In this PhD by Publication I argue that my art practice serves as a useful contributor towards shaping elements for the activation of civil society. Through consideration of three interrelated examples from my art practice from 1998-2011, which emerged from my Restpfennigaktion (Left-over Penny Campaign) an artistic methodology has emerged that shows links between the artwork as process and product in relation to notions of transformation. Lynn Froggett writes, "The transformative potential is realised when it generates a cultural form for experience that needs the visual or performative register for its fullest expression." I unpick and position the role of my practice using theoretical frameworks of participatory art as life, such as art and social sculpture (Beuys) in relation to the discourse used by theorists such as Claire Bishop, who aligned a socially engaged public art practice with ideas of civil society and democracy. I also use critical pedagogy and conflict resolution to position my work in this realm. Equally important is the role of a selected number of examples of participatory art works by others, such as MA, Park Fiction and Schlingensief, as well as Suzanne Lacy. Innovative strategies in my work are the implementation and cross-sector uses of that knowledge through artistic practice. The three projects under consideration were time-based interventions, which sought to engage people in penny-giving, wish-giving and wish realization in Germany (Left-over Penny Campaign), Italy (lnitizativa Centesimo Avanzato) and Spain (Hucha de Deseos). As a result of undertaking this research, a suite of questions revealed themselves from within the practice. The questioning was specifically focused around the following three areas: the role of aesthetic form in my art practice, different conceptions of my role as artist, and how practitioners working in public or social space are affected by and respond to contexts. These questions arose during the processes of art-making and within the context of this research project. They emerged in response to a broadening of my ideas of participation, and participatory decision-making. It became clear that I was evolving new skills, in order to find appropriate and satisfying responses to these questions. I found myself by necessity seeking answers for the advancement of my art making by moving beyond traditional artistic strategies and into areas of knowledge, such as formalised conflict resolution, pedagogy, gift economy, leadership, self organisation, creative solutions in community development and undertaking a PhD. 1 Froggett, Lynn (ed), New Model Arts Institutions and Public Engagement, Research Study, Headline Findings, uclan, 2011, p. 10. [online] Available at Participatory public art refers to an art practice that features the transformation of individuals and societies for a common good. It aims to contribute to perceived demands for transition processes and is necessarily aware of and responsive to conditions that characterise a democratic civil society, which hopes for non-violent and fruitful transformations. The current global socia-political, ecological and cultural climate, currently dominated by the economic taxonomies, demands transformational processes if future life on earth is to be secured. Hence my art projects highlighted money, its meaning and ways of transformation, through focusing on gift economy more than on exchange economy. My three projects highlighted on the one hand the limits of our existing man-made systems, on the other, they demonstrated how participatory public art can be a mode of transformation.

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This research investigates the relationship between art practice and citizenship, raising questions on what the relationship might be from the perspective of an artist-citizen-researcher. The contextual research and the writing of the thesis was not conceived as an activity divorced from my art practice, so the theory, practice methods strove to situate the relationship between art and citizenship both inside and outside of the thesis; whereby the inherent practices of art and citizenship move in and out of aesthetic, ideological and scholarly activities. In practice, the text in this thesis is disrupted by the multiple voices of the artist, citizen and researcher. Content presented in the abstract refers to the experience of the artist, citizen and researcher. My art practice is demonstrated by individual exhibitions and collaborative work with other artists. Citizenship is demonstrated by reinvigorating a sense of communal values through the politics of self-sufficiency. I argue a 'localized' (avant-garde) art practice diametrically reflects citizenship through the articulation of an agonistic-led wishful-ness, which is first and foremost engaged with staking a place for contestation and difference to exist. The intended complicity between art practice and a socio-political field articulated in Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics (1998) is counter-productive to an effective relationship between citizenship and art in context to a self-sustaining micropolitics. A micro-politics based upon communitarian values. Relational Aesthetics is criticized for its complicit participation in the particularity of neo-liberal politics. Atelier van Lieshout's AVL-Ville (1995-2000) provides a template of a heterogeneous, self-sufficient micro-politic, which I argue is best placed to resist the colonization of art and citizenship by undemocratic corporatism. It is in this context that this research contributes to the literature of Documental 1_Platform 1, Democracy Unrealised (2002), but opposes the literature of Relational Aesthetics (1998) by contesting the significance of a 'localized' art practice as a domain for the avant-garde. Local art practice, not as an international (liberal) canon, but as the configuration of an effective relationship between art and citizenship in the preservation of social difference and democracy.

This dissertation follows the theme of negation, negativity, and “practices of negation”, through a selection of writings on art in the post-war period, and, in particular, from the 1960s to the present. Although the term negation is widely used, most prominently with respect to the histories and analyses of art-historical categories like avant-gardism, neoavant-gardism, modernism, and postmodernism, very little attention has been paid to the concept itself, 01 to its role within art-historical methodology. The main art-theoretical texts which I select for examination are characterised by a suspicion of figures of identity, plenitude, or affirmation. I explore the borderlands between dialectical and nihilistic methodologies which these suspicions seem to provoke, and I argue that the attention to negativity has a particular importance for considerations of art because of its implications for the question of representation. Chapter 1 outlines the key accounts on avant-gardism and modernism, and looks at the impact of the Left Hegelian tradition on recent art theory. I argue that the claims that negativity has become compromised or ineffectual, lead, in fact, to a reassertion of negativity. The second section of this chapter tracks some of the methodological implications through a case study of the writings of T.J. Clark, and develops the question of negation as a fundamental problem of representation. Chapter 2 analyses the writings of the Italian architectural theorists/historians Manfredo Tafuri and Massimo Cacciari. These authors elaborate their arguments from German critical theory, and their attention to negativity is tracked into an account of “completed nihilism”. Chapter 3 starts from the association - advanced, in particular, by writers associated with the journal October - made between modernism/postmodernism and the rhetorical figures of symbol/allegory. I argue that allegorical negativity is not straightforwardly disjunctive, and, by reading it as a degenerative dialectic, the argument returns to representational debates.

This research proposes and develops a critical framework - a 'matrix' to make sense of the artistic process from the practitioner's perspective. It draws from the research of de Certeau into everyday culture and the art historical discourse of Bourriaud that positions art within models of social interaction. As a critical concept the everyday has benefits for re-thinking the nature of creative activity and its reception. The term participatory relational practice is used \ 11 this thesis to define an approach that situates the artist within the everyday. The matrix is constructed reflexively through three of my art projects and by analysing two artists engaged by the On the Edge research programme to conduct two projects. Used reflectively in and on practice the matrix sensitizes the artist to judgements, values and qualities within a dynamic process of exchange and transaction. The matrix represents a core from which judgements about practice are considered and negotiated. It comprises three inter-dependent dimensions, which the artist selfconsciously models. The aesthetic may be defined as the intricacies of giving form to experience, the ethical as enabling individuals to share a freedom to think, speak or act differently, and the polemical as forming, expressing and enacting a view or position. The research proposes that a nuanced critique may be defined as the interplay between the aesthetic, the playful and resistance. It responds to the need identified in the discourse to develop a multidimensional understanding of practice. The matrix is a way of considering and representing the aesthetic as part of an interdependent whole - a system of values. The research addresses artists and critical theorists interested in collaboration and multi-disciplinary work. The matrix is both interpretive and generative. It can be used to structure and evaluate projects. It has implications for pedagogy in terms of better equipping younger artists with the skills necessary for operating within the everyday as the multi-layered fields of civic society.

Text in Afrikaans / This research deals with the artist's contribution towards the current process of ecological purification through which mankind's attention are brought to the destructive maintenance of the planet. The alchemical artist uses purification as a means to make social comments on the lifestyle of the contemporary person, through the aestheticism of objects. The different manifestations of ceo-feministic thought within environmental activism are explored to make the reader aware of the diversity of ceo-feministic thought. Eco-feminism in general, tries to promote the importance of the earth as a life supporting system by respecting her needs, cycles, energies and eco-systems. As a result of this process, the public are invited to take part in recycle-art through which a change in attitude towards purification and the survival of the planet, are being accomplished / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)

Text in Afrikaans / This research deals with the artist's contribution towards the current process of ecological purification through which mankind's attention are brought to the destructive maintenance of the planet. The alchemical artist uses purification as a means to make social comments on the lifestyle of the contemporary person, through the aestheticism of objects. The different manifestations of ceo-feministic thought within environmental activism are explored to make the reader aware of the diversity of ceo-feministic thought. Eco-feminism in general, tries to promote the importance of the earth as a life supporting system by respecting her needs, cycles, energies and eco-systems. As a result of this process, the public are invited to take part in recycle-art through which a change in attitude towards purification and the survival of the planet, are being accomplished / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)

Unmasking the heroes: sources of power in Afrikaner mythologising is a personal, visual and theoretical exploration of the underlying sources of power which governed the development of Afrikaner nationalism, particularly the years spanning the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The practical work, a series of drawings and relief cut-outs, sets out to unmask the beliefs, customs, traditions and attitudes particular to Afrikaner culture. It does so through the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction of selected mass mediated images whereby different symbolic paradigms are juxtaposed through the devices of collage and allegory to uncover layers of meaning. This art-making approach was informed by theoretical and visual research into the tradition of Western mythology, including related topics such as linguistics, psychology and sociology, Afrikaner history and historiography, and the mechanisms of contemporary cultural reproduction, particularly the South African mass media and fine arts. / History of Art and Fine Arts / M.A. (History of Art and Fine Arts)

Unmasking the heroes: sources of power in Afrikaner mythologising is a personal, visual and theoretical exploration of the underlying sources of power which governed the development of Afrikaner nationalism, particularly the years spanning the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The practical work, a series of drawings and relief cut-outs, sets out to unmask the beliefs, customs, traditions and attitudes particular to Afrikaner culture. It does so through the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction of selected mass mediated images whereby different symbolic paradigms are juxtaposed through the devices of collage and allegory to uncover layers of meaning. This art-making approach was informed by theoretical and visual research into the tradition of Western mythology, including related topics such as linguistics, psychology and sociology, Afrikaner history and historiography, and the mechanisms of contemporary cultural reproduction, particularly the South African mass media and fine arts. / History of Art and Fine Arts / M.A. (History of Art and Fine Arts)