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Forty years after the writing of "Art and Objecthood," this thesis presents an alternative idea of objecthood that moves from Michael Fried's original association of the concept with the objects of literalist (minimalist) art to an idea of objecthood as a field (of both vision and action). The potential for objecthood to be separated from Fried's attendant term "theatricality" inspires an intensive re-reading of Fried's short passage concerning Tony Smith's night time drive along the New Jersey Turnpike.

Live durational performance art practice is the site of investigation for this research project. The event of another human presented for intentional viewing in somatic, non-verbal practice is explored through a phenomenologicallense. The research examines underlying issues by firstly addressing "the cult of personality" in works where the artist is performer and then exploring individual involvement in live performance from both the performer's and audience member's perspectives. This thesis thus examines live durational performance under four categories: Site, Time, Performer and Audience. The research is both a textual and a practical one, with many of the artworks scrutinized stemming from my own work. The practice of an artist as performer is dissected and re-built through a re-performance project; Yellow-Re-pelTormed. This reperformance project is analysed and contextualized within the recently emerged debate surrounding re-performance strategies in performance art practice belonging to visual art. The proposition of re-performance is correlated to appropriation art, with both challenging the status of an original artwork. Through the experience of selected live artworks produced for this research, this study illuminates the complexities and difficulties inherent in this unstable practice. By analysing live performance from an insider's perspective, this thesis contributes to the understanding of the practice of durationallive performance in a gallery context. Interrelating reperformance and appropriation art, the thesis seeks further to demystify the art form and critically proposes re-performance as a strategy of remembering and also for making new live performance art. Through documenting and reflecting on the processes of commissioning and exhibiting performances, as well as briefing re-performers and eliciting inthe- moment responses from participants on all sides, this project can inform future practices and debates. It is my view that it can help gallerybased live performance to be better understood in relation to presence, and the experience of presence in re-performance.

In reference to Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss in Formless: A User's Guide, 1997, which maps out a third area between the traditional dichotomy of form and content in the visual arts as originally suggested by Georges Bataille, this thesis looks at the notion of the Space of Nothing as a third space between form and content through the case study of Yves Kleinʼs gallery-emptying Le Vide - The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw Material of Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility 1958. This thesis is based on the realisation that artists since the birth of the conceptual art movement in the late 1950s, with specific later reference to the dematerialisation of the art object as defined by Lucy R. Lippard in 1967, have continued to explore spatial definition by directly adopting themes and forms of representation taken from architectural practice to describe concept-based and often immaterial, artworks. This is exemplified by the title of Roberta Smithʼs review of Michael Asherʼs project for the Santa Monica Museum of Art for The New York Times, March 2008 titled How Art is Framed: Exhibition floor plans as a conceptual medium. “The gray volumes of conceptualism are filled with somber ciphers which express primarily the inexpressibility of socially critical thought in the form of art. They embody a terrible contradiction. These artists attempted to break out of the prison house of the art business, its bureaucracy and architecture, and to turn toward social life. But in that process they reassumed the very emptiness they wished to put behind them,” Jeff Wall, 1988 [i] The core interest of this thesis lies in a theoretical reading of the spatial within conceptual art, the art of the immaterial. Can the experience of an artwork that is immaterial become corporealized? The titular reference to the verb to house in A Space to House Nothing is to be understood directly as; to accommodate nothing; to store nothing; to shelter nothing. It does not reference notions of the domestic or the home, nor do gender politics or such readings of the home as a site of gender rules play any role. Can the Space of Nothing be defined as an architectural site? The adoption of architectural themes and forms of representation are evident in the career of Dan Graham, yet his work is overtly concerned with multiplicity and the multi-layering of psychosis and the interweaving of viewer and participant. Although there is a natural overlap with regard to the architectural form of his work, the motivation is oblique to the focus of this thesis, which is centred on the use of the Space of Nothing as an architectural device. Lines of enquiry are considered in reference to Yves Kleinʼs Le Vide - The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw Material of Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility, 1958 as the genesis on which the research is sited. Theoretical analysis is examined through four key terms - nothingness, emptiness, zero and void. These terms are surveyed through mathematics, philosophy and language to create a theoretical model; the Space of Nothing (Chapter I). The new term is further explored through a series of specific classifications that catalogue artistic approaches to the Space of Nothing: doing nothing, mapping nothing, framing nothing, occupying nothing and listening to nothing (Chapter II: Strategies Toward Nothing). Artworks of this nature are often misunderstood as an extreme form of pure abstraction based on reductivist and formalist tenets or simply considered nihilistic. However, through spatial theory and the contexts of experience, memory and occupation (Chapter III: Nothing within Spatial Theory), the thesis establishes that the Space of Nothing can be read as complex, emotive and multi-faceted. As a practicing curator of contemporary art, it became important to understand curating as a spatial practice (Chapter IV: The Practice of Nothing). The major project NOTHINGNESS, a touring European exhibition of work by 25 major international artists, examined the premise of this thesis and acted as a visual record of enquiry of selected art projects. The exhibition opened at Galerie Eugen Lendl in Graz, Austria (8 Oct - 27 Nov, 2004) and later toured to Galerija Gregor Podnar, Ljubljana, Slovenia (25 Feb - 2 Apr, 2005) and was accompanied by a hardback illustrated catalogue (English/German) and published and distributed by Revolver Books, Frankfurt. The design research is further supported by additional curated projects including DAN GRAHAM: PERFORMANCE at Lisson New Space (12 July - 28 Aug, 2004), and site-specific installations and theoretical models as contributions to academic conferences and symposia, that explore the temporal nature of materiality, interior, void, boundary and frame. Endnotes [i] Graham, 1991 p. 19.

Recent scholarship has revisited conceptual art in light of its ongoing influence on contemporary art, arguing against earlier accounts of the practice which gave a restricted account of its scope and stressed its historical foreclosure. Yet conceptual art remains both historically and theoretically underspecified, its multiple and often conflicting genealogies have not all been convincingly traced. This thesis argues for the importance of a systems genealogy of conceptual art—culminating in a distinctive mode of systematic conceptual art—as a primary determinant of the conceptual genealogy of contemporary art. It claims that from the perspective of post-postmodern, relational and context art, the contemporary significance of conceptual art can best be understood in light of its “systematic” mode. The distinctiveness of contemporary art, and the problems associated with its uncertain critical character, have to be understood in relation to the unresolved problems raised by conceptual art and the implications that these have held for art's post-conceptual trajectory. Consequently, the thesis reconsiders the nascence, emergence, consolidation and putative historical supersession of conceptual art from the perspective of the present. The significance of the historical problem of postformalism is reemphasised and the nascence of conceptual art located in relation to it. A neglected historical category of systems art is recovered and its significance for the emergence of conceptual art demonstrated. The consolidation of conceptual art is reconsidered by distinguishing its multiple modes. Here, a “systematic” mode of conceptual art is argued to be of greater current critical importance than the more established “analytic” mode. Finally, the supersession of conceptual art is revisited from the perspective of the present in order to demonstrate that contemporary context and relational practices recover problems first articulated by systematic conceptual art. It is from systematic conceptual art that relational and context art inherit their focus on the social relations and the social context of art. By recovering the systems genealogy and systematic mode of conceptual art we provide a richer conceptual genealogy of contemporary art.

My thesis explores the movement-based performance work of artist Anne Seagrave analysing her practice through the theoretical lens of the uncanny. From the 1980s to the present, Seagrave has created short rhythmic performances that have an iterative, or a spectral quality. This is the first academic study devoted to her work, albeit it ghosted by my master's research. It takes an innovative approach by focusing on a single performance from Seagrave's oeuvre. The performance entitled Jamais Vu 'returns' in different guises or configurations over the course of the thesis to highlight the generative and the creative power of repetition. My research methodology pairs critical and creative writing with a practical strategy of performance re-enactment. Re-enactment has been primarily interpreted as a conservation strategy for time-based art. I consider the ways in which the strategy queers traditional historiographic methods, but also the ways in which it might function as a mode of production and reception of performance. In my critical analysis, I explore the relation between the uncanny and the spectral to propose an affective, or an embodied, mode of relating to the past.

Although examples of work investigating the perceptual relationship and possibilities of sound and image are common, relatively litle work has been carried out into multimedia works combining sound and three-dimensional objects. A practice-based investigation into this subject is presented with original artworks and contectual material from sound art, sculpture, moving image and psychology. The project sets out to more examine the perception of multimedia work, specifically through the creation and analysis of artworks combining sound and physical objects. It considers three main areas of study: sound’s ability to draw attention to, or modify, the existing properties of an object; techniques which encourage sound and object to appear cohesively as part of the same work; and a discussion of cognitive effects that may occur as a result of their simulataneous perception. Using the concept of the search space from evolutionary computing as an example, the case is made that multimedia artworksde can present a larger field of creative opportunity than single-media works, due to the enhanced interplay between the two media and the viewer's a priori knowledge. The roles of balance, dynamism and interactivity in multimedia work are also explored. Throughout the thesis examples of original artworks are given which exemplify the issues raised. The main outcome of the study is a proposed framework for categorising and analysing the perception of multimedia artworks, based on increasing semantic separation between the sensory elements. It is claimed that as the relationship between these elements becomes less obvious, more work is demanded of the viewer's imagination in trying to reconcile the gap, leading to active engagement and the possibility of extra imaginary forms which do not exist in the original material. It is proposed that the framework and ideas in this document will be applicable beyond the sound/object focus of this study, and it is hoped they will inform research into multimedia work in other forms.

Histories of Surrealism typically concentrate on the provocations of French practitioners against the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. The case of Japan, where Surrealists were directly imprisoned by wartime authorities, presents an apposite study of the interaction of state and avant-garde, yet the Japanese contribution is marginalised in existing accounts. Japan forms an excellent case study in the tensions and problematics inherent in Surrealism, since it encompasses tensions between East and West; Imperialism and anti-colonialism; totalitarianism and avant-garde radicalism; and issues of cultural assimilation and e~change. Existing scholarship on Japanese Surrealism is limited, marred by inadequate attention to context; by ideological and connoisseurial biases; and, in the case of international exchange, by a paucity of archival research. Recently, increasing interest in Eastern European, Latin American and other Surrealist movements has created a new context for scholarship, in which discourse can be geographically expanded, and in which the Japanese movement can be reassessed. Investigating the specific cultural and political contexts of Japanese Surrealism contributes to an understanding of the Surrealist movement as an international whole. Japanese practitioners were thought to be isolated from the Parisian 'core' of the movement, but the relationships of Japanese artists with prominent European Surrealists allows the provincial, derivative character given to Japanese Surrealism in previous accounts to be confronted, and opens the critical reception and transmutation of European ideas to enquiry. By examining France and Japan comparatively, this thesis provides a model of the dialogue between the Parisian 'core' and the Japanese 'periphery'. This enquiry also contributestothewiderfield of Japanese art history. Scholarship on Japanese art is dominated by enquiry into traditional, pre-modern art; research into modern and avant-garde art, particularly work produced before the end of World War 11, has been less forthcoming. Thus, this thesis, positioned at an intersection between discourse on the Surrealist movement as an international collective; on Japanese modernism; and on the non-western avant-garde, contributes to several emergent areas of enquiry, and interrogates how cultural movements might transcend 'nation' and 'ideology' during times of conflict.

This thesis presents evidence of an extended period of research which has both a practical and a written outcome. Being primarily practice-based research, its principal outcome is the production and exhibition of three new video installations featuring the use of digital imaging techniques in their production, combined with the utilisation of sculptural display structures in their presentation and exhibition. The three works under consideration are Mind's Eye (exhibited July-Aug. 1997); Mothlight (exhibited April 1998, April 1999 and May 1999); and Merging/Emerging (exhibited June-July 1999). The thesis contains an extended discussion of the concepts and concerns behind these works, as well as an analysis of the interrelationships between them and my previous video installation work produced in the period between 1990 and 1995. (The appendix to this thesis contains the original proposals for these three new works, as well as a CD Rom with documentation of the exhibited works.) The other main component of this research is an exploration and discussion of the influence of significant changes in video imaging techniques on the development of video art in the United States and the United Kingdom. in the period between 1960 and 1990. This evolving relationship between video technology and video art is explored predominantly through an examination of art works and statements made by particular video artists who's work is relevant to my concerns, but also includes observations and statements by critics, writers and curators who are concerned with the development of the medium within a fine art context. Section One examines and discusses the historical and cultural context, tracing the evolution of video as an art form in relation to significant developments in the technology, including its origins, discussing in some detail the emergence of the genre in its early formative period, with particular attention to the contributions of individual artists. There is a significant section which discusses the work of artists who have experimented with and built special video imaging tools in both the US and the UK. Section Two examines specific works by artists operating in the United States and the United Kingdom under four main headings, acknowledging the impact of the most significant technological developments identified in the first section. Specific video art works are discussed under the following categories: 'Non-broadcast' video, frame- accurate editing, electronic image manipulation techniques and video display equipment for installation. section Three traces the development of my own fine art practice in video during the period between 1978 and 1995, examining the influence of video technology on the work and discussing issues related to the accessibility of image production facilities, as well as the impact of this technology on the development of formal innovation and its interrelationship to content. This section also discusses and examines the influence of artists working in related areas such as experimental film and music, with a special emphasis on the influence of the avant-garde film movement of the 1970's. This section is to a certain extent cross-referenced with the previous section, as many of the artists and works cited were important to the evolution of my own fine art practice. The final section examines in detail the ideas, concepts and development of the three new video installations that form the core of this research: Mind's Eye (1997), Mothlight (1998-99) and MerginglEmerging (1999). Each installation is described in detail and discussed in relation to its ideas and themes, as well as with reference to the technical processes employed and the formal concerns of the work. This section also includes a discussion of issues in relation to notions of site-specificity.