This thesis studies the practices and the polemics that structured the mid-twentieth century ‘field’ of modern art in India, as it registered shifts away from mythological classicism to new artistic imperatives of the everyday, the popular and the progressive. Concentrating on Bengal, this study follows the new agenda and anxieties around ‘formal’ autonomy and ‘social’ resonance of art that developed during the transitional decades of high nationalism, decolonisation and postcolonial nation-building in South Asia between the 1920s and the late-1950s. I argue that artists and art discourse in Bengal during this historical conjuncture invoked tropes of contextuality, habitation and socio-political experience in art-production, reinforcing the sensibility of realism within artistic modernism, of the everyday within modernist abstraction, and the locational within the national. Two themes map this mid-century ‘social turn’ in visual art: the first concentrates on institutional sites like the Government School of Art in Calcutta and the Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan, to follow the shifting registers of the ‘national-modern’ aesthetic, both in the elimination and re-figuration of orientalist classicism by new values of composition and contemporaneity, as well as in the pro-Gandhian rhetoric of the ‘local’ and the ‘popular’ that dominated cultural discourse during the interwar period. The second theme studies the left-wing intervention in formulating a socially-committed, politically conscious notion of ‘progressive’ art since the late-1930s. Resonating with anti-fascist cultural activism of the Popular Front period, and increasingly dominated by the Communist left, the progressive rhetoric became the site for ideological conflict between realism and modernism in the 1940s, with contesting values of socialist idealism and formalist progress of art. I close with the recurrence of the social as metaphor in postcolonial art production in Calcutta in the 1950s-60s, as the city negotiated both marginal location within the nation’s modernity and a persisting memory of post-partition trauma.

This thesis analyses the relationship between polite and patriotic discourses, their critical development in satirical imagery, and the place of these concepts within the Habermasian public sphere 1745-84. In exploring the polyvalent nature of ‘politeness’ and ‘patriotism’ in this period, I undermine the implicitly simple dichotomy between these strands of social discourse, by considering their function as essential components of the public sphere and public identity. Satirical prints, being simultaneously a cultural product of the public sphere and a means of critiquing the culture of that sphere, are an important source for understanding the relationship between the social public sphere and public discourse, not only in a heuristic sense, but as a result of an entrenched system of shared codes and signs, which allowed the exchange of didactic, polemical and/or humorous messages between different public media. The ability of an image to convey the subtleties and ambiguities of an idea, in a way that written text cannot, makes satirical prints in particular a useful tool for understanding the complexities of politeness and of patriotism. By approaching public discourse through the medium of satirical prints, I explore the contradiction inherent in the production of images that critique and comment upon the commercial public sphere, while acknowledged as commodities in themselves.

The central research question of this thesis is to ask: what is the relationship between Chinese contemporary art and spectacle? I argue that the relationship is uncertain and ambivalent, and mobilise the variegated term ‘spectacle’ in order to track the transformational logic at play in recent Chinese artistic production, consumption and reception. I regard the spectacular event of the first Olympic games held in the People’s Republic of China as a trope for the complex processes of national reconstruction, forms of social control and geopolitical influence set in train by China’s rapid economic advance. I look at the mixed messages and ideological contradictions of such a spectacular global event, and examine the role art plays in China’s 21st century cultural reconstruction. I suggest that since Deng Xiaoping’s ‘open door’ economic reforms in 1978, Chinese art has operated within what I define as a spectacular framework, which subtends to how these artists recursively (re)imagine their own histories; reflect or reject the ambivalent legacy of totalitarian aesthetics; and also, confront and/or comply with the commercialisation, institutionalisation and indeed spectacularisation of their work as ‘imagineered’ by fantasies, projections and longstanding anxieties of China. Through an interdisciplinary and broadly deconstructive approach, this thesis explores the multifaceted dimensions of spectacle as a cross-cultural interface that reveals much of the geopolitical imaginary beneath the façade of ‘One World, One Dream.’

This dissertation examines the politics of narrative in women artists’ film and video. It investigates not only how narrative was and is used as a powerful instrument to offer counter-discourses to those sanctioned by the dominant culture, but also how narrative forms themselves can be invested with political significance. Starting in the 1960s, the supposed neutrality of narrative forms came under sustained attack, particularly by post-structuralist thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva. Their political critique of narrative quickly found its way into the work of experimental film and video makers, whose responses ranged from total rejection to partial and conflicted acceptance. Part One of this thesis seeks to understand the various ways in which narrative was reshaped in the work of women filmmakers and video artists from the 1970s and 1980s – who, I argue, could not do away with narrative as easily as men. It focuses on the independent scene in Britain, revealing the impact of feminist theory and the women’s movement on the ‘return to narrative’ in British avant-garde film and video, and the major contribution of women artists to the deconstruction and refashioning of narrative forms. It also proposes detailed analyses of particular narrative strategies, as found in the work of Laura Mulvey, Lis Rhodes, Tina Keane and Zoe Redman, among others. Part Two brings the question of the politics of narrative into the twenty-first century through an in-depth discussion of three contemporary video installations by Chantal Akerman, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and Catherine Sullivan. It shows how the narrative strategies deployed by an older generation of film and video makers have been re-articulated in new ways in these works, and proposes new terms to understand the use, meaning, and political resonance of narrative in contemporary film and video: Porous, Schizophrenic and Contagious.

This thesis considers the numerous ways in which ideas of order and disorder pervade the lithographic practice of Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet. Charlet and many in his contemporary audiences had lived through the First Republic, the Napoleonic wars, the civil conflict that followed the Bourbon Restoration and the July Revolution of 1830 as well as ongoing political strife. It has often been assumed that Charlet’s work addressed a politically motivated, popular audience. However, sale catalogues provide evidence that contemporary collectors sought to accumulate his lithographs and other collectable works enmasse. This thesis proposes that the pleasure of constructing and dismantling systems of order within the lithographic oeuvre was central to Charlet’s appeal during his lifetime and the decades after his death. Therefore, rather than functioning to motivate political change, the lithographs allow politically charged concepts of order, such as military order and revolutionary upheaval to be transferred from violent, lived experience to the restrained consumption of the printed sequence. Key to my arguments is that the body of Charlet’s lithographic work functions to occlude the traumatic aspects of conflict, transferring the memory of war to a playful engagement with the lithographic sequence and surface and rendering military imagery domestic and reassuring. Despite considerable empirical work and social historical analysis, there has been relatively little theorisation of Charlet’s lithographic practice. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have tended to view him as the producer of an unproblematic Napoleonic myth. I will interrogate the questions of order and disorder in Charlet’s lithography using theoretical models drawn from gender studies, psychoanalysis, linguistics and literary theory. I will suggest that by studying the lithographic oeuvre en-masse, the dynamic of order and disorder becomes observable and with it, a more ambivalent polical agenda can be discerned.

This thesis argues that we reconsider the philosophical premises which prefigure our encounter with art today. The thematic of ‘simultaneity’ is proposed as one means which might enable this to be achieved. Mapping the notion of simultaneity’s constant presence in art and philosophy associated with Conceptual art after 1960, I look at how this un-examined modality lies at the core of some of our understandings of the subject, its object and the relationship between the two. I also consider how this theme leads us back towards a territory of possibility that re-invigors the claims and concerns of materialism. This is done systematically, though idiomatically, through the careful analysis of the art work itself, in equal and non-hierarchical tandem with theoretical models. The thesis began as a speculative enquiry into what it could possibly mean that simultaneity seemed so central and embedded within aesthetic practices. It became a series of re-approaches to art whose most significant readings seem to over enthusiastically deny the possibility of the spectator’s encounter with the real, or a relatable contact with matter, in favour of a post-structuralist model of analysis. The arrangement of the thesis is not entirely chronological, though historical contextualisation is important, it, rather, adheres to a narrative drive which begins with the systems and language-based aesthetics of the late sixties, and moves further in the direction of material possibility; of an unpredetermined and contingent space in which to encounter the work of art.

No description available.

Geographers and social scientists have argued that geospatial technologies are contributing to new understandings of space as relational and of cartography as processual, performative and embodied rather than representational. These new understandings are developing through practices as well as in academic debate, in a widely acknowledged proliferation of vernacular, activist and artistic mappings. There is a fundamental tension in the fact that these new understandings of space and cartography are being facilitated by a technology underpinned by an absolute understanding of space. This thesis investigates the use of GPS by artists, and the role art has in producing these new spatial understandings. It looks at the work of four practitioners (Esther Polak, Jen Southern, Christian Nold and Daniel Belasco Rogers) who have made a significant engagement with the mapped trace of movement, through detailed biographical case studies which track their involvement with GPS across different projects over the last decade. The case study subjects have all been associated with the locative media genre, a label for new media art practices involving mobile and context-aware devices which emerged in the early part of the last decade. The mapped trace of movement has been identified as an inadequate capture of spatial practices. This position – most influentially articulated by Michel de Certeau – is associated with a tradition of thought that privileges time as the dimension of dynamism and denigrates space as the dimension of stasis and fixity. This denigrated space is the absolute space of cartography as it has been traditionally understood. This thesis uses the art practices of the four case study subjects to explore different relational understandings of space in which movement is primary, taken from the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Felix Guattari), Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour and Nigel Thrift. By looking at the different ways in which my case study subjects have addressed or exploited the tension between the absolute spatiality of cartography and the relational spatiality of movement in their art, it seeks to find a way past seeing these different conceptions of space in such starkly oppositional terms.

Blackboards were turned into tables … Questioning ‘horizontality’ in collaborative pedagogical art projects is research based on the practice of the collective microsillons, which is developing collaborative pedagogical art projects in different contexts. The aim of the research is to explore the possibilities offered by ‘horizontal pedagogical exchanges’ and to question the very notion of ‘horizontality’. It interrogates the possibility to challenge, through artistic projects in educational contexts, the traditional master–pupils (or artist–participants, or gallery educator–public) relationship. After a presentation of microsillons’ position in the cultural field, in particular regarding gallery education practices, collaborative art practices and the Educational Turn in Curating, a series of five collaborative pedagogical art projects realized by the collective between 2009 and 2011 are presented. Inspired by methods such as thick description and Participatory Action Research, situations in those projects are studied where a more horizontal pedagogical exchange is sought. Paulo Freire’s reflection about dialogical pedagogy serves as a starting point in this reflection. Anarchist and libertarian pedagogies, as well as the critical pedagogies discourses following Freire, are used to discuss the various strategies used by microsillons. Through those case studies are discussed the ideas of the classroom as a laboratory for democracy, of content co-generation, of network-like organization, of unpredictability and of constructive conflicts. Drawing from poststructuralist and feminist perspectives, key terms of critical pedagogy (such as empowerment) are then rethought and the idea of ‘horizontality’ questioned, complexified, presented as a utopian horizon rather than a practicable concept. Shortcomings and paradoxes in the projects’ attempts toward more egalitarian exchanges are identified and the limitations of the term are discussed. Thoughts about ways to overcome those reservations and to avoid romanticizing ‘horizontality’ are proposed, opening to microsillons’ future projects.

I have been working in the field of radio art, and through creative practice have been considering how the convergence of new media technologies has redefined radio art, addressing the ways in which this has extended the boundaries of the art form. This practice-based research explores the rich history of radio as an artistic medium and the relationship between the artist and technology, emphasising the role of the artist as a mediator between broadcast institutions and a listening public. It considers how radio art might be defined in relation to sound art, music and media art, mapping its shifting parameters in the digital era and prompting a consideration of how radio appears to be moving from a dispersed „live‟ event to one consumed „on demand‟ by a segmented audience across multiple platforms. Exploring the implications of this transition through my radio practice focuses upon the productive tensions which characterise the artist‟s engagement with radio technology, specifically between the autonomous potentialities offered by the reappropriation of obsolete technology and the proliferation of new infrastructures and networks promised by the exponential development of new media. Switch Off takes as its overarching theme the possible futures for FM radio, incorporating elements from eight „trace‟ stations, produced as a series of radio actions investigating these tensions. Interviews have been conducted with case study subjects Vicki Bennett, Anna Friz, LIGNA, Hildegard Westerkamp and Gregory Whitehead, whose work was chosen as being exemplary of the five recurrent facets of radio arts practice I have identified: Appropriation, Transmission, Activism, Soundscape and Performance. These categories are derived from the genealogy of experimental radiophonic practice set out in Chapter One.