Since William Morris has earned his reputation as an artist; the seriousness of his socialism is often underestimated. E.P. Thompson re-established the reputation of Morris as a socialist, but he did not totally appreciate Morris's past and the role of art and romanticism in his socialism. Therefore Thompson missed its essential character. This thesis examines Morris's socialism in the round, and argues that Morris's criticism of capitalism is relevant, not only because it provides us with the keys to tackle the crisis the modern global market has brought, but also because it sheds light on the fatal faults of the existing socialist regimes. The essence of Morris's socialism is the emphasis on pleasurable work. Morris claimed work should be enjoyed as art, i.e. the expression of human pleasure in work, and no society would be genuine without abolishing toil and making every work attractive. Through the comparison with Marx and other socialists, this thesis maintains that Morris is practically the only socialist who stressed the importance of the qualitative aspect of work. Most other socialists focused only on the abolition of private property and the reduction of working hours, namely the quantitative aspect of work. The relevance of his socialism also lies in the employment of utopia and imagination. Unlike orthodox Marxists, Morris created the image of future society in ‘News from Nowhere', believing it important to urge workers to have vivid images of their own in order to change society. Morris's utopianism is not an adjunct to Marxism, but the specific area Morris emphasised. His romanticism, 'the capacity to make the past present', enabled him to understand sorrow and joy of ordinary people in the past and the present, and to pursue society where everybody is equal and an artist.

William Logsdail (1859-1944) was a Lincoln born artist. He is largely unknown to the general public and little has been written about him even though he was a successful and prolific artist during his lifetime, as contemporary accounts prove. This is the first comprehensive and modern scholarly account of this artist’s life and work. The thesis is comprised of two sections, plus an appendix of a full, annotated catalogue of the artist’s known works. Part I relates to Logsdail’s life, training and artistic achievements in relation to the cultural environments and circumstances under which he produced his work. The primary evidence for this has come from contemporary articles on the artist, and his own unpublished notebooks, written in later life, which contain details of his life, work and travels. Part II provides an analysis of the stylistic content of Logsdail's work, and of the artistic influences on it from the early stages of his career through to his later portrait works. His work here is considered primarily with regard to contemporary notions of Realism and Impressionism and, by extension of the latter, to 'modernity'. It also explores contemporary critical reviews of Logsdail’s work, both in terms of how it was understood within the wider artistic movements and trends of the time, and to assess Logsdail's contribution to late nineteenth/early twentieth century British art today. Furthermore, the thesis also assesses Logsdail’s portrait work as an area that has been hitherto neglected, thus providing a complete study of the artist, and adding to our understanding of British Portraiture at this time. Appendix I, William Logsdail: Catalogue Raisonné, provides an original catalogue of all known works. This is rare for a British artist of his time and in itself constitutes an original piece of research. This catalogue will hopefully provide a useful source for further research on the artist, his contemporaries, and on British art at that time.

This critical review forms a reflection on the research published within the following publications: Patrick Procktor: Art and Life (Unicorn Press, 2010) Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977, (Sansom & Co., 2012) The research is on two artists, Patrick Procktor (1936-2003), and Keith Vaughan (1912-1977). The monograph on Procktor – previously one of the least documented of the generation of artists who came to prominence in London in the Sixties – positions him in a history of art from which he had been notably absent. The research on Vaughan asserts a new reading of his work, one that is both deeper and more nuanced in its analysis of the ways in which personal experience and sexuality are encoded autobiographically within his work. Crucially, in both artists biography and work are symbiotically linked; the research therefore examines the links between life and art. Revisionary in intent, the work examines trajectories of experience of gay British (or rather, English) artists in the twentieth century, artists who sought to express themselves and forge careers within the constraints of a heteronormative society, albeit one in which attitudes to sexuality were undergoing change. As gay men, both were constrained by the social mores of their times, and each used painting as a means to affirm personal and sexual identities. A key research interest is in the ways in which sexuality and persona are reflected in critical responses to the artist’s work: in Vaughan, Procktor and other gay male artists of the period. The writing on both Procktor and Vaughan examines the relationship between their personal and professional/artistic lives, framed within a broader socio-political and art historical context. It asserts the place of biography as a means to understand and form new readings of the work. The work adds substantially to the literature and wider discourse on post-war British painting and social history.

Claims for originality in this thesis lie in bringing together many different disciplines in art, music, sound studies and performance. The methodology, contextually indebted to the dialogues of site specific art, performance, and sound improvisation, has emerged as a multi-disciplinary one, informed in part by the study of those artists from the 1960s onwards who actively sought to resist the gallery system. The practice has driven the thesis in developing and continuously testing the requirement to respond uniquely to chosen sites. By using relevant references, instruments, and sonified materials, a compulsion to convey something of the particularity of the site’s associations through sound, is performed on site. In the course of considering the wider implications of a site through both the sound performances and the critical writing, I propose that there are essentially three aspects to identify when working with sound on site. I define these as: the actual the activated the associative The first aspect describes what is essentially inherent to the place, the second what can be encouraged to be ‘sounded’ through physical intervention, and the third outlines and forms what I have coined as the wider material of the site. This term draws on any relevant aspects of the social, physical, historical, anecdotal, and aural associations that a site may proffer. However, it is the notion of the associative that primarily informs the research by providing a methodology for the practice and in proposing a new paradigm of a live, site specific, performed, sound art work. The twenty or so works in the portfolio undertaken hitherto have existed not only as live performances but also in virtual and physical documentation, critical 4 analyses, and in the potential possibilities brought to the form by the response of others. By addressing this new taxonomy of approach in defining the actual, the activated and the associative as a kind of aural ground to the site (borrowing a term from painting), significant live sound art works have been developed to temporarily inhabit a space by exploring this latent material of the site.

This dissertation focuses on The Ring Net, a documentary exhibition by the artist Will Maclean. The Ring Net is a collection of drawings, photographs and printed plans numbering more than three hundred and forty items, which was originally shown at the 'Third Eye Centre, Glasgow in 1978. It subsequently toured to various venues, mostly in Scotland, and was later bought by The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh where it is presently held. The project is based on a particular method of sea fishing which used to be practised on the West Coast of Scotland. The subject of fishing is a consistent feature in the work of Maclean, although this particular undertaking is somewhat unusual as the artist has chosen a documentary approach. The initial period of research for the project was enabled by an Edinburgh-based charitable organisation, the Scottish International Education Trust. The artist continued to work on the project for some time afterwards, and the eventual exhibition was not shown until four and a half years later. The aim of this dissertation is to look at The Ring Net in its context. The period of its making is explored in some depth, as is the showing of the project at the Third Eye Centre and the various venues included in its tour. Though the methods and media used in The Ring Net are discussed, they do not constitute the main objective of the work. More space has been devoted to the documentary aspect of the project and the effect this had on the finished result. Unpublished sources such as a series of letters from the artist to a collaborator in Kintyre have been used to some extent.

This thesis addresses critically the work of American artist Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), focusing especially on the tensions Kaprow proposed between 'art' and 'life'. It presents a reconsideration of the most fertile period in Kaprow's career, from his undergraduate studies in the late 1940s to his mature work of the 1970s, prior to the increasing demands made on him to produce re-enactments of his early work. The period 1948-1976 presents a fuller overview of the themes and motivations of his practice than has been scrutinised in the existing literature. The research is based on extensive examination of the Allan Kaprow Papers at the Getty Institute, Los Angeles, which revealed significant and previously unstudied documentation and images. This archive and Kaprow's personal library in Encinitas, California have provided substantial previously unpublished evidence of his early interest in the American pragmatist John Dewey, and reveal many of the motivations for Kaprow's emphasis on change, together with his relational approach to form, context and process. The role of composer John Cage in the development of Kaprow's thoughts on chance helps elucidate the complexities inherent in the development of Kaprow's negotiation between chance and control. The present study also gives, for the first time, a comparative and detailed reading of the five drafts of Kaprow's Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966), a reading which sheds fresh light on his art and publications of the period. The thesis also presents a thorough reconsideration of the significance of play in Kaprow's work of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the tensions between and among play, work, hierarchy and liberation. Kaprow's many struggles to conceptualise and reconcile these tensions, and others, such as between audience and participant, private and public and narrative and history, were a necessary feature of the categories of art and artistic identity, including 'Happening', 'Activity' and 'Un-artist' that he helped bring into being.

This thesis investigates the intersection of art, feminism and postwar memory in Japan through lens of artist Yoshiko Shimada. Coinciding with unprecedented geopolitical shifts occurring in the final thaw of the Cold War, the year 1989 marks a fraught moment in Japan when spectres of the nation's imperialist past and its historical entanglements acquired renewed potency in the wake of Emperor Hirohito's death. Born in 159, Shimada gained international prominence in the 1990s for her critique of the national body, in particular, the relationship between women and the imperial wartime state. Her work, which unapologetically confronts Japan's WWII aggressions in Asia, its wider histories of occupation, and issues such as the fiercely contested legacies of former 'comfort women' vitally reflects on the social role and agency of art and artist in a climate of political unease emergent at Showa's close. Based on extensive interviews with the artist and research into her primary archive, this is the first comprehensive survey chronicling Shimad;s twenty-five year oeuvre. It situates her practice between two vectors: feminism in Japan and its engagement with Western scholarship, and traces the 1990s 'feminist turn' led by art historians such as Chino Kaori, who began to champion the application of gender perspectives in the study of Japanese art. Within the wider Asian region, the concurrent development of transnational women's art' networks, exhibitions and publications dovetailed with the burgeoning of performance art was protest. As one of the most outspoken feminist art activists of her generation, Shimada has borne key witness to the changing cultural conditions informing women artists' organised activities and the writing of their social histories. This interdisciplinary study incorporates a range of perspectives drawn from art history and gender studies, film and performance theory, memory and trauma studies, Japanese studies and cross-cultural scholarship. It highlights the formal and conceptual interactions between printmaking, performance, installation and lens-based media in Shimada's practice, and demonstrates the plural ways in which her reflexive aesthetics and visual strategies express the tensions and complexities characterising processes of remembering, forgetting and representing the past. By interweaving arguments about the crucial role of feminism in challenging dominant narratives of nation, race, sex and ethnicity, with critical perspectives central to discourse on postmodern Japan, questions are raised concerning the implications of gender, tradition and popular culture for art produced in this age of anxiety. The recent proliferation of problem-oriented, politically engaged practices following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami marks an ostensible 'return to the social' and departure from privileged tropes of 'Japaneseness' in artistic experimentation. Taking this into account, this thesis proposes that revisiting the recent history of feminist art interventions reveals valuable insights into the role of art in understanding and addressing trauma, and engaging marginalised histories and communities. This is exemplified by Shimada's work, which offers a powerful vantage point from which to contemplate art's political inflections, its social potential and the urgency of memory work both in Japan, and in our contemporary societies today.

The initial research questions for this practice-based doctoral research project was to ask, "Is it possible to develop a more confident, self-conscious creative voice able to articulate one's identity more clearly through the making of handmade artefacts?"; this thesis applies the methodologies of autoethnography and pedagogy to consider an answer. My original contribution to knowledge through this enquiry is the identification of the ways in which the exploration of identity through autoethnographic, creative and pedagogic methods encourages an expanded field of self-knowledge, self-confidence and sense of creative self.

In this research I explore my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and make manifest equivalent experiences of it through art practice. I investigate my OCD through artistic enactments and test my equivalence of the framework obsessioncompulsion using installation art – an equivalence, which I suggest is a relationship between my embodied perception and my memory. My interpretation of equivalence contains characteristics that arguably align with common emotions of control and doubt, inflated sense of responsibility and fear of disaster, which, I suggest are accessible to an audience other than myself. As such, my artwork proposes that a viewer can experience my equivalence to some degree. I refer to writer David Batchelor's (1997) definition of equivalence as a starting point for this research, and question how my OCD reveals itself through memory and perception, by referring to Richard Shusterman's ideas regarding somaesthetic reflection (2008), Bergson's description of the structure of memory (2004), Paul Ricouer's link between memory and imagination (2006) and Gilles Deleuze's ideas regarding difference and repetition (2013). I also refer to theoretician Estelle Barrett and her ideas regarding “situated knowledge” (2010: 4-5) as a way to frame the subjective and personal nature of my artistic enquiry, regarding my equivalence of OCD. Within this thesis I place emphasis on art practice as a method of research and describe the processes I have used to explore my OCD and make manifest my equivalence. I refer to Clare Bishop’s (2005) phenomenological description of installation art and mimetic engulfment within this process as I consider them methods to reveal my equivalence, by making manifest the relationship between my memory and my perception, both of which are embodied experiences within my OCD. I discuss Ross G. Menzies and Padmal de Silva’s (2004) clinical definitions and descriptions of obsession, compulsion, memory deficit and checking, in addition to phenomenological and pragmatic ideas, regarding memory and perception, as a way to articulate my proposition that equivalence of my OCD is constructed of a interdependent relationship between two embodied experiences, which can be revealed through art practice. My research contributes to new knowledge as it suggests a new way of understanding OCD by employing a multi-disciplined approach to practice-led research.

Die Künstlerin Channa Horwitz (1932–2013, Los Angeles) wurde vor allem durch ihre komplexen Notationssysteme bekannt. Ihre Werke werden häufig im Spannungsfeld der Minimal Art und der Conceptual Art verortet. Die von ihr verwendeten Medien erstrecken sich über Zeichnungen, Installationen bis zu Performances. Horwitz arbeitet mittels dieser unterschiedlichen Darstellungsmodi an einer universellen Sprache, die von anderen künstlerischen Disziplinen als Anleitung interpretiert und somit in Tanz, Lyrik, Musik oder in eine Installation umgesetzt werden können. Das wichtigste Motiv ihrer künstlerischen Arbeit ist das Aufzeichnen von Bewegung innerhalb eines Zeitraumes. Hierzu entwickelt Sie verschiedene Spielarten, die Horwitz häufig in Buchform herausgibt. Der Akt des Aufschlagens und des Umblätterns eröffnen der Künstlerin neue Möglichkeiten, über die Präsentation ihrer Notationen nachzudenken. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welche Konsequenz das Format des Leporellos für Horwitz’ künstlerische Praxis hat und wie ihre Notationen durch das Format archiviert werden.