In the exchange between theory and practice, art is appropriated as a creative mode of enquiry, a differential form of knowledge and experience in the processes of rationalization. As a differential in knowledge, art is explored as the practice of composition making differences out of established rationales - the discrete disciplines that find stability in economic, pedagogic and scientific discourse. As a differential in experience, art may contain the potential to destabilize social, historical and political constitutions of sense, working as an interference pattern in the production and reproduction of rational subjects. The academic distillation of the artist's know how into the 'art of subjectivity', draws both the subjects and objects of knowledge into this critical space of composition, a dynamic space of contestation in which the artist acquires the capacity to become an agent of cultural change. As a cultural and critical formation, the 'art of subjectivity' reactivates the art historical tradition of institutional critique. Re-evaluated through the critical and philosophical components of the doctoral research, the material rendition of institutional critique is configured as a series of artistic engagements with the procedural and regulatory codes of practice that comprise the info-structure of instrumental reason. Through a gradual synthesis of process and product, the 'art of subjectivity' begins to merge with the arts (techniques) of rationalization, drawing upon rather than resisting the bureaucratic, informational, scientific-technical and semiotic energies of political economy. In the aesthetic merger of productive processes there emerges an affirmative mode of critique, the 'constructive criticism' of the intelligent artist whose purpose in the doctoral research is to interrogate the terms and conditions of knowledge and experience, and in the process open up new possibilities of expression. Constructive criticism foregrounds what art can do in the register of production, as opposed to what it means in the register of comprehension. Artwork is situated on the side of creation, whereby the work of art is conceived as an aesthetic process, an aggregate form of thought and action, which in the doctoral research develops as the 'intelligence key' of the combination-composition. The artwork as intelligence key is designed to unlock the established practices of discrete disciplines in an attempt to realize a more permeable, inquisitive condition of subjectivity, recomposed in a connective fabric of affective and perceptual understanding. In this respect, the 'art of subjectivity' is motivated by the desire to deregulate what limits the potential for expression, questioning how sense becomes restricted as a basis for remaking the thresholds of knowledge and experience. It is envisaged that the doctoral investigation will be of value for artists who wish to develop a critical role for their work in the context of academic research. Through the composition and recomposition of method the 'art of subjectivity' yields a palette of practices, any one of which could be re-appropriated by the critically minded artist. Conversely, the techniques of constructive criticism provide an operating model for the perceptive critical theorist who may wish to utilize art as the practice of least restriction, in the strategic integration of creative thought and action.

The research project is to develop an understanding of the use of automatism in the practice of art derived from an interrelationship between the material process of art and critical text. As these practices converge in their vocabularies of the psychic and the somatic, they formulate a discourse of interpretation. The critical textual inquiry has identified an expanded language of interpretation for automatism within the vocabularies of three particular areas of investigation in, 1. Psychoanalysis, 2. Phenomenology and certain currents of thought in Existentialism, and in 3. The theory and criticism of art. I have laid down an account of the field of research and my reading of it through six constituent writers: Freud, Ehrenzweig, Merleau-Ponty, Breton, Bataille and Rosenberg, determined from the artist-practitioner's perspective to be central contributors to an understanding of automatism. Four key terms have recurred in the material which I have identified in the research process as phenomena of automatist art practice; trauma, repetition, excess and gesture. As thinking continues in a contextualisation of art and critical theory they have provided further links to the theoretical language of current psychoanalysis and criticism by writers including: Agamben, Barthes, Foster, Krauss, Lacan and Lyotard. The focus of the practical inquiry rests upon an exploration of the communion between the unconscious mind and the body in automatism, derived from a studio practice with emphasis on a modelling and casting process. It is developed through the four key terms used as bridges in a critical exchange between the material practice and textual theory including original automatic writing. The theorising function of the art practice has been to initiate the four phases of the process of automatism as phenomena to be re-theorised through the four key terms as they are exemplified by a reflexive studio practice of automatist methodology in action. The body of art presented for examination selects works in series completed from 1996-2006, in the following materials: bronze, paint, plaster, laser print and wax.

This thesis explores the cultural, or literary history of taste as a social construct. Taking the mid-eighteenth century as its starting point, the thesis adopts an historicist approach to five very particular texts from this vast history. It begins by focusing on three novels: firstly, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) which was published at a time when there was increasing pressure to create `standards' of taste; secondly, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) which belongs to a moment that scrutinised these `standards'; and thirdly, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837), which reflects an era in which taste is driven by commercial forces. The final chapters explore a significant twentieth-century development in the history of taste: namely, the adaptation of text into film. Here, David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones (1963) become the focus for close investigation. I argue that Lean's Oliver Twist very much belongs to a post-war Britain in which the acquisition of taste was part of a wider framework for maintaining national and social cohesion. Richardson's Tom Jones, I argue, must be read in relation to the cultural revolutions in tastet hat dominatedth e early 1960s.

This thesis assesses the work of four art writers who were active in Britain between the wars, Laurence Binyon, Paul Nash, Herbert Read and Geoffrey Grigson. In a period that has generally been viewed as dominated by a formalist criticism, their art writing exhibited a persistent romanticism that was fundamental to their engagement with modernism and was also integral to their interpretation of the role of the artist in the modem world. The main contention of this thesis is that this sensibility, far from being regressive, was a vital "- factor in their understanding and active promotion of modernist movements such as abstraction and surrealism. The main period under consideration is the inter-war years, leading up to the year 1936 as a significant moment, with the International Surrealist Exhibition in London and the publication in Axis of Geoffrey Grigson and John Piper's important article 'England's Climate'. Chapter One focuses on Laurence Binyon, a key figure bridging late nineteenth-century romanticism and the new romanticism of the mid twentieth century who, in his writing on Asian art and in his studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century English artists, found relevant exemplars for modem artists. Chapter Two examines the art writings of Paul Nash, whose explorations into abstraction and surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s were driven by a need to find an appropriate vehicle for his own artistic expression. A study of Herbert Read's art writing between the wars in Chapter Three demonstrates the extent to which his romantic sensibility and a desire for cultural continuity with the past informed his interpretation of modem movements, most notably surrealism. The fourth chapter reassesses the role of Geoffrey Grigson, a controversial but, I would maintain, crucial figure in the 1930s, and demonstrates the importance of his contribution to the promulgation of modernism in Britain.

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This thesis considers certain critical moments in the writing about art in modernity. I firstly identify key exemplars as responses to a "crisis of representation" within a broadly conceived discipline of art history in Britain. These mark significant turns in the discipline, one towards a newly invigorated Marxist social history of art in the 1980's and one towards an increasingly philosophical mode of investigating aesthetic works. Whilst the latter can be said to have most impact after the 1980's, key aspects of the actual object of study pre-date this. The exemplars in the first two parts of the thesis are the writing of the British art historian T.J. Clark, principally in respect of his critical work, writing on Manet's painting of Olympia in the article first published in the British journal Screen in 1980 and the writings on the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, a film which dates from 1959 and not only documented by its script writer, Marguerite Duras at the time, but subject to critical readings within film theory and testimony studies in the 1990s, drawing upon particularly modern French philosophical thought. I examine how these exemplars present the relationship between aesthetics and politics but also the extent to which the paradigms by which they think that relation can be shown to come up against their own limits. I consider the challenges these exemplars presented to other modes of disciplinary thinking; Clark's Marxist criticism was part of a major politicisation of the discipline of art history and the film Hiroshima Mon Amour in itself and supported by Duras's script presented a major challenge to documentary and "memorial" cinema. But I argue that they return us to thinking the political or the historical in foundational or other essentialist ways under which the aesthetic is subsumed. It is by way of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy and critical thinkers influenced by them that I have problematised these exemplars. Derrida and Nancy have provided an approach which whilst respecting the criticality of the tradition, shows where that criticality meets its limits and forecloses on its questioning and openness to the potential 'other' in the aesthetic and the political, out of which there emerges a responsibility to continue to think the relation between aesthetics and politics. In addition, to deepen the context through which I invoke Derrida and Nancy and to offer historical insights to inform current critical concerns within the disciplines of art history, the thesis examines the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin in relation to art and politics and technology written in the 1930s. Heidegger's influence especially is fundamental to Derrida's and Nancy's thought but it is from the contrasting outcomes of Heidegger's and Benjamin's thoughts on art and technology that lessons may be drawn in respect of critical issues for contemporary politics and culture. The final chapter refers to some of these critical issues as part of a re-iteration of the contemporary importance of reading art 'otherwise' in the wake of a perceived waning of relevance of 'critical theory'.

In our Post-Modern milieu there has been a renewed attempt in art to communicate with the viewer. My hypothesis is that particular images provoke empathic responses in the viewer. Iconographical and formal characteristics in images which provoke empathy are discussed and Lipps' ( 1905) and Worringer's (1908) theories of empathy are examined. The psychological profile of a viewer is considered in the light of Freud's familial model of the human psyche with its emphasis on sexual instincts. The theoretical framework within which my hypothesis operates is based upon Bryson, Holly and Moxey's ( 1991) interventionist response to visual interpretation. They foreground the viewer's historicity in the viewing of an image and their approach is contrasted with that of the perceptualists (Wollheim, Gombrich and others) who maintain that the historicity of the viewer is unimportant. Finally it is argued that art can have a transforming potential if the artist provokes empathy in the viewer. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Fine Arts)

In our Post-Modern milieu there has been a renewed attempt in art to communicate with the viewer. My hypothesis is that particular images provoke empathic responses in the viewer. Iconographical and formal characteristics in images which provoke empathy are discussed and Lipps' ( 1905) and Worringer's (1908) theories of empathy are examined. The psychological profile of a viewer is considered in the light of Freud's familial model of the human psyche with its emphasis on sexual instincts. The theoretical framework within which my hypothesis operates is based upon Bryson, Holly and Moxey's ( 1991) interventionist response to visual interpretation. They foreground the viewer's historicity in the viewing of an image and their approach is contrasted with that of the perceptualists (Wollheim, Gombrich and others) who maintain that the historicity of the viewer is unimportant. Finally it is argued that art can have a transforming potential if the artist provokes empathy in the viewer. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Fine Arts)

Depuis les années 1980, la critique d’art du XIXe siècle a bénéficié d’un regain d’intérêt dans l’historiographie contemporaine. Malgré cela, la période du Second Empire reste encore mal connue. Notre thèse est consacrée à l’un des critiques d’art de cette période : Théophile Silvestre (1823-1876). Après une approche biographique de son parcours, notre travail montre comment, dans son grand œuvre critique intitulé Histoire des artistes vivants, Silvestre choisit d’étudier les peintres et sculpteurs les plus célèbres de son temps pour examiner la validité de leur notoriété. Confronté à ce qui lui apparaît comme un monde malade, en perte d’idéal, Silvestre est à la recherche des artistes qui sauront régénérer l’art et la vie. Ainsi Delacroix, dont l’imagination puissante transfigure le réel, est-il consacré comme « le plus grand artiste du XIXe siècle ». Après la mort de Delacroix, Silvestre dirige ses préférences vers les peintres de l’école de Barbizon qui, comme lui, tournent le dos au monde nouveau qui s’élabore selon les directives du progrès et de l’industrie, et dont la peinture semble un remède possible aux maux de la société moderne. Chargé à la fin de sa vie de rédiger le catalogue de la collection d’Alfred Bruyas, Silvestre s’attachera à faire entrer le romantisme dans l’histoire, employant le musée comme un rempart à la décadence de l’art moderne. De l’Histoire des artistes vivants au catalogue de la Galerie Bruyas, notre thèse montre quels vestiges de son temps Silvestre a voulu laisser aux historiens futurs et comment il s’est fait le gardien moral de l’histoire de l’art en donnant à son siècle la forme d’une pièce de musée, déjà classée et déjà jugée. / Since the 1980s, there has been a renewed interest in contemporary historiography for the art criticism of the nineteenth-century. The Second Empire era remains nevertheless little-known. Our thesis is devoted to an art critic of that particular time : Théophile Silvestre (1823-1876). After a biographical approach of his career, our research will focus on his criticism masterpiece, Histoire des artistes vivants. We will attempt to show that, when Silvestre chooses to study the most famous painters and sculptors of his time, it is in order to investigate the legitimacy of their popularity. Confronted to a world he deems sick and deprived of faith, Silvestre is looking for artists that will revive art and life. He thus considers Delacroix, whose powerful imagination transcends reality, as "the greatest artist of the 19th century". After the painter's death, Silvestre focuses his interest on the painters of the Barbizon school who, just like him, disapprove of the emerging new world based on the principles of progress and industry, and whose painting appears as a potential cure against modern society. Being towards the end of his life assigned the writing of the Alfred Bruyas' collection's catalog, Silvestre endeavours to give romanticism a rightful place in history, using museums as a frontline against the decay of modern art. From Histoire des artistes vivants to the Galerie Bruyas' catalog, our thesis shows which memories of his time Silvestre decided to pass on to future generations of historians, and how, by shaping his century like a museum item, already classified and already judged, he made himself the moral guardian of history of art.

Quand Gaëtan Picon écrit en 1970 « toute œuvre est à la fois image, représentation, et présence d’une existence » dans Admirable tremblement du temps, il a probablement trouvé une définition convaincante de l’œuvre. Critique, philosophe, enseignant, Directeur général des Arts et des Lettres, penseur en dehors des écoles, il a toute sa vie été proche de la littérature et de la peinture. Par ses articles, ses essais, ses romans, par sa pratique de l’écriture et des œuvres, de l’écriture de l’œuvre, avec son esprit et ses sens, il a fait l’expérience de cette œuvre qu’il a aimée, cherchant son être et les propriétés de son événement. Car l’œuvre demande à celui qui la rencontre d’interroger sa forme, sa signification et son effet. Dans sa réception et son interprétation, dans ce que nous faisons d’elle, l’œuvre appelle l’écriture et interpelle la vie, l’être et la culture que le sujet, en retour, convoque. En quoi se trouve-t-elle alors liée à la conscience, au langage que nous maîtrisons et au monde que nous percevons ? En quoi est-elle issue de l’art, de l’existence et de l’histoire que l’artiste perçoit et existe et qu’elle représente ? Comment, plus simplement, existe-t-elle à la fois pour nous et en dehors de nous ? Ces questions étudiées par Gaëtan Picon supposent nécessairement d’envisager plusieurs perspectives. À partir de la lecture du sujet et de l’écrit, il faut interroger ensemble le langage, la représentation, le monde et la création. Dans l’ensemble de ses écrits, Gaëtan Picon a consciencieusement apporté une forme de réponse à l’expérience de l’œuvre à laquelle cette thèse s’engage à donner une lecture et une visibilité. / When Gaetan Picon wrote in 1970 « Every piece of art is simultaneously a picture, a depiction, and the presence of an existence » in Admirable tremblement du temps, he offered a convincing definition of the nature of a work of art. Critic of art and literature, philosopher, teacher, Director-General of Arts and Letters, and above all an independent thinker, he devoted his life to Art and Literature. Through his articles, essays and novels, his personal experience of writing and artwork, and his writings on art that were infused with his own particular sensibility, he created a new experience out of the beloved artwork, seeking to understand and explain it through personal identification. He considered that each artwork asks the observer to question its form and meaning, and the effect achieved. A work of art requires to be written about, and is a challenge to life, existence and culture in the way it is received and interpreted, in what we make of it. And in return the observer also seeks life, existence and culture. In what way is art related to conscience, to the language that we use, and to the world as we perceive it ? In what way are conscience, history and existence products of art ? In short, how can it exist for us and yet outside of us at the same time ? The questions that Gaetan Picon studied impose necessarily an exploration using multiples perspectives. We must examine at the same time language, performance, the world and creation from attentive reading of his writings. In all of them Gaetan Picon carefully brought new ideas to the experience of art. This present doctoral thesis will offer an interpretation and an acknowledgment of this experience.