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This thesis uses neo-Marxist theories of the state and their application to New Deal historiography as the framework within which to analyse the artworks produced under the auspices of the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture from 1934 to 1943 in Washington, D.C. Taking as its focus the murals and sculptures produced for the Justice Department, the Interior Department, and the Social Security Administration buildings it seeks to demonstrate how Section art reflected the twists and turns of the Roosevelt administration as it moved through the First New Deal, the Second New Deal, and the constitutional crisis in the lead up to war in Europe. Whilst these artworks are often read as propaganda pure and simple the thesis will explore the extent to which the art produced under federal patronage had a far more nuanced and complex relationship to New Deal social policy. It will demonstrate that this was particularly the case with those murals and sculptures produced by radical artists, politicised by the Depression and organised via the various cultural fronts of the Communist Party of the United States, who attempted to use their commissions to encode a politics and ideology to the left of a New Deal reform agenda, particularly as this was becoming increasingly stymied in the led up to war.

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The main subject of this thesis is my artistic project UNCAGED, which explores interrelationships and transitions between computer-based virtual environments and their immediate physical surroundings. The underlying motivation behind my approach was to 'uncage' screen-based realities from the confines of their digital existence and to bring the remote computer world closer to our human experience. In particular, my work was opposed to the notion of immersive 'virtual reality' where the physical world is more or less excluded from the participants, but instead attempted to situate the virtual domain within the physical world. Initially, I will discuss the theoretical framework behind UNCAGED, ranging from aesthetic considerations, the particular role of sound, human computer interaction (HCI) to technical issues, and afterwards describe the creation process of UNCAGED. Based on a study of audience behaviour with UNCAGED at a major London museum, I will claim that the work's popularity seems to relate to its perceptually intriguing fusion between the virtual domain and the physical world, and in this respect my project can be deemed successful. Furthermore, on the basis of an extended review and analysis of related work in the broad area of 'mixed reality', I will suggest that my own approachcan indeed be viewed as a novel way to bridge the divide between the physical world and the virtual world of computers. The innovation relates, in particular, to its unique balance of formal simplicity and technical sophistication. In the last chapter, I will provide a more critical evaluation of UNCAGED, largely informed by Jean Baudrillard's conception of the 'real' and the 'virtual', which raises questions about the very idea of integrating digital technology in our lives in a meaningful and satisfying way. Finally, I will present my subsequent practical work, which strongly engages with my critical reflections on UNCAGED. In particular, it is informed by a new heightened sensitivity regarding the role of digital technology in my artistic practice.

Research Questions: • How can we understand the legacies of the eighteenth-century sublime in contemporary culture – including commercialised and commodified forms? • What are the insistent reiterations of tropes, affects and themes of the sublime doing in contemporary art and culture? • How are the aesthetic forms of the sublime bound in to economic, social and political histories? • What happens when we read Hirst in terms of the histories of the sublime? And the sublime through Hirst? • The work also more generally sets out to examine the cultural forms of our own global-capitalist moment, and to think this within the longer histories of capital. Research Context • Hirst is a highly successful artist but there is a dearth of serious critical writing about him. Most extant work on the yBas was produced in the 90s, as part of a critical polemic around the work. My own work starts from the historical distance which is now opening up between then and now to read Hirst as srt history. • The work also positions itself with regard to a currently burgeoning body of literature around the sublime. I draw on the different approaches of aesthetics, criticism and cultural history to read the relation between past and present forms of the sublime. • My work focuses on the intertwinement of the sublime (from its earliest histories) with commodified culture, rather than just high culture. Research Methods • Hirst is treated as a cultural symptom. • The work investigates forms of historical repetition (Nachträglichkeit, Nachleben, figurality, hauntology, etc.) • Hirst is a focal point for a wider exploration of a wide-ranging cultural history. Other objects of inquiry include: Alexander Pope and the Scriblerians, Bertolt Brecht, John Singleton Copley, James Thomson, Bruegel the Elder, Piranesi, Wordsworth, Steven Spielberg, Mary Shelley and Emile Zola. • My approach is broadly Marxian, but I also critically interrogate Marx, and draw on other approaches including those of Freud, Lyotard, Derrida and Braudel. • Particular attention is given to the early eighteenth century. Findings: • The strength of Hirst's best work stems from its condensation of social contradiction into complex, haunting images – images which are in turn haunted by the histories of sublimity, an aesthetic formed in, and which also serves to help form, capital's imaginary. Hirst and the sublime are bound in to a representational logic of an imperialism common to our own moment and that of early modernity. Such links to the imperialist imaginary belie the use of the sublime by contemporary leftist theorists (such as Lyotard) to valorize the sublime.

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