This thesis seeks to lay the foundations for a socio-historical analysis of German radicalism and the avant-garde. Following first the development of the German applied arts movement from 1890, and then the debates over the role of painting from within and beyond the avant-garde in the interwar period, it addresses the ways the reform of artistic and technical-vocational education was intertwined with the questions of the ‘art proletariat’ and the nature of intellectual labour in capitalist economy. It argues that the history of what was widely conceived as the ‘avant-garde’ in the interwar period was still responding to the same set of concerns addressed in the context of the applied arts movement. The concept of functional, ‘useful’ artistic labour as opposed to the ‘useless’ fine arts, a concept connecting the prewar reform movement with the interwar avant-garde, is translated here into a new model of professional politics serving the radical or vanguard artist. ‘Radicalism’ is discussed here neither in terms of political positions per se nor with regard to artistic innovation, but instead as a distinct historical phenomenon of professional politics. The question is not what makes an artwork or an idea radical, but how artistic radicalism itself was shaped. The secession of the applied artist from the traditional art institutions is seen as a decisive moment in this process. Precisely this outsider position – beyond fine arts and traditional crafts – determined the increasingly exclusionary policies of the avant-garde movement. Thus this thesis ultimately proposes a new interpretation of the conflict between the advocates and enemies of modern art as a whole. It was the artists’ own professional politics which shaped this conflict and determined affiliations with specific political parties, and not the opposite. The relation of artistic developments to larger political issues must, I argue, be read through the specific professional politics emerging out of the polarity between the vanguard artist-reformer and the so-called ‘art proletariat’.

This study addresses site-specific sculptural practice and examines the tensions arising from the interactive relations between site and the artworks that exist within it. It applies the concept of ‘anthropophagy’ to re-signify traditional models of representation in order to re-organize them into new contexts through practice-led research into site-specificity. Anthropophagy, a metaphorical vision of the Brazilian indigenous people, utilises cannibalistic customs “in order to legitimate their critical, selective and metabolising appropriation of European artistic tendencies” (Mosqueira 2010: 12). The use of this concept in this thesis arises from the idea of simultaneously belonging to two geographically separated cultural universes: one individual (in my case, Brazilian) and another related to the centralised European/US cultural model of influence that dominates the art world. The differences and intersections between these two universes provide a rich field for practice-led research into how artistic creation is affected by attitudes to space and time. In order to explore this, the thesis is divided into four chapters. The first develops a theoretical framework dealing with concepts of space and time and demonstrates how anthropophagy draws these concepts together. The next chapter examines walking in the UK as an art practice to expand the understanding of site-specific practice through the artworks of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. The third chapter focuses on work, site and location in order to examine how anthropophagy can re-signify the idea of walking as related in Chapter two. The final chapter analyses site-specificity, drawing on my own practice-led research explored through three art projects implemented in Brazil and England. These projects develop ways to negotiate the complex relationship between art, place and temporal contexts, re-inscribing events within specific sites over time. To build a methodology for the research, I have developed three different projects and situations testing the spatial-temporal contexts of site. By using site-specific art practice I shape my arguments upon a creative practice ruled by concepts, materials and techniques. In my practice I have delineated some creative responses to the transformations of the contemporary world, weaving iii reflections between work/site/body as well as on my own perception regarding current ‘temporalities’. The theoretical frameworks that inform this study range from postmodernism to globalisation theories in order to draw together work, site and location under the overarching concept of anthropophagy.

The politics of place and walking as an arts practice form the core concerns of my research. The research is being conducted with particular reference to the ongoing Mis-Guide projects, conceived and produced by the site-specific arts company, Wrights & Sites, of which I am a member. Our apparent rejection of performance-making for an audience has led to walking with spectators as collaborators in the work, and has made the physical journeys and verbal exchanges along the way an integral part of the practice. Through this work, which revolves around place, site-specific arts and urban walking, I am harnessing existing knowledge about cities as spectacle in the footsteps of the Flaneur, the Dadaist, and the Situationist and in recognition of contemporary works by artists who use journey and place as the text, reference points and resources that generate or support their research and practice. I am exploring a sense that urban spaces and places can offer passages to utopian, creative and optimistic relationships with the everyday. I am engaged in a research writing or re-writing of the city activated by wanderings and explorations that can lead, for example, to an active engagement in issues of ecology and environmental planning. In the spirit of a walk between places and ideas I have attempted to structure the writing as if the writer and the reader are passing though or over different thresholds. We pass through thresholds or doorways or across boundaries in our physical and mental development but we also employ such concepts practically and imaginatively in the devising of performance work. As theatre-makers we could make claim to be leaving the everyday and entering a dedicated space called a studio where by degrees we often engage in vocal, physical and mental practices that might appear very strange and out of place in any other context. The crossing of thresholds and boundaries is also part of the composition of performance with entrances and exits, appearance and disappearance, transformations and shape shifting as key aspects of such work. Some of these thresholds in this thesis might be regarded as doorways or obstacles whilst others might verge closer to the ambient hubs noted by poets and pychogeographers. I see this writing as a means of interrogating and exploring and developing my own practice towards particular social and environmental issues.

This thesis critically examines, through both theory and practice, the affective and/or performative nature of imagery from the visual arts, popular science and other media concerned with biotechnologies for human modification and enhancement. These biotechnologies tend to polarise debates between progressive and transgressive (or Frankensteinian) views and positions, so images about them are especially important. Visual images have the potential to shape opinions, and hence the direction of future developments, but little work has been undertaken to determine the principal pathways by which they impact on and influence public perceptions of, for example, human cloning or genetic modification. The research identifies specific types of imagery associated with both positive and negative views of human enhancement, and addresses the lack of empirical research into public responses to artworks and science-based visual imagery by means of a survey. The study distinguishes three principal frames through which the subject is customarily addressed: representation, imagination and narrative metaphor, and assesses the role of artworks that incorporate aspects of scientific visuality, such as bioart. The practical investigation draws on theories of affectivity, performativity and Luhmann’s temporal scenarios, focusing on ambiguity and the active role of the viewer of the artworks, in relation to the construction and interpretation of meaning. The survey findings are indicative of a relationship between the perceived qualitative-affective content of the imagery and viewer attitudes towards biotechnologies, and form the basis of novel artistic responses to extend and challenge existing representations. By identifying and explaining the aesthetic mechanisms involved, this thesis contributes to the visual construction of understanding on the subject of human enhancement in art and science.

This thesis aims to rethink the terms for drawing as it negotiated dematerialisation and deskilling at the beginnings of conceptual art in the mid to late 1960s. The survival of drawing at this time is considered in terms of what a ground means in relation to an image, concentrating on questions of finish, temporality, skill, and materiality – most crucially that of paper. Over five monographic chapters, I set out the foundational and flexible proposition of the ground of drawing: an equally material and conceptual framework that disrupts the direct registration of line and trace that process-led accounts of drawing in the expanded field have so often focused on. Accepting both the precision and pollution of drawing as it existed within the mass media landscape of the 1960s and early 1970s, the examples discussed move away from the active flight of linearity in favour of rendering, depiction, narrative or visual deception, revealing drawing’s relationship to the world to be both potently iconic and stubbornly indexical. Chapter 1 tackles drawing’s newly conceptual relationship to trompe l’oeil through Vija Celmins’s use of photographic paper ephemera. Chapter 2 explores the concepts of over-working and after-drawings as together they control and obscure Franz Erhard Walther’s interactive sculptural practice. Chapter 3 reappraises Bill Bollinger’s intermedial practice of sculpture, drawing and installation to focus on his works on paper shaped by industrial gestures and a blindness of technique. In chapter 4 the ground shared by drawing and performance in the work of Alex Hay is used to interrogate the material and conceptual potential of the paper plane – referencing drawing only at an oblique angle. The final chapter thinks through the idea of post-photographic drawing within an image-saturated print and media culture, ultimately reconciling the durational, illusionistic drawing of Ed Ruscha with its hidden processual base.

This thesis explores Anaïs Nin’s idea of a synthesis of the arts in writing and its extension to different media through an analysis of her interdisciplinary collaborations with artists and composers in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s. I discuss these collaborations within the context of Nin’s unconventional understanding of the unconscious as multidimensional space and her interest in the sensory effects of different art forms, which are at the centre of Nin’s art theory. I look at the sources she drew on to formulate her ideas in Paris of the 1930s, including Symbolism, D.H. Lawrence’s writing, French Surrealism and various psychoanalytical models, and discuss how they relate to cultural and socio-political developments in America at mid-century. This includes a strong focus on Nin’s ambiguous negotiation of female identity and female creativity in her writing and the frictions it causes when it is translated into other media by her male collaborators. While Nin’s interest in different art forms and her attempt at imitating their sensuous effects in writing has been explored from a literary perspective, Nin’s extra-literary collaborations remain largely unexplored. Similarly, the work of most of the artists Nin collaborated with has not been analysed critically in a scholarly context. Unlike previous studies of Nin’s work, then, the approach of this thesis is an interdisciplinary analysis of her collaborations, which focuses equally on Nin’s writing and on the work and input of the artists she worked with. Each of the four chapters focuses on a different collaboration and art form including photomontage, film, music and collage. This thesis argues that Nin’s artistic encounters and her engagement with different art forms in America of the 1950s and 60s open up interesting new discourses around interdisciplinarity and gender, the legacy of surrealism in America and counterculture art production in the 1960s.

Since the late 1990s a new tendency has emerged in contemporary art whereby artists deploy archival research to explore the mechanics of historical representation and evoke the past. This thesis examines the works of some of the most relevant practitioners of the new tendency who are working with video, photography and film and explores the reasons for the return of historical representation in art. In the introduction the study sets the tendency against the background of modernist, postmodernist theories and the historiographic debates of the last thirty years. The first chapter attempts a critical re-evaluation of the concept of nostalgia; by examining the works of Tacita Dean, Joachim Koester, and Matthew Buckingham, a more nuanced concept of nostalgia emerges, for which this approach to the past does not appear as a sentimental and escapist fantasy but, on the contrary, as a strategy to reflect critically on the present and re-imagine the future. In my second chapter I focus on the experimental documentaries of Anri Sala, Walid Raad and Hito Steyerl. These works are based on a sophisticated notion of truth that overcomes the Platonic dualism between truth and appearance. The third chapter considers the photographic archives of Zoe Leonard, Rachel Harrison, and Jean-Luc Moulène. These archives represent recent historical events through the figure of the commodity. I ask whether these works should be considered as amnesiac archives and whether they confirm the Marxist notion of the commodity as memory disturbance. The fourth chapter examines the use of digital images and technologies by Sean Snyder, Hito Steyerl and Paul Chan. These artists challenge the narrative of crisis and catastrophe predominant in 1990s theories of new media, which considered the digital image in term of a profound loss of memory and historicity. The dissertation concludes with a critical assessment of the political importance of the artistic tendency.

This thesis approaches re-enactment as a dominant strategy for the return of time-based practices through four case studies that inaugurate specific modes of fidelity to the event. Through the concept of the mise-en-scène, which I define as both a semiotic and psychic framing device and a literal place filled with objects or props, I investigate how these works operate within a fantasy space where past propositions are worked through. The dual geopolitical orientation of the thesis allows me to focus on both mainstream Western and slightly lesser-known Eastern European practices as a way of expanding the historiographic parameters of prevailing discussion. Therefore, my point of departure is the Slovenian retro-avant-garde collective IRWIN re-enacting the work of the Slovenian neo-avant-garde OHO group over the course of two decades, illuminating the link between art historical canons and national ideologies in the process. Second, I address a series of wildly differing approaches to the ‘reinvention’ of Allan Kaprow’s happenings and environments, ranging from resemblance-based ‘dramaturgical’ re-enactments to the invention of new event scores in places where the philosophy of the ‘un-artist’ was politically non-viable. Third, Marina Abramović’s re-enactments emerge as less concerned with self-presence and mutual transformation in a theatre of performative duration than with the ultimately self-reflexive deconstruction of received ideas about bodily transmission and empty belief. Through reference to Mike Kelley’s collaborative work with Paul McCarthy as well as later solo work, this thesis finally demonstrates how Kelley advanced Vito Acconci’s use of repetition through a fidelity to institutional, interpretive, and participatory failure. As I examine both image-based strategies of the return and those that reject mimicry in favour of overt difference and contingency, I also focus on the space between relational aesthetics and postproduction strategies in order to advance a critique of participation art.

This thesis explores how suburbs during the British Industrialisation (1780-1850) were represented. ‘Industrialisation’ is well researched in many disciplines. In history of art, the landscape imageries produced during this period are usually categorised and approached as rural/natural landscape painting and (urban) topographic views. However, the categorisation could overlook the representation of the place in between: the suburb. This thesis therefore views the suburb in terms of the impact of industrialisation on the form and the extent of the city, and thus regards the suburb not only as a modern, middle-class and residential district we are familiar with today, but also as the developing edge not only of a built environment but also of a linked set of social and economic changes. The main case study is Birmingham. Birmingham developed from a small provincial settlement into the manufacturing centre of the country between 1780 and 1850. How to perceive, recognise, and represent the suburb made as a result of this rapid urban growth and industrialisation posed a challenge for local artists. This thesis focuses on nearly a hundred topographic views they produced, and argue that these pictures represent the idea of suburb. I will analyse the pictures in a semiotics way. Chapter one begins with the imagery of the town and explores the difficulty of representing the (industrial) suburb. Chapter two continues to investigate the representation of suburb through imageries of Nature. Chapter three focuses on the topographic view tradition of the town. Chapter four argues that the imagery of the suburb represents a modern life in it. Chapter five explores how the periphery of the town was developed for residential purposes and how this process might be represented in pictures.

María Anna of Austria was the daughter of Emperor Fernando III and the Infanta María. She married her uncle, Felipe IV. After the death of Felipe IV, Queen Mariana became regent, guardian-tutor and guardian-curadora of her son, the child-King, and in his name ruled the monarchy. Although Mariana is relatively obscure as a historical figure, we know her portrait thanks to Velázquez, who produced a number of portraits and included her, as wife of the King and mother of the Infanta, in Las Meninas, in the famous background mirror. The goal of this thesis is to examine the various portraits of the Spanish Queen Mariana in order to distinguish and explore the roles she played. There has been little recent historical research treating the years 1665-1696, the period which covers Queen Mariana´s designation as governor and tutor, and ends with her death. My research directly addresses this gap. A thorough list of illustrations of these portraits will facilitate an analysis of the iconography of her portraits and of the different elements which worked to constitute and represent her roles. The overall intention is to retrieve, reconstruct and bring back Queen Mariana’s image as a whole, the image that she, in the course of her life, originally commissioned. A systematic examination of Queen Mariana’s portraiture has allowed me to engage with the visual forms consciously used to represent the elements characteristic of the three states of womanhood -maid, wife and widow- as well as of the functions pertaining to queen consort, governor, tutor, curadora and queen mother. In addition, in my analysis of royal portraiture in seventeenth century Spanish painting, I have incorporated viewpoints developed by what is known as Court Studies. In this regard, my study of the royal portraits includes a detailed reading of the Spanish etiquettes, cortesias, and royal regulations (premáticas y pragmáticas), as well as an analysis of ceremonial and gender oriented subjects (period documents concerning the use of jewels, dress, female ceremonial, etc.).