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No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines the relationship between Adorno's 'shudder' and conceptual art, in the interest of conceiving of an art form resistant to societal and ontological 'objectification', as embodied by scientific pursuit, capitalist endeavour, and recent philosophical innovation (particularly in the work of Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound, and Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude). This art form, it will be argued, must necessarily be completely conceptual, devoid of any object which might become sundered to these objectifying forces. Just such a form, might be appealed to in order that the subject can feign an escape from absolute objectivity at the hands of the nihilising influence of science. Can the concept of freedom as an artistic declaration help the human to evade reification, in a way that can co-exist with accepted scientific findings; namely the clear base materiality of the 'subject', and the finitude of subjectivity, as signalled by Brassier and the absolute contingency of Quentin Meillassoux? Examining the implications of Duchamp's 'anything can be art' admixed with Beuys' 'We are all artists,' the study draws, in its latter third, on examinations of Adorno's 'shudder' made in the first chapter, in order to conceive of a means by which the subject may overturn its objectification via the declaration of its own subjectivity even in face of the falsity of this premise. Where, for Adorno, the 'shudder' is felt in face of the artwork, as the subject realises it base objectivity (as a result of the 'truth' which the artwork, as perpetual deceiver in a an untrue world, imparts), this study calls for the shudder, which frees the subject from objectivity, to be auto-designated by the subject, upon itself, for lack of an artwork capable of otherwise invoking it in a thoroughly reified world.

This thesis presents a 'critical catalogue raisonne' of Helen Chadwick's oeuvre created over two decades between the mid•i970s and her death in 1996 and is the defined outcome a collaborative research project based on the artist's archive deposited at the Henry Moore Institute. The thesis examines the significance of the archive, and of the role of archiving. as part of Chadwick's self-critical art practice, and in the historical construction of the artist Helen Chadwick, in now being available as a research resource. Analytical readings of two early works provide an example of how the archive can be used in writing a history of Chadwick's practice and how it opens different ways of knowing the artist. The studies of the installations Domestic Sanitation (1973~76) and Ego Geometria Sum (1982~84) reveal the evolution of self-reflexive, Research-led practices that extend the concept of a finite artwork. Chadwick's focus on the body and the politics of embodiment are explored through analysis of preparatory material, intermediary works and her documentation of performative practices in the process of researching and creating the works. The final staging of the works as complex installations is also examined in detail. The catalogue raisonne in volume two provides a fully researched chronological timeline of Chadwick's oeuvre with two extended entries or 'dossiers' relating to the works featured in the case studies. These chart the evolution of each project, through the. presentation of archive material in order to further illuminate the processes of research and realisation

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Conceptual Art (henceforth CA) has the peculiar status of being at once a neglected topic in philosophical aesthetics, and one on which a degree of philosophical weight disproportionate to the attention it has received is placed. On the one hand it is frequently mentioned by philosophers as a problematic case, one that general theories of art have difficulty dealing with, but on the other, there is a notable lack of philosophical research taking CA as its focus. It is largely taken as a given that CA is radically different from other art in various ways and thus poses problems for some of the general statements about art that philosophers tend to make. But it is striking that these claims are not, for the most part, grounded in a thorough investigation into the nature of CA. The purpose of my research is to conduct such an investigation; to address the question of what CA is, and what makes it different from other art, in order to come to a clearer view of what particular philosophical issues or difficulties CA raises for the philosophy of art. In existing literature on CA, it is standard to take CA’s distinctiveness to have something to do with the importance of ‘ideas’. I investigate what could be meant here by ‘idea’, and identify two broad schools of thought as to what form this emphasis on ideas in CA takes: Priority Accounts, which claim that in CA ideas are the most important aspect of the work and Constitution Accounts, which claim that works of CA are ideas. I identify serious problems for Constitution Accounts, in general, and for some kinds of Priority Account. I then put forward a new kind of Priority account which I think overcomes the problems faced by its rivals.