My visual practice is concerned with an articulation of the 'left-out-thing', remnant or blank, produced by and embedded within technologies of representation, which themselves echo the mechanisms through which an identity is formed. As automatic, 'empty apparatus', technological devices threaten as well as construct this self image. This thesis proposes a new theoretical interpretation for art practices that engage with this empty space, or 'shifter'; understood as a form of punctuation around which meaning revolves. Indexing an object both absent and 'has been', the kind of mark making that falls into this category can be identified - like an hysterical symptom - as the reproduction of an unrepresentable sign. It is through my practical work, which explores the link between the photograph, the body, and the written sentence, that my contribution to the field of fine art practice is primarily offered. The way in which an image is put together or a sentence is organised can be considered as an exemplary definition of subjectivity in operation. Yet, as Ann Banfield (1987) has argued, after the invention of the lens, novelistic writing began to index a 'world without a self'. My visual work, which frequently looks like writing, attempts to construct a similar 'grammatical' form: one in which the 'I' is absent. The aim of my work is to stage or record this empty place, understood as a disturbance, impediment or failure within speech; as the text's undertow; and equated with a photographic - or optical -'unconscious'. This failure, this fault in language, detected in the lapses, gaps and silences within a body of writing or in an image - a gap upon which such language systems are nevertheless hinged - is, I suggest, both the place where technology and the non-self are linked and, paradoxically, the site where the I is constituted.

The dissertation presents a cultural analysis of contemporary art collecting and art production with an illustration of patterns that overlap in collecting and art production practices in contemporary art. The illustrated visual network shows how institutions, local context, social strategies and prestige overlap in their influences on art production as a cause for collecting contemporary art. Economic exchange, reputation, a perception of time, and the personal and emotional understanding of objects and material are four patterns that illustrate reasons for collecting contemporary art in conclusion. This analysis is based on a visualisation of the structured field data that was generated in a participatory field study in the New York art world, consisting of semi-structured interviews between 2013 – 2015. Limitations in usability and interface design, and the need for a sufficient visualisation tool for qualitative data analysis, drew the focus of this study to the development of a new data visualisation software. After a peer-reviewed process, the software Entity Mapper was selected for use in this thesis to visually analyse the collected and structured data. The analysis takes location, size, hierarchy and movement of the structured data in the visual map into consideration for concluding theoretical statements.

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The last three decades have seen the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca evolve to become an autonomous centre for the creation and promotion of contemporary art on state, national and international levels. The present research's original contribution to knowledge is the analytical investigation of an art movement's response to the political and technological effects characteristic of postmodernity and effected through globalisation. The research uses a hybrid theoretical framework that includes the work of: Fredric Jameson to discuss postmodernism; Nelly Richard to characterise a postmodern Latin America; Homi K. Bhabha to analyse the postcolonial context and the creation of agency; and, inherent to this structure and the context, the work of Néstor García Canclini. The theoretical investigation is supported by ethnography that ascertains how hybrid political thought and community altruism characterise the Oaxacan art community and the aesthetic expression practised by a new generation of its members. Oaxacan contemporary art is based on the success of the post-Rupture primitivist magical realism practised originally by important Oaxacan artists living and travelling in other locations. The most recent generation of contemporary artists in Oaxaca integrates with, upholds and promotes the model of cultural production that is now inextricably intertwined with the local and wider communities. Participant observation and the analysis of the behaviour of the artists studied, focused the investigation on the efficient interaction between artists and collective action as an integrated sector of civil society. The research determines how the artists studied and the wider Oaxacan art community applies their knowledge of global communications and information technology to create and market a cultural product and promote a postmodern social and political perspective. Regarded as a solid sector of the local and regional community due to its national and international standing, the Oaxacan art community constructs political power from significant, direct involvement with micro-projects to engaging in partnerships with state and federal stakeholders in large-scale cultural endeavours. The research discusses projects instigated and undertaken by the artists studied, including the call for a pacifistic solution to the Oaxaca Conflict of 2006, a six-month socio-political uprising caused by actual and historic conditions in the national and regional Left-Right political duel. The strength of the art community is founded on necessary and reinforcing collective action in both artistic and altruistic projects; often combined through the direct use of art in the creation of funds and media-empowered support towards achieving a perceived common good that centres on the protection of identity and the political defence of diversity.

This thesis is a practice-based investigation into the articulation of pain beyond representation in contemporary art practice today – in particular the art created under the shadow of violence – conducted by prolonged actions that strive against this concept of a representational logic. Exploring the contemporary Colombian conflict as my case study, the aim of my work is to ask if it is possible to move past the existing logics of representation through a form of making, that when confronted by the distressing sensations of conflict shatters its existing logics. My visual practice is concerned with actions that embody the performative dynamics of movement, in which reality itself gets inscribed into the created images, by retaining a trace of the context that surrounds and affects what is rendered too painful to be articulated and exists silently beyond description in the work. In Colombia, trauma has clearly become culturally transitive; it affects society as a whole through the recurring accumulation of events and the generational transmission of unprocessed histories, obstructing cultural digestion. As such, this practice-based research is situated within complex relations of contemporary culture, social forces, and past and present historical events. At present, under circumstances of constant sociopolitical conflict, this thesis argues that art must register but cannot hope to master what must be approached and confronted through prompting change by poignancy as opposed to puncture. Thus, this thesis proposes a new practical and theoretical interpretation for art practice that engages with this problematic: the reality of extreme pain, which may be forgotten by being remembered through persistent gestural actions of healing as erasure, which draw on affective levels capable of shifting subjectively a caring understanding and an elaboration of such pain. My contribution to the field of art practice is primarily offered through my practical work, which here presents a passage to beyond through the Matrixial sphere and its healing notions of art; the objective being to form a link between remembering and forgetting by engaging acts of endurance, in which I use making as a reaction performed with-in or against the accumulated memory that exists as an active and present-negative force inside the reality of conflict and war. In and through my work I attempt an utterance, which is complicated, censored and interrupted by trauma, yet always striving to find ways to transform its ever-building burdens.

Since 2009, there has been an increased presence of group exhibitions in public institutions in the UK and the US which address the ways contemporary artists in the past two decades have used text as a material, a subject, and a conceptual device. Significant amongst these exhibitions are Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 2009, and Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012. Within their curatorial strategies, and independently from one another, both exhibitions draw a binary of the genealogy of text in art practice as emerging either from the international movement of concrete poetry of the mid-1950s to 1971 (including the work of Décio Pignatari, or Haraldo de Campos), or from conceptual art of the mid-1960s-early 1970s (including the work of Joseph Kosuth, Art & Language, Robert Smithson, or Mel Bochner). Such group exhibitions have overlooked how feminist, second generation conceptual artists embraced language as material. Artists of this second generation of conceptual art were critiquing conceptualism by introducing subject matter which looked outward from art and which demanded the audience to engage with language as a material through their use of the printed word, typography, written language, and methods of printing. For these artists, such as Mary Kelly, language was not presumed natural, and the materiality of text was necessary in order to engage an art audience in questions of power, representation, gender, and socialisation. With the rise of the digital age, the materiality of the linguistic signifier offers artists today something different than it did in the 1960s. Since the late 1990s, there has been a proliferation of works by contemporary artists in the UK and US that I refer to as text art, made by artists such as Fiona Banner, Janice Kerbel, Shannon Ebner, Pavel Büchler, or Paul Elliman. Part of my original contribution to knowledge is to explore the ways contemporary artists use text, to interrogate how this is different from work seen before, and to question the demands it places on the audience who reads it, as well as the challenges it places on the act of reading an artwork made of words. The literature emphasises a turn away from looking or the visual to a turn towards reading which occurred in conceptualism (Kotz, 2007; Blacksell, 2013). I explore the binary of this turn in the conceptual art period of 1966-1973 and I suggest that artists are engaging with text today not only to challenge how an audience encounters written language as art, but the very act of reading text in a digital world. The first three chapters explore the materiality of text in a historical genealogy of conceptual art, conceptual art in relationship to concrete poetry, and the feminist critique in second generation of conceptual art. The latter three chapters explore the materiality of text in contemporary art practices. This is the focus of the thesis, which builds on the foundation for materiality of text argued in chapters one, two, and three. I argue not for a cohesive movement of contemporary text artists, but rather, that diverse, contemporary artists’ practices are making similar investigations across text in art, and that this warrants attention to explore how we consider text as a medium today.

My thesis considers the distinctive characteristics of contemporary artistic production and display in Scotland from the 1960s to the present. The main objective is to make manifest the diversification of global sites of contemporary art away from traditional centres by examining less exposed aspects of art practice in Scotland. My methodology is driven by a set of case studies of artist-run initiatives (ARIs), which provide models of enquiry into alternative methods of production and display of contemporary art and that demonstrate the role of ARIs in producing art scenes, and not merely representing those that already exist. I focus on counter-histories of self-organised ARIs and their legacies, and adopt a genealogical approach to examine how recent praxis and infrastructures came into existence and how their initial impetus intersected with their historical conditions. Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory is employed to examine local forms of power and infrastructure, as well as the wider, global structures of the art world. The emphasis is on how ARIs and established institutions can and do negotiate with each other and in recognising the interpenetration of different scales of art institutions. I apply a bifurcated approach in order to bring Scotland into dialogue with anthropological discussions of cultural globalisation. I ask how locality, nationalism and globalisation are configured in (visual) culture generally and as applied specifically to a Scottish context. This is underpinned by a consideration of Scottish Devolution as a disintegration of hierarchical domination, which correlates to the ideologies of artist-run practice. Finally, I propose the eradication of top-down delivery in favour of horizontal distributions of knowledge and practice via self-organisation.

With specific reference to five discrete projects, this supporting text sets out to explain the methodologies, dynamics and rationale behind the installation-based and collaborative art practice of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, in relation to contemporary art methodologies and the chronologically parallel and equally emergent academic fields of Artistic Research and Animal Studies. The projects are represented by four monographs and one book chapter, each of which has its basis in a substantial art project involving a sustained period of interdisciplinary research and practice and involving one or multiple exhibitions. A series of research questions pertinent to the cross-disciplinary nature of my practice has been tested in respect of each project within the context of an overarching set of meta-questions pertinent to the practice as a whole. As my practice seeks to challenge assumptions, regarding for instance knowledge systems and representation it is the function of this text to present the projects in relation to knowledge production more widely, its currency, value and the basis upon which its value is estimated. I demonstrate how the dynamic of collaboration is integral to the principles of relationality embedded in the work and how those principles reverberate through our methodology and through the participation of the professionals, amateurs, and academics who contribute variously to the projects. Although working counter to subject-specificity as a matter of strategy, I discuss how certain subject-specific models (for example anthropological interview techniques and surveys, museum display, hunting etc.) are nonetheless appropriated and deployed in order to ground and inform critique. The latter and significant proportion of the text is devoted to providing a conceptually and materially descriptive summary of each project, clarifying project-specific research questions and propositions and detailing the relationship of each publication here included, to the research field(s) and the associated artworks.

This research identifies the negotiation of inherited understandings of the term ‘community’ as an increasingly widespread concern within the field of contemporary art since 1989, particularly in the wake of art’s communitarian turn during the 1990s. The thesis examines these artistic investigations in connection with the work of philosophers such as Maurice Blanchot, Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy during the 1980s and 1990s, where we find the most thorough interrogation of the term ‘community’ since the nineteenth century. Contending that art has significantly contributed to a discourse long established in philosophy, the thesis reflects on what precipitated the widespread shift from an artistic interest in ‘this or that community’ to ‘community as such’ during the 1990s, and on what art has offered to the negotiation of community that philosophy has not. These dual concerns have been developed in the two sections that comprise the thesis, entitled ‘Untying the “Unique Epochal Knot”’ and ‘Collaboration, Participation, Performance and the Negotiation of Community’. An important issue the thesis broaches is whether art can (despite concerns about its co-optation within neoliberal institutions) constitute a potent site for the negotiation of community. The affirmative, if critical, answer given considers the unorthodox forms, logics and strategies that art is permitted to employ, art’s ability to enact material interventions into social relations and, overall, art’s operation as an alternative/complementary mode of articulation to that offered by philosophy. Through the analysis of pertinent case studies, the thesis examines how collaborative, participatory and performance practices have been particularly employed by artists including Tania Bruguera, Kristina Norman and Artur Żmijewski, seeking to scrutinise factors crucial to the rethinking of community. These factors include singularity, commonality, temporality and ethics. Springing from interviews, research trips to key case studies, and a thorough literature review, as well as implicating a range of work from diverse geographies and spread over the past two decades, the thesis situates the move towards the negotiation of community in art both historically and theoretically. In doing so, the analysis develops an important reconsideration of contemporary art’s widely noted attendance to the social. In privileging a conceptual framework for the discussion of this tendency in art, as opposed to the more prevalent formalist model, greater critical purchase may be gained on this urgent development in contemporary art history.

Often durational, process or/and concept-based, transient and participatory, contemporary art understood as a paradigm of artistic practice calls for new approaches to the institutional collecting and all related practices including conservation. The intangible agents of contemporary artwork often exist as, and thus might be transmitted only through various kinds of documents. The resulting documentation does not only contain information about artwork’s provenance, history, meanings and character but it hosts an important part of the artwork itself. As decisions about the future presentations and hence interpretations of artworks are made based on documentation, the latter not only shapes but also determines the future of contemporary artworks.