This thesis examines the use of the science of visual perception in the study of art. I argue that this application of perceptual psychology and physiology has been neglected in recent years, but contend that it is being revived by writers such as John Onians. I apply recent scientific research to demonstrate what can be learned about depiction from the science of perception. The thesis uses the science of perception to argue that there are four main interlinked components in depiction. It argues that each of these components can be better understood by using the science of vision. Chapter 1 examines one component, namely resemblance. It uses studies of the retina, centre-surround cells, and attentional processes to examine how a picture can vary in appearance from its subject matter, yet still represent it. Chapter 2 examines a second component, namely informativeness. It applies Biederman's psychological theory of recognition-by-components to argue that the depiction of volumetric forms depends on the depiction of the vertices of such objects, as well as that of linear perspective. From this the chapter argues that the notion of informativeness, as developed by Lopes, should be combined with a notion of resemblance to create a more complete theory. Chapter 3 examines a third component of depiction, namely that pictures can include, omit, and distort the features of their subjects. The psychological theory of scales, as developed by Oliva and Schyns, is used to explain certain kinds of depictions of fabrics, and the perception of Pointillist paintings. The chapter also examines the issue of to what extent perception and depiction are dependent on culture rather than genetics, and shows how a combination of scientific methodology, in the form of cross-cultural psychology, and historiography, in the form of Baxandall's 'period eye' approach, can be used to investigate this issue. Chapter 4 examines a fourth component of depiction, namely the organisation of pictures. It uses studies by Westphal-Fitch et al., and Võ and Wolfe to analyse the patterns of Waldalgesheim art, and the images in the Book of Kells. By using the science of visual perception, I arrive at the conclusion that a combination of theories of recognition, informativeness, and order, developed in Chapters 1, 2, and 4, together with theories of visual decomposition, processing, and recomposition, developed in Chapter 3, form a basis for understanding depiction.

Despite the expansion of the contemporary art world and art market and the increased attention this has brought from theorists and researchers, there is still little known of the artist’s involvement in the operational dynamics of how art flows from production to consumption – beyond the artist’s role as the producer of the art object. This reinforces the image of the artist as ‘solitary genius’ and being isolated from the art world and art market. Is this romanticised notion from past eras still applicable in today’s globalised art world and art market? This thesis begins by assembling a contextual picture of the art world and art market – the complex logics are laid out within a framework considering how value is created, how the networks of agents operate as well as exploring what is currently known of the artist’s position within these networks (other than as producer). Following this the thesis brings in empirical evidence from in-depth interviews with artists and dealers to reveal that artists are both actively and reactively engaged in developing their art world and art market. It is specifically in relation to the structure of the artist-dealer relationship; the day-to-day administration of this relationship; and the management of third party relationships where their engagement takes place. Furthermore, I reveal there is a lack of clarity at the core of the art world and art market (specifically in the artist-dealer relationship), which is exacerbated by a reliance upon trust; this trust means that communications often do not occur and instead assumptions are made based on expectations. These expectations when unfulfilled can result in the artist taking an even greater level of administrative engagement. I therefore propose that the artist is both a creator and an administrator, whose administrative actions or inactions can develop or hinder their position within the art world and art market networks and ultimately impact on the value of them and their art.

This thesis seeks to examine, through a combination of practical and theoretical research, some of the chief implications or consequences of the point of view asserted by Walter Pater, in his 1877 essay on the School of Giorgione that All art aspires to the condition of music'. Both the practical and theoretical aspects are based on the postulate that it is indeed fruitful to consider to what extent, or if, relationships can be posited between the practices of painting and music. The personal work consists of a painted frieze with music by J. S. Bach as the generative subject matter. The written part initially establishes a broad but selective historical overview of key issues concerning the relationship of the visual language of painting to that of music. Subsequently, related sketches and studies by Frantisek Kupka, which resulted in the first purely abstract painting to be recorded as being exhibited in Paris in 1912, are analysed and arranged in order to clarify the thinking and stylistic development behind his creative process. These are placed within their historical context and are seen to reflect the general artistic concerns and technological developments that affected practising artists of the day. Examination of further congruent examples of paintings by Duncan Grant and Paul Klee serves as an appropriate link to an investigation of my own practical work. Key aspects of my intentions and achievements, and arguments for and against the validity of the overarching idea of the thesis, i. e. that it is possible to posit the sort of relationship between the language of music and painting that can withstand thorough analysis, form the basis of the concluding critical analysis and annotations. The thesis will be produced in conjunction with an exhibition of the practical work, and providing copyright matters are not infringed, a tape provided for purposes of examination.

The context paper addresses works submitted that are informed by postcolonial theoretical debates about multiculturalism, racial identification, essentialism, cultural hybridity and mimicry that prevailed in the cultural milieus of New York and London in the 1980s and early 1990s. Race is addressed in all these works as a language and racialisation is treated as a social and psychic process. The practice that is addressed in the context paper is interdisciplinary, involving performance, video and curating, as well as writing that assesses how these works engage the public in a dialogue about race as a signifying practice and about the seductive qualities of racial imagery. Central to the works submitted is the notion of the archive, and more particularly the colonial archive. The context paper singles out the pertinent conceptualizations of the archive in relation to the postcolonial theories and practices under consideration. Those most relevant to the works submitted are the writings of Edward Said, Michel Foucault and Allan Sekula. The colonial archive is understood as actual repositories of official representations of colonised peoples, as well as a structuring principle that demarcates the possible articulations of subaltern selfhood. The context paper treats the artistic works submitted as attempts to work through postcolonial theories via critically informed lived experiences, which is to say via praxis. What is proposed is that performative re- enactment and interaction with audiences offers an important means of exploring how racialised cultural discourses actually operate in and shape understanding of the world. The principal argument for the originality of the works submitted is that the reflexive use of performances foregrounding the constructed nature of racial identity through re-enactment and simulation constitutes an innovative approach to postcolonial praxis. The context paper also summarizes relevant aspects of the historical context in which the submitted works were produced. During that period, the author was associated with artists and art collectives that were actively engaged in a postcolonial critique of cultural institutions and Eurocentric aesthetics in the United States and Britain. The multicultural activism of that period concentrated on developing ways to combine experimental techniques with a "new cultural politics of difference" in the words of cultural theorist Cornel West. Multicultural activists were concerned not only with critiquing the stereotyping of racial minorities in mainstream media and art history, but also with putting forward a notion of race as a social construct and a symbolic practice. The works submitted address the ways that racial tropes from colonial discourse, such as "the primitive" reasserted themselves in the contemporary discourses of state-sponsored and corporate multiculturalism. The context statement focuses on three major cultural projects and nine essays that engage with the notion of race as a language. Those cultural projects are: my caged Amerindian performance, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992-1994), featured in the video The Couple in the Cage (1993); my video a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004); and my curatorial project Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). The essays address either these works or others by artists who share a concern with racial representation. The context statement outlines the theoretical underpinnings that inform these works. I discuss how these works have been informed by structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language and discursive practice; psychoanalytic theories of racial identification and fantasy and postcolonial models of cultural interpretation. The conclusion incorporates retrospective commentary on the shortcomings in my approach and in my original understanding of audience reception, particularly in relation to credulity and the suspension of disbelief.

If democracy were an artwork, what would it look like? - This project proposes a specific way of conceptualizing the link between democracy and aesthetics. Contrary to previous accounts, which mostly concentrated on understanding democratic as accessible art or on analyzing the role of art in democratic society. suggest that a democratic aesthetics can be properly understood by interpreting specific formal features of artworks as metaphors for particular key elements of democracy as it is framed in important strands of contemporary democratic theory. The project argues, among other things, that a certain kind of loose collage composition stands in a metaphorical relationship with the structure of a pluralist democratic polity. Systematically developed, this account helps better to understand the democratic quality of individual artworks, and also makes plausible how aesthetics can contribute to the discourse of democratic theory.

This project explores the appropriation of images of political upheaval in contemporary art, with a particular focus on artists who painstakingly draw from photographs. It is a project informed by contemporary debates on the convoluted temporality and performativity of the image, the aesthetic and affective dimensions of political subjectification, and forms of political agency. The drawings of artists including Andrea Bowers, Fernando Bryce and Olivia Plender, discussed here, elaborate a piecemeal, meticulously-drawn iconography of protest. Photographs and documents of emancipatory political struggle from different periods and places are reworked by hand, in acts of salvage. Something like an affective atmosphere is limned in scenes and artefacts that may not have lost their capacity to move but nonetheless seem remote today, the collective political desire and will they evoke overwhelmed by the disconcerting vicissitudes of sociopolitical circumstance. In light of the long and complex histories of art’s engagement with the political, and the many and various modes of reciprocity devised along the way, what does it mean to be preoccupied with images of political action? To ask as much is to begin to address the complex ways in which such images intersect with and shape processes of political identification and affiliation, the emergence of collective subjectivity and the desire for political agency. Moreover, it is to speculate upon how these processes take place in a negotiation with the often obscure histories of collective action, and how such histories inform renewed efforts of political imagination. What attachments or detachment are played out in these drawings? What choreographies of binding and unbinding are traced in these lines?

No description available.

This thesis proposes a reconceptualisation of aesthetics moving from the irreversibility of emergence as described by the theory of complexity. Existing aesthetic platforms reflect a binary ontology that perpetuates the oppositions of concept and object or discourse and practice, thus projecting aesthetics as a contingent surface. The metaphysical split of material and immaterial is therefore maintained as the ultimate structure of sense and the sensual is still represented as the other of reason. This produces a dichotomy where art is either identified with a medium or a technology or is approached as a hermeneutical exercise that anesthetises its poetic modes of operation, thereby drifting towards visual communication. The thesis turns to complexity theory for an alternative ontological approach that can overcome the need for such metaphysical a priori structures. Indeed, complexity offers forms of coherence that install sense locally and heterogeneously, without the possibility of universalisation. This recasts aesthetics as a cohesive surface or genetic logic, rather than mere phenomenological appearance as the image of an object or the body of a concept. Thus, the thesis exhorts not to seek or think the ultimate, but to dwell in the finite pattern of possibility laid out by the radical irreducibility of the processes of emergence. In this light, the relation of concept and object can be re-thought as a continuum; a rhizomatic pattern of organisation that, however, no longer relies on the transcendental move adopted by Deleuze, or on Heidegger’s infamous leap out of metaphysics. In fact, the thesis shows that metaphysics is not the purveyor of dimensions, but is itself a dimension of thought. Hence, the move towards Prigogine, Stengers, Barad, and Golding in order to re-articulate the structure that supports sense as the local interference of continua, or ontological segments, rather than external coordinates. This radical materialism or dimensionality names a regime beyond transcendence and immanence where aesthetics is inseparable from ontology and offers a wholly different way to think and practice art - one best understood as diffraction.

No description available.

Work and the Aesthetic argues for the priority of a work-centred account of aesthetic interest. This 'Work Theory' proposes an internal relation between good work as an activity and our aesthetic interest in made things. Each is conceptually related to the other so that to be good, work as an activity must engage aesthetic interest; and aesthetic interest in products, in making, viewing and using them, is an interest in different aspects of good work. Good work is characterised around three elements, the technical, functional, and authentic, which essentially relate to work that is skilful, responsive to design problems, and freely chosen. Work Theory has important antecedents in the Arts and Crafts Movement, modern conceptions of the work of designers, and in existentialist accounts of free choice. Work Theory's core tenet of an internal relation between good work and aesthetic interest throws light on some problematic areas in philosophical aesthetics, including the nature of aesthetic interest, the relations of craft to art, aesthetic education, and what is meant by 'everyday aesthetics'. Work Theory also provides a framework for understanding what it is for lives to be aesthetic.