Through practice-based research, I propose to reflect critically on my practicethrough a dialogue with the work of other artists and theorists that include Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Theaster Gates, Marine Hugonnier, and Claire Fontaine. I explore the possibility of self and collective emancipation from sedimented socio-historical and political violence. The forms of violence that concern me are those produced by legacies of war,colonialism, economic ideologies and religious practices. As an integral part of the methodology, I have selected examples of modern and contemporary artworks considered as being engaged with art's social significance. Through a dialogue with these artworks, I draw out significant pressures and develop a toolkit of concepts: dispositif-of-dissent,able-agent, and universim. The selected examples of artworks suggest potentially disseminable strategies of social, political, critical and ethical value. Socially engaged art has been a constant presence for over a century, the Wanderers in Russia, William Morris in the UK, and Oswald de Andrade in Brazil are great examples of its span. My thesis selects an aspect of current socially engaged practice that argues for a particular conceptual strength and socio-political agency. I assert the idea that small strategic gestures are of far greater critical significance than grand reactionary actions. I also focus on the idea that empowerment and emancipation can only come from an engagement with the structures of power already at play — and the social, political and economic conditions that these have produced. My approach foregrounds the construction of the aforementioned toolkit aiming to contribute to the widening of a field of inquiry, born of already existing practices. These practices produce encounters with others and suggest ways of discovering agency in everyday life and experience in ways that are potentially collective and social in orientation. The artists of interest to my research forge modes of production open to experimentation, and offer critical expressions of being and relating to others. This toolkit, its terms of use and the artworks I create in relation to it, aims to reflect and animate the development of this field of practice. Throughout this thesis I ask: how individuals become socially engaged, and how the strategies employed by these individuals inform the construction of tools of everyday emancipation? I address these questions through the creation of exploratory artworks, the developement of a toolkit of terms and an exposition of practices that pervade this field of production.

This research began as an investigation of the artist's subjectivity within the process of creating art. The focus of the research was the state of stasis, experienced by the artist as absence of action and nothingness. Reflexive methodology and autobiography were chosen as the basic epistemological and methodological approaches in order to fulfil the framework, questions and needs of this research. Diaries and Meta-Diaries as tools of the methodological approach were significant in the understanding of the artist's subjectivity and its manifestation in the written document. Diary entries were treated as instances of subjectivity rather than symptoms of the truth of the subject. I referred to diaries as part of a 'diary practice' which is inclusive of the time not writing in the diary. Additionally diaries developed an exchange with the artist's practice, became part of the concerns of this research and finally became part of the practice as much as a way of exploring it. Stasis was examined through diary practice and artworks and its characteristics were mapped out. These characteristics were uncertainty, frustration and anticipation of action for the subject. The artist's own diaries and works were examined within the contemporary artistic and theoretical context to determine the strategies the artist adopts to escape stasis. These strategies were initially determined as: Repetition creating a refuge for the subject; Submission to arkhé as a way of providing continuity and The creation of a network of complicity as an affirmation of existence. Drasis, a Greek concept the meaning of which includes both 'act' and the 'performance', was adopted to describe the strategy by which the eventisation of stasis is performed. In drasis the focus of my artwork would become stasis and not action. Through drasis the eventisation of stasis was carried out, marking a strategy of the artist in stasis. Drasis, a strategy for the artist as subject in stasis, is, together with the creative work, my main contribution to knowledge in this research.

This thesis argues that Roger Fry should, in part at least, be placed within a tradition of British, Protestant, art criticism. To this end I compare his work with that of the leading nineteenth-century British art critic John Ruskin. I discuss the problems both men had in engaging with a predominately Catholic art form, and place their work within a wider British tradition. I consider their personal histories and how they gave a similar interpretation of art history. I explore the work of both men on Venetian art and artists with particular references to Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Fry’s writings on Bellini and Giotto. I examine how Fry sought to distance artworks from the culture that produced them and how this affected his view on art history. I compare Fry’s aesthetic ideas with the Theocentric theory of art advanced by Ruskin in the second volume of Modern Painters. Here I compare their respective formalist ideas. I discuss how Fry’s formalism led him to reject Impressionism and champion the Post-Impressionists. I examine the controversy surrounding the 1910 and 1912 Post-Impressionist exhibitions and how they raised the question of the moral value and use of art. I end with a discussion of Ruskin’s concept of the Theoretic faculty and contend that Fry held a similar concept. Overall I argue for the presence of continuity between Fry’s early and later ideas on art criticism and history that can partly be explained by his religious background.

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I examine the way in which, in his work of the 1840s, Ruskin uses methods and assumptions derived from eighteenth-century Materialist, Mechanist and Vitalist Natural Philosophy, especially his assertion that the meanings which he reads into natural phenomena are objectively present and can be quantified, and the way in which therefore aesthetic concepts, responses and judgements can be quantified, and their values fixed. I examine the ways in which Ruskin seeks to demonstrate the relationship between the unity of Nature and the Multipilicity of Phenomena, not only as existing objectively in the external world, but also as reflected in the paintings of Turner. I suggest that his attempt at demonstration features a problematic relationship between his accounting for a material reality and the spiritual significances which he sees as immanent in it, and that resistance to the dynamism of contemporary industrial and social change is implicit in his celebration of an eternalised natural order. I examine four features of his correspondence during the 1840s: his dealings in the art market, his outright opposition to a number of modern developments, his urgent desires to see his favourite European architectural heritage preserved, and his strident xenophobia, and suggest relationships between the last two and his resistance to the modern. I examine the shift in his interests in the 1840s and 1850s from Nature and Art to Architecture and Man, and thence to Political Economy, and examine available accounts which rely too heavily on references to his psychological development, or on his claims to regular epiphanies, or on a significant shift in focus which can be explained by revealing the internal continuities in his work. I conclude with an attempt to demonstrate that what I have called the "broad sweep" approach obscures the confusions and contradictions in his position in the late 1840s and 1850s, and suggest that his social and intellectual inheritance, which is of a highly conservative and unremittingly paternalistic nature, crucially limits his work as ~ social critic. I offer three appendices: on the problem of the relationship between the Unity of Nature and the Multiplicity of Phenomena as that had been addressed in the Natural Philosophy on whose assumptions Ruskin draws; on eighteenth century Materialist, Mechanist and Vitalist theories of matter; and on the work of Edmund Burke and Sir Charles Bell.