition of the picturesque. These parallel East-West connections served as the foundation for later interest in site-specificity, and were essential in establishing a historical context for understanding cross-cultural currents and their influences on Land Art artists. Using jingjie as my focus, I examine aspects of contemporary art that are not usually addressed by art critics, and reconsider the relevance of the Western picturesque tradition through a reciprocal model of cultural influences.

Francis Barlow (c. 1626-1704) was one of the most prolific picture makers to work in England during the second half of the seventeenth century. Surprisingly, there has not been an account of his life and works in almost forty years, and even then Barlow was •• #.-f presented rather narrowly as the 'first master of English book illustration' (Hodnett, 1978). Barlow is now chiefly remembered for his illustrated Aesop 's Fables (1666), but he has also gained attention as a satirist, and as a sporting artist. This dissertation attempts to piece together the many facets of wide-ranging oeuvre. Following the introduction, which reveals new information about his life, Barlow's works are investigated in eight chapters, arranged according to the heuristic categories of natural history; religion and politics; and hunting and travel. As the chapters proceed, the interconnectedness of Barlow's works is revealed, as is the lack of distinction between the aspects of seventeenth-century society and culture, which they reflect. The dissertation mainly recovers Barlow as a painter. It is argued that Barlow has been forgotten as a painter due to a strong connoisseurial tradition in the history of British art, which has tended to underrate his painting. No less than forty-three paintings are interpreted and placed into a chronology. Striving to understand them in a seventeenth-century context reveals Barlow' s craft, his relationships with a wide range of patrons, and the nature of his place in the London community. Extrapolating from what we know about Barlow' s activities as a graphic satirist, the politick of his patrons, and the 'internal' evidence of the narratives of his paintings, this study demonstrates how, at least for Barlow, painting was not merely decorative. - ---~--------- / \

This dissertation will consider how 'gothic' might be applied within contemporary art discourse beyond the motif-heavy assumptions which clutter its habitual usage today. I explore the term historically across its principal disciplines: firstly, art and architecture, from Renaissance to twentieth-century accounts of the Middle Ages alongside its stylistic revival during the Romantic era; and secondly, its now-predominant reference, the eponymous literature of terror emerging in the mid-eighteenth century, later strongly related to horror film, My first premise is that the term's original art-based significance - i.e., having to do with the lingering effects of unwanted inheritances - remains central to its meaning. Secondly, I observe that in attempting to define the essence of the genre, numerous literary theorists cite recurring aesthetic features, i.e., shadows and darkness; labyrinthine space; an emphasis on surface rather than depth; and claustrophobia, among others. These can be seen to establish a recognizable yet flexible aesthetic language - a gothic aesthetic - to speak of the present as a haunted time. This research will test and explore the relevance of a possible literary-based gothic aesthetic to art, particularly in relation to Andy Warhoi's Death and Disaster series (1962-65; '67), Louise Bourgeois's Cells (1986-2008), and a selection of artworks by Tacita Dean, all of which I identify as significant examples of gothic innovation in the visual arts. I also consider the gothic content of Warhol' s artistic persona, and explore whether an earlier art-historical meaning of the term, particularly regarding the fifteenth-century danse macabre, can be seen to continue in the Death and Disasters on radically revised terms. Conventionally assumed as opposites, Modernism and (modern) gothic can be said to have emerged contemporaneously during the Enlightenment. The gothic was a mode despised in the Modernist writings of Clement Greenberg and others; as I argue, some post-1960s artists can be seen to have adopted locations, figures, and forms associated with the gothic to assert counter- or after-Modernist art-making strategies, or to reflect upon Modernism's legacy today.

This thesis re-examines the idea of melancholy through the work of a selection of female artists. I argue that it is due to the neglect of the importance of women and also to the lack of attention paid to visual art that has generated a general obscurity around the term melancholy. In actuality, what has become an abstract idea originally had a physical cause: the initial severance from the mother's body. As result, the melancholic is fixated on a lost ideal -- on the umbilical connection that they once experienced and subsequently spend a lifetime trying to recreate. Following the introduction of maternity to our understanding of melancholy, it becomes necessary to expand and revitalise the list of symbols connected with this complex idea to incorporate womb-like and umbilical motifs. The first chapter discusses historical depictions of melancholy by Albrecht Durer and Francisco Goya, and theoretical texts by Julia Kristeva and Juliana Schiesari. Through the work of Frida Kahlo, the second chapter unites ancient melancholic emblems such as the angel, dog and distant horizon, with new ones including the bathtub, ribbons and hair braids. The third chapter considers the work of Francesca Woodman and the artist's melancholic's tendency to experiment with models, for example geometry, in order to embody the irrational intensity of thought and feeling. The fourth chapter reassesses the work of Kiki Smith as an anatomical investigation into the idea of melancholy, using the suggestion of physical pain and bodily leakage as revelatory of inner psychic torment. The fifth chapter, on Tracey Emin, demonstrates the alleviation of melancholy in ways other than the 'real' infant/mother dyad, such as, through fantasy and other relationships. The sixth and final chapter introduces the work of ',; .' . ';, t three lesser-known artists, Elina Brotherus, 'Klara Kristalova and Charlotte Lindsay; .. , their work, I maintain, reasserts the importance of historical examples to reintroduce an element of abstraction, while at the same time acknowledging the newfound bodily focus and explicability of melancholy, perhaps the more "feminine" contribution to the discourse

The thesis and portfolio of practical work presents a parallel inquiry into socially transformative art practice and the evaluative framework proper to it. It explores how art contributes to a better world and the form such practice takes in an increasingly expanded, 'precarious' and interdisciplinary sphere. The varied nature of the work under question leads to the adoption of a structure that distinguishes practices by their operation in different spaces or ecologies: the individual, social and structural. A further distinction is made between those practices that self-identify as art (and the institutional, market-led and capitalist framework this can entail), and those that either actively disavow or go unrecognised as art due to their distance from the signifying apparatuses of the discipline. This 'informal' art practice is referred to as 'self-organised cultural activity' and opens up on to discussions of the relative merits of DIY practices including music, self-publishing, political activism and so on. The thesis demonstrates how these often distanced and apparently contradictory practices find resonance and whose accumulative effect contributes to the conditions for a paradigmatic shift that would constitute 'postcapitalism'. The connecting thread between these sites and practices is their potential for effecting change at the level of the individual via a subjectivising aesthetic rupture. Contextualised by poststructuralist, postanarchist and Autonomist Marxist political philosophy and debates in contemporary art criticism and theory, the thesis and dossier of practice contribute to a richer understanding of - and expanded language with which to discuss - the relation between art and politics. It draws links between normally unconnected practices, identifying the often overlooked or underplayed aesthetic experience within socially engaged art and the political resonances of aesthetic experience, attending to gaps in thought and practice around art and social change.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.