In 1949, the first Young Contemporaries exhibition presented work by art school students in London. In 1988, Freeze displayed the work of artists who became known as the young British artists (‘YBAs’). This dissertation offers a historical framework and a critical account of the concept of the ‘emerging artist’—developed during the intervening forty years—a term typically associated with Freeze and the YBAs. The dissertation offers a corrective to the widely held belief that an interest in young and emerging artists was a new development in the 1980s, by reconnecting the notion with much earlier roots in the 1950s. It also revises the term’s commercial connotation. ‘Emerging artist’ posits something yet to come, and is loaded with suggestions of investment and future value. These traits can be read as imprints of the marketplace. This research demonstrates that a focus on young artists’ work in fact evolved as a result of changes to education and public patronage that occurred during the expansion of the welfare state. The art market contributed to the phenomenon, but did not shape it alone. Alongside the historical account of these institutional changes this dissertation considers the relationship between characteristics associated with the emerging artist and those associated with creativity more generally. Judgments of quality and value are in part made institutionally: an artist’s worth is attested by passage through prestigious educational institutions, exhibition in respected galleries, and collection by public institutions and important individuals. But there remains a conflicting appetite for these artists to be ‘outsiders’, expressed in the discourse which frames and receives them. It is in the ‘emerging artist’ that these competing demands can be reconciled. This analysis concludes by framing the ‘emerging artist’ as a paradigmatic artist, with dual appeal both as institutional ‘insider’ and romantic ‘outsider’.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a concept of 'off-site art' as a distinct mode of art production, and further argues that a specific approach to curating. 'off-site art curating', is required in order to realize the potential of this art form. Off-site art refers to works in temporary exhibitions which are held away from the gallery space and which create their own time-space on site, usually being 'site-specific' and 'context-sensitive'. Taking place in the real living environment, off-site art, on the one hand, is liberated from the limitations imposed by an institution, while on the other hand it naturally encounters difficulties being sited in a broader social, economic and political arena; in this sense, off-site art could be considered in part to be a reflection of spatial-political circumstances and problems encountered on site. Three questions will be discussed: what is off-site art and why it is significant? What is the relationship between artworks, environmental context and viewers in off-site art exhibitions? and what is the role of the curator and how might the curating of off-site art work? The research is based on an interdisciplinary approach, and a number of off-site art exhibitions held in Taiwan during the period 1987 to 2007 will be taken as case studies in order to examine four primary aspects: off-site art curating and politics; off-site art curating and business; off-site art curating and urban regeneration; off-site art curating and the community. I argue that the value of off-site art lies in the fact that art should not be confined to a gallery; instead, art manifests its power in everyday life. The task of off-site art curating is to create a support system that mediates between the diverse forces in operation in order to ensure that art is valued as art itself rather than merely playing a subsidiary role serving political, economic or any other purposes.

This PhD by Publication reflects on a program of research, which is informed by a number of approaches developed and manifested in debates surrounding the theory and practice of the use of video and sound installations in a contemporary art context. The submission brings together key critically recognised accomplishments in my exhibited and published body of work, which address the broader themes of 'places of departure' and 'mobile transitions'. It consists of three parts. Each analyses a body of works, including the video and sound installations entitled Point of Departure 2006, Adrift 2006, Quintet Without Borders 2007, Tahtakale 2004, Poised in the Infinite Ocean 2004, Downward Straits 2004, and Entanglement 2003. My practice has been informed significantly by theories and themes surrounding the notions of liminality, border crossing, mobility and ideas on place, placelesness and space. The explorations of these ideas have manifested themselves in architecturally and sonically complex types of installations, each informing and contributing to knowledge from a different perspective. The contextual nature of the works and the development of technical knowledge have formed the basis of what can be described as a research based approach to new video and audio installation techniques and they have provided the basis for this submission. This becomes evident on a number of levels specifically at a time when video art installation practice has become increasingly popular, and the use of new technologies widely available and accessible for artists. For the purpose of this PhD by Publication I have chosen a particular selection of works, which demonstrate the ability of contemporary art practice to contribute in unique and innovative ways to the field of knowledge surrounding understandings of place and mobility.

Ephemeral art is usually understood as reflecting a desire to dematerialize the art object in order to evade the demands of the market, or to democratize or challenge art museums. However, in many ephemeral artworks something much more fundamental is involved. In this thesis I explore the hypothesis that the use of ephemerality by some artists is best understood, not solely in terms of art world issues but of the relationship between ephemerality, mourning and loss. I will begin with a refinement of the definition of ephemeral art, which is often confused with temporary works. This definition identifies four characteristics of ephemeral art: time, communicative act, inherent vice and directive intent. Ephemeral art often involves works that do not exist in a steady state, but change or decay slowly. This temporal aspect is examined through a discussion of the boredom they consciously evoke, which can be seen not only as an acute awareness of time but also a form of mouming for lost desire. The different physical state of ephemeral works represents a shift from the art object to communicative act. This shift is exemplified by artists working in the 1960s, particularly those influenced by John Cage. Cage's engagement with Buddhism and the subsequent work he produced demonstrates that the appreciation of transience is a reflection of wider cultural values. The growing interest in Buddhist philosophy and the engagement with transience at that period are discussed, not as cause and effect, but as both stemming from the same desire to find alternative forms of meaning and expression at a time when traditional structures of meaning were in decline. The use of non-traditional, non-durable materials and the incorporation of chance and ephemerality mean that the resulting worlds possess an 'inherent vice' which results in the demise or disappearance of the work. This is a key feature of ephemeral art, which distinguishes it from temporary works. The latter are designed to function for a fixed period, after which they are discarded or destroyed. The conclusions drawn have implications that reach beyond artworld concerns with durable or at least preservable commodities. These works offer insights into the mourning process which are powerful and profound reflections on the human condition. These works can act as a means of engaging with bereavement, disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss. In a world where many societies may be deemed post-religious traditional myths and rituals that once served to alleviate fear or mortality and the pain of bereavement are no longer viable or effective, this is of immense significance.

The portfolio of published work focuses upon my own artistic methodology and approach to contemporary art practice that I have termed 'discursive performance'. This has been established through my manipulation of the guided-walk form that I have distinguished from other categories of 'performance art' or 'live art' by describing as 'manoeuvres'. Each 'manoeuvre' has involved the recitation of quotations each of which have been brought to bear upon the route through pre-designed association with particular stopping points en route. The quotations have been culled from various subjects and amount to a discursive web of information. Through this 'discursive performance' (the combinations of documentation, textual exploration, guide-publication and live presentation), the suite of publications proposes my work as a new mode of performative practice based upon the politics of the 'de-centred body' and the performativity (doing) of 'history'. The utilisation of the walking tour as a vehicle to understand this has also offered this practice up to public scrutiny. The work has been registered in academic journals on History, Architecture, Geography and Contemporary Art as a new approach to understanding concepts of 'space', 'place', 'memory', and 'history'. The accrued programme of work forms a plank in an argument for experiential knowledge which is heteroglossic in nature, and which tests generalised notions of 'interdisciplinarity', 'site-specificity', 'performance', 'poetry' and the 'memorial' analysed in terms of the following threads: 'zone'; 'place' and 'history'. The published work forms a methodology that has emerged over time as a resistance to notions of 'objecthood' in art. In turn, this methodology (discursive performance) has made possible new works of imagination (each 'manoeuvre'). This performative approach utilises process in the public realm to open out discursive potential to both producer and participant.

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This thesis examines the concept of ‘embeddedness’ as condition and strategy in contemporary art and cultural production. Identifying embeddedness as a motif of contextual proximity and a strategy in contemporary art, the thesis proposes immediacy to be the result of intrinsic mediation. The project’s main concern is how embeddedness is contextualised by the current conditions that authors and cultural producers engage with. The primary question is whether and how embeddedness can convey a critical relation to the mediation that it undertakes. These concerns inform and arise from my work as an artist, and my participation in events, some of which I organise. The project claims that embeddedness in art is a critical condition and an editorial concept or a strategic plan that can be set up by the artist. The investigation begins by looking at conditions of embeddedness by focusing on concepts of subjectivity and by elaborating strategies that I call ‘auto-direction’. For example, concepts of subjectivity are taken up in relation to Richard Serra’s video Boomerang (1974), in which the performer Nancy Holt reflects on her own spoken words, which are fed back with a short delay via microphone and headphones into her ears. Auto-direction, introduced with the example of Steven Spielberg’s initiative of a video diary exchange project between Israeli and Palestinian children, describes the activity of the producer, who self-directs his situated presence. Taking up idioms of embeddedness from artists like Phil Collins, Christian Jankowski and Erik van Lieshout the project examines embeddedness through a comparative analysis between contemporary art, visual culture, media theory, sociology, art theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy. These practices lead to an identification of embeddedness as an author’s immanent exposure, a claim taken up through analysis of theoretical texts and literature by Rosalind Krauss, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gregory Bateson, Hal Foster, Bernard Williams and Alfred North Whitehead.

The research considered the participatory dimension of collaborative drawing as an act taking place in three and four-dimensional space and relating to the two-dimensional resolution of a drawing. The drawing activity, therefore, consciously explores the dynamic interrelationship between participants the choreographic dessinateur (the researcher) and others in site specific situations which result in surface action on both the vertical and horizontal plane of a drawing. There are two major considerations; the concrete and direct observable behaviours of the participants and the resulting graphic marks of the drawing left as a trace of that activity. These are seen as the facts of the body and the drawing. That is, that tangible dimension which looks at the movement of the body in relation to all that it may physically come into contact with and its 'arrival' as 'vectorial force' on a material surface as a 'scored' and 'recorded' reflection of that activity, What the researcher is looking at therefore, takes account of this as the initial infrastructure from where other possibilities collide. The researcher is also attempting to locate an underlying significance to the first physical observations which may have a correlation to other phenomena within the same time/space situation, namely, the invisible and interpretative dimension. The attempt therefore, is to explore the relationship of subject and the 'world' (in this case the space of a performative and collaborative drawing), as an ontologically reciprocal act, embracing the self as we know we are with its orientation to the other. Merleau-Ponty (1964: p. 55) has referred to this as the primary source of expression in his essay 'Indirect Language'; that area where the embodied self is slightly out of focus, but situated where it may collide with new possibilities. The embodied self therefore, is seen as focusing on things as the relation between the subject and object of experience, from the personal to the collective, from the particular to the general. Hence, the collaborative nature of this project searches for new images and methods through and as a move away from the common habitual behaviours of drawing and into the realm of the unknown. It is a conscious engagement with pre-reflective sensory, motor and affective capabilities, 'primary expression' on the one hand and 'secondary expression', the more routine behaviours both operating within a specified and unified whole. This is a 'dialogical method' which accepts what is there, while also endeavouring to change or extend through added and invented dimensions. The whole process of drawing and reflection for the project embraces ambition and intentions for developmental outcomes which might enhance comprehension, performance and communication skills in and about drawing. A dimension which relies upon observation, insight, reflection and interpretation from a multitude of viewpoints

This thesis conceptualises instances of posthumanism in contemporary art. As an interdisciplinary critique in the humanities and social sciences, posthumanism is set against the anthropocentric discourse of humanism and its speciesist structures that reproduce the normative human subject through the dichotomy of humanity/animality. The analysis focuses on Patricia Piccinini's video work The Gathering, Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle and Charles Avery's ongoing multimedia project The Islanders. The otherwise diverse works of these three artists similarly combine media such as film, sculpture, drawing and photography to generate complex fictional universes inhabited by various animal or animal-human hybrids, alongside morphs, blobs, machine-organisms and amalgams of plant and inorganic matter, so as to negotiate a space of continuity and rupture between human and animal, animate and inanimate, living and dead, natural and artificial. While examining how posthumanism plays out in the above-mentioned artistic projects and discussing its implications for the wider culture, I argue that these works engage with the destabilisation of anthropocentrism, the reconsideration of ethics based on species membership, and more generally interrogate animal-human distinctions. These themes are explored in relation to Cary Wolfe's theorisation of posthumanism and anti-speciesism, Giorgio Agamben's writing on potentiality and human-nonhuman relations, Niklas Luhmann's notions (following Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela) of autopoiesis, the "blind spot" and form-medium distinctions, and Jacques Derrida's rethinking, under the pressing "question of the animal", of humanist ethical postulates based on ability and power.

This text investigates creative decision-making in art practice and theoretical models that illuminate the sense of how contemporary working practice as an artist (expert practitioner), functions. Further it seeks to demonstrate how observation and documentation alters the creation of new work, which emerges from the process. It also seeks to show how this perspective differs from that of non-makers (expert spectators). Equally important is the linked thematic content, where complex notions of identity, self and culture are played out against an historic time frame as well as in contemporary art making situations of various models (museological, commercial, academic), and within the several guises I perform (as an artist, writer, curator) which might give rise to signature practices. These investigations work in parallel with those that seek to identify, understand and explain the nature of coded information that has been used in the artistic practice of same-sex lovers. Embedded coded information is ostensibly about one subject yet contains within itself another subject matter, and I refer to this phenomenon as hiding in plain sight. The Portfolio includes an outline of methods and strategies adopted in the project, an enquiry into the interweaving of objects made, curation, and outlines the most recent project Golden Rain, addressing institutional privilege, gifting, and hiding in plain sight. It provides a retrospective account of changes in my practices and records the development of new strategies to deal with institutional homophobia over a series of exhibitions, artworks and practice-based investigations.