This thesis examines how cutting altered and reshaped the relation between image and body in early modern anatomical print. At the beginning of the sixteenth century renewed interest in anatomy brought about new visual conventions for representing the human body, and crucially it was through the cut that knowledge was constructed, disseminated and challenged. The engraver's burin could be seen to mimic the anatomist's knife, revealing new knowledge as the exterior surface of the plate or body was gouged away. The first chapter examines the anatomical fugitive sheets produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that utilise the cut, both conceptually and materially, in order to construct a body that is spatialized. Users of fugitive prints not only forge this internal space they also introduce animation and potentially threaten to destabilise the image in the process. Chapter Two investigates prints in Charles Estienne's 1545 treatise, On the dissection of the parts of the human body, where the antique and mythological are employed to negotiate between the fixity that the print strives for and change, which is an integral aspect of the production of anatomical knowledge. Chapter Three focuses on two prints representing the eye in George Bartisch's 1583, On the Service of the Eyes, and provides the opportunity to address the unstable status of version and the observer's shifting position in relation to the image. The final chapter concerns a triptych of early seventeenth century fugitive sheets, Johann Remmelin's Mirrors of the microcosm. The intermingling of anatomy, allegory and ornament in Remmelin's prints suggest that they offered an opportunity for viewers to reflect on spiritual as well as medical concerns, while the many novel adaptations of these prints are also a reminder of how the process of uncovering self-knowledge accumulates over time, and can have varied outcomes.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Parisian art criticism was saturated with culinary metaphors used alternatively to describe figures within paintings (usually female), to characterize the appearance of paint, or to refer to a painter’s process. These three purposes were linked, and the foods chosen as analogues for paint and for figures were aligned with certain constructions of femininity. To date, these examples of commentators lingering upon their multi-sensory responses to paint material and painted subjects, and drawing attention to the artist’s attempts to capture senses other than vision, have received very little attention from art historians. But these responses enable a radical rethinking of the perceived ocular basis and bias of self-consciously modern painters and their critics in later nineteenth-century France. References to gustatory taste in art criticism point to a gastronomic culture in artistic and literary communities that is not so easily separable from discourses of aesthetic taste. The migrating language of cuisine contributes to an understanding of the visceral effects of the material, facture, and technique of specific works, and appears in some of the most widely studied critical texts of the period. The model of embodied spectatorship that it raises, which returns a body vulnerable to desire and disgust to the “detached” connoisseur, destabilizes established art historical readings of that criticism and the paintings that it described. As viewing was positioned as analogous to ingestion, with concomitant dangers or benefits to the body, the fiction of aesthetic detachment (with the flanêur as its avatar) broke down. Because gender was the base upon which comparisons to the culinary were most often elaborated, interrogating these analogies provides a fresh lens through which to investigate nineteenth-century constructions of gender and the gendering of sensory experience, as well as offers an alternative framework through which to examine painting itself.

The recent resurgence of critical interest in the practice of painting has yielded significant attempts to move beyond pre-millennial debates over its apparent demise following the failure of modernism and the triumph of advanced capitalism. Yet, in trying to counter the loss of art’s autonomy as brought about by postmodernism and the ‘post-medium condition’, these accounts have often over-emphasised the persistence of indexicality through painting’s digital turn as its last hideout in an increasingly abstracted world. Complicating this premise, my thesis explores how artists have, since the mid-twentieth century, mined the relationship between painting, its past and the psycho-social space of perception through means other than the symbolic brushstroke. To this end, rather than a dialectical structure of deadlocked binaries, painting is here reimagined as a way of making patterns through time. That is, instead of a linear story of cause and effect, painting comprises a vast array of parallel trajectories. In the first two chapters I examine the roles played by exhibition design and colour within Ad Reinhardt’s retrospective attempts to make such a pattern out of (and for) his work, before going on to track further examples across a transatlantic set of practices begun during the supposed watershed for painting instigated by the 1960s. Examining works and writings by Bridget Riley, Jo Baer and Patrick Caulfield alongside Reinhardt’s own, this thesis spans an extended moment in which the concept of painting’s life-cycle gave way to alternative paradigms cutting across the stylistic and ideological imperatives still shaping its discussion today. Reframing mainstays of modern art such as the monochrome, the grid and the arabesque as primary tools in painting’s historical reformulation, rather than primal sites of its undoing, I conclude by considering how painting’s current ubiquity might in turn remake the patterns of its past.

This thesis investigates wonder in contemporary art and visual culture, which interrogates human-animal relations and aims to raise awareness about various plights facing wildlife. Recognising the ethical and political potential ascribed to wonder by various theorists, it examines the role wonder plays in promoting respect and responsible behaviour towards wildlife through artistic practice at this time of ecological fragility. Various species of wonder are identified that have human-animal relations at their heart. These are explored through three case studies, drawing on theoretical work from the fields of art history, visual culture studies, human-animal studies, anthropology and philosophy. Chapter one examines how wonder arises and what forms it takes in relation to Art Orienté Objet’s exhibition at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. Here, wonder’s potential to contribute to the cultivation of an ethical sensibility and elicit compassion towards wildlife is discussed. Next, the limits and possibilities of wonder in this regard are addressed through Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno films, which focus on the problems facing marine wildlife. Finally, the work Marcus Coates and Tania Kovats made during the Gulbenkian Galápagos Artists’ Residency Programme is discussed in terms of what wonder might do and where it might lead in the context of the fragile ecologies on these Enchanted Isles as well as closer to home. These artists are argued to be working in ways commensurate with their awareness of the plights facing wildlife today and their desire to treat nonhuman animals with respect. Accordingly, their representations of wildlife often avoid the use of live animals or animal derived materials. Instead, wildlife is fabricated from surrogate or more ethical materials, and even performed by the artists themselves. Such playful and poignant artistic strategies are shown to be ripe for wonder, responding to the call of Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene.

This thesis examines the intersection of art, activism, and the politics of neoliberalism in relation to three consecutive editions of the Istanbul Biennial, 2009, 2011, 2013. During this period, widespread disillusionment with the biennial institution in the city let to artists and activists disputing its corporate ties, links to tourist industries and urban gentrification, and thus its capacity to productively engage its publicised political and social thematics. In foregrounding discussion of each biennial in contemporary political circumstances, from 2007/8 global financial crisis up to the occupation of Gezi Park in 2013, I draw on the disagreements between curators, artists, and activists to critically reflect on the way perceived limitations are understood.

Focusing on the interdisciplinary context of the Independent Group (1952–55, IG from now), this thesis investigates the collision of visual arts, architecture and ecology in London across a period stretching roughly from the end of the Second World War (1939–45) to the mid-1970s. A traumatic, yet exhilarating time of rapid transformations, the postwar period was marked by an anxious insistence on bio-centric and eco-centric narratives of survival, integration, re-adaptation and above all, regeneration. In the mid-1940s, the shock and devastation of the war, coupled with a new attention to social welfare, had put the question of collective development under the spotlight, reigniting the age-old nature/nurture dispute across a number of governmental, academic and popular platforms. The economic boom of the 1950s and the onset of the consumer society advanced the terms of this debate to encompass new material realities and behavioural patterns. The IG was quick to register this shift. Ecology, anthropology and sociology gained popularity among group members as viable theoretical models with avant-garde credentials for mediating between nature and culture when confronting the particular phenomenon of a changing visual environment. The chapters in my thesis focus in particular on the work of the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, alongside the artists Nigel Henderson, Magda Cordell, and John McHale. Ranging from photography to painting, urban planning, exhibition design, criticism and fiction, their practices offer some of the most perceptive interpretations of how the new landscape was transforming society at its core.

Architectural history was produced via a number of new media practices in early twentieth-century Germany; this thesis asks why, how, and for whom - and what kinds of knowledge resulted. Existing studies in this area are monographic, focusing on individual media, actors, or objects, whereas this work examines several communication technologies, as well as both avant-garde and conservative protagonists. It is divided into three chapters. The first considers the production of photobooks by figures such as Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Karl Robert Langewiesche, Sigfried Giedion, and Adolf Behne. The second concerns films about Gothic architecture, both fictional (such as Der Golem) and documentary. The final chapter is devoted to radio broadcasts about architectural history, especially those of Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Pinder. This synoptic inquiry reveals the changes wrought by media during the period, as the parameters of art-historical discourse were reconfigured and new publics were produced. At the same time, by means of this comparative approach, the boundaries of individual media are opened up to investigate a more fluid zone of intermediality in which the image of the building was unsettled and opened to new uses. In the course of such transmediations, the media were hybridised and the knowledge of history was modernised, undermining the attempts of more reactionary authors to reinforce medial boundaries and to redeem the present by reintroducing it to historical architecture using technological means. Others used the media in more productive ways, critically harnessing their qualities or refunctioning them to suit their purposes. However, they too ran up against the obstinacy of the media, which rendered the quest for an oppositional public around art quixotic at best. This situation presents striking parallels to the present day, and this study concludes by considering the ramifications of architectural history's past engagement with new media for an age of smartphones.

In his description of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses (c.1513-1545), Giorgio Vasari alleges that Roman Jews would abandon their religious observances to “adore” the image of the iconoclastic Hebrew lawgiver on the tomb of Pope Julius II. The Mosaic prohibition of “graven images” is recognised in Judaism as the original antithesis to pagan image-worship, but its authority has been undermined in Christianity by the idea of God incarnate. As Vasari’s tale helps to illustrate, Michelangelo’s Moses embodies an enduring conflict of religious and cultural ideals, originally encapsulated by the biblical prohibition. This thesis examines how aspects of that conflict – especially the perceived opposition between Christian and Jewish attitudes to figural representation – were visualised in Italy during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Vasari’s allegation of Jewish apostasy – wherein the Jews establish their own image-cult of Moses – seems to epitomise the Freudian concept of the return of the repressed; the “inexorable” rule by which repressed psychic or cultural material (in this case idolatrous worship) re-emerges through the agent of repression; here, the forbidding figure of Moses, destroyer of the Golden Calf. The central idea of this thesis is that Freud’s psycho-cultural rule has unexploited potential as a tool for understanding not only Michelangelo’s Moses (which is horned, like a species of pagan idol), but Renaissance art and culture in more general terms. While developing this idea, the thesis also explores Jewish cultural reactions through visual media, including printed books, ritual objects and portrait medals, to the oppressive anti-Judaism of Counter-Reformation popes. The isolation of Jews in Italian ghettos was expected to induce mass conversion to Roman Catholicism, but Jews remained largely resistant to assimilation, and visual evidence of Jewish acculturation often involves symbolic reassertions of religious integrity. This thesis examines the complex interactions between Christian and Jewish (visual) cultures in early modern Italy, and challenges received ideas about a lack of agency in the latter.

This thesis investigates the intersection of political violence and photography in contemporary art and visual culture, focusing on the transnational context around the liberation and civil war in Angola (1961-2002). Though the longest period of conflict in the twentieth century, and one of the deadliest and most internationalized to date, it has always been presumed to be without images. Structured around four case studies, this thesis explores, and brings together for the first time, the wide range of experimental strategies with which artists in Angola, Cuba, Portugal, South Africa, or the US, among other places, have been systematically responding to and dealing with such colossal events over the last decade, through the mutual interrogation of photography and history.

The coastal town of Albissola Marina has been the site of traditional ceramics production since the thirteenth century. During the twentieth century however Albissola became a prosperous hub for avant-garde ceramic art, design and activity. It’s two central ceramics factories - the Mazzotti Factory and San Giorgio - attracted a large number of international artists and figures during this period, including Asger Jorn, Lucio Fontana, Wifredo Lam, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Baj, and movements such as Futurism, CoBrA, Nuclear Art and the Situationist International. They all experimented with clay in avant-garde ways, resulting in the production of some the most innovative and unorthodox ceramics of the twentieth century. This thesis is the first scholarly study which demonstrates Albissola was a centre for avant-garde artist production during the twentieth century. It responds to an overwhelming lack of scholarship by examining the most vibrant and artistically revolutionary periods in Albissola, seeking to understand why artists were so interested in ceramics as an art form and why Albissola was such an attractive place to work. In answer to these two fundamental questions, this thesis combines original object-based research and fresh document analysis to explore some of the most important works of ceramic art created by artists in Albissola. This thesis hones in on the ways in which individual artists responded to ceramics using the various lenses of religion, mythology, technology, industry, artistic collaboration and collective activity, demonstrating that Albissola should be recognised as an important site of twentieth century ceramics, art and design.