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This PhD project aims to investigate the use of social formats in the realm of sculpture and consists of a theoretical reflection on my artistic practice. Since 2008, I run a company called PaintSyndicate, which produces oil paintings in the People's Republic of China. This thesis is an attempt to explain how setting up and running a company can be considered as sculptural practice. Within this research, PaintSyndicate stands exemplarily for my practice and serves as rationale and context. Sculpture today is an ambivalent term describing specifically three-dimensional, artistic objects in the tradition of the statue, while a somehow expanded concept of sculpture is used as an umbrella term to cover a wide range of spatial related art. My argument aims to contribute to a conceptual clarification and develops alongside two main references: firstly, Rosalind Krauss' 'Sculpture in the Expanded Fie/d', as a main reference in a 'post-formalist' discourse, and secondly, Joseph Beuys' 'Social Sculpture', as an example for an expansion of the concept of sculptw-e in the practical realm. Using Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, I define sculpture as social system, considering space as the medium of sculpture and sculptural form as an arrangement of spatial relations. Such a definition of sculptural form shifts the focus from materiality or programmatic tasks to the observer's understanding of space. During the last century, the conception of space has undergone fundamental changes, from being defined as an absolute value, to the existence of a plurality of 'species of space' today. If sculptural form is the result of an engagement of sculptor and space, the existence of multiple 'species of space' corresponds to the actual variety in sculptural form. In this context, my research aims to contribute to a reconsideration of sculpture as a category of contemporary art practice.

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This study explores a liminal, brightly coloured substance - red coral - through its trade and its uses in the early to mid-Qing China, 1644-1795. During the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, Mediterranean Corallium rubrum was employed as an expression of the self-representation, cultural identity and political organisation of the Qing imperial court. Indeed, red coral, shanhu, was one of the few European commodities to be welcomed in China, where it was regarded as a 'national treasure' . This examination focuses on the use of red coral by evoking a Qing 'period eye', with reference to past Chinese dynasties. It investigates the historic incentives for the appreciation and value of coral and looks at how earlier beliefs, attitudes and uses of this unusual substance influenced the material culture of the Qing dynasty. The first part explores the nature of red coral, its trade, processing and crafting. It follows 'The Coral Network' recreating the journey taken by coral via the various nodes, from the Mediterranean to Beijing. Coral was crafted in Italy, Guangzhou and the imperial workshops, zaobanchu. The second section explores the court of the Qing emperors. As 'son of heaven', they were the centre around which the Chinese empire was arranged. Here, David Summers' ideas about centrality are employed as a means to help understand the status of red coral as a mysterious, metamorphic red material, in addition to its significance in combination with pearls and with turquoise in imperial regalia. The value and agency accrued by red coral is examined through an exploration of coral's colour and materiality, and the uses and layers of associations placed upon these. This study of red coral in Qing China utilises objects, texts and visual representations to suggest new ways of considering shanhu as a distinctively coloured prized in both religious and official Chinese material.

New British Sculpture, as it became known, dominated the international art world throughout the 1980s, following the public debut of a group of young British sculptors at the Venice Biennale in 1982. Shown at major art events such as Documenta, Bas/e, and the Sao Paulo Biennale, the work subsequently toured Europe, Japan, Australia and America, entering museum and private collections, and placing Britain firmly at the forefront of international artistic developments. This thesis focuses on how this grouping of sculptors, trained in the British art schools in the difficult economic and cultural climate of the 1970s, emerged in the early 1980s to become the dominant artists of the decade. In particular, the primary aim is to identify the processes through which they gained visibility and the various conditions and support systems that facilitated their emergence from the late 1970s, at a time when Italian and German painting dominated Europe, and Britain was recovering from an economic recession. Although much has been written on New British Sculpture, there is currently no study that critically examines the history of the construction of this grouping, its roots in the British art world of the 1970s and its emergence in Europe and America in the early 1980s.

This ‘by practice’ research project explored the function of back-story in contemporary sculptural art. It was driven by an ongoing artistic practice and resulted in a series of new artworks accompanied by an analytical commentary. Gérard Genette’s concept of analepsis within narrative literature was taken as an initial theoretical framework to test to what extent it might be applied to sculpture. Analysis of selected works by Joseph Beuys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Doris Salcedo, artists who used back-story in the context of trauma, led to modifications of the theory to account for the relationship between artwork and its back-story, notably its expression in materials. The use of narrative in sculptural art to provide a storied reading acts in combination with the work’s biography, although the work remains non-narrative in form, even lacking a ‘main’ narrative. The study discusses the ways the selected artists disclosed their ‘authored’ back-story, through title, paratext, public biography and reiteration of themes within an oeuvre. Back-story invoked what Genette called retroception – compelling the viewer to look again from a different perspective. Here, the autonomy of the artwork from its back-story is upheld. However, I posit that reading the art work in conjunction with its back-story alters the viewers’ experience by offering a storied entry into the work, situating the viewer at the ‘right’ distance in terms of emotional connection, and extending the reading time allowing more complex meanings to emerge. Investigation through making was prioritised, conducted through a process of ‘improvisation’ that explored various storied connections within original glass sculptures. As a result of reflecting on the results of a traditional glass inclusion process in my work, a new approach surfaced which I call incorporation: the partial embedding of a material within another as it solidifies. This process is seen to embody the concept of retroception and signal the connection to back-story. The research contributes to knowledge by providing a framework for an understanding of back-story in contemporary sculptural practice; demonstrating how incorporation can evoke and embody back-story; and, creating a body of original work that provides material for further investigation of back-story.

This study, "Minimalist Sculpture: The Consequences of Artifice", was initially prompted by the wish to examine the case for a materialist approach to modern sculpture. Such an inquiry needed to address not only the substantiality of material and its process, but also the formative role of ideology on those choices of governing materials and procedures. The crux of this study began as, and remains, an inquiry into physical presence, and, by extension, the idea that Minimalist sculpture somehow returns the viewer to the viewer. At the core of any materialist position is the certainty that experience contains an element of passivity. If nothing exists but matter and its movements and modifications, then consciousness and volition depend entirely on material agency. The hierarchy of such a scheme underpins the socio-economic and cultural level with that of the biological, and, in turn, the biological with the physical. However, perception is not a matter of automatically recording external stimuli, but requires active elaboration. A hermeneutic process, therefore, is not one of unbridled pure thought; rather, it requires the recognition of an external and constant measure that gives form to thought. Recourse to the 'given' fact of an external reference, therefore, depends upon a relationship between materiality and signification-the resultant heuristic method of perceptual hypothesis that is established remains perpetually open to questioning. C.S. Peirce is invaluable to this study in providing a theoretical framework for these considerations. The manner in which modern sculpture was realized experienced a decisive change with the emergence of Minimalism. The dominant aesthetic of Vitalism was brought into question as never before by the materialist programme set in motion by Minimalism. The key issue of adherence to a Vitalist or Minimalist aesthetic is invaluable when clarifying the position of artists such as Tony Smith and Robert Smithson. Earlier sculptural forms generated by Constructivism utilized aspects of industrial mimesis but did not engage with sheer physicality to the extent that Minimalism did. One reason for this major difference was the consideration accorded to scale rather than size by the Minimalists. Such a consideration of scale and the experience of spatio-temporality, understood as inextricably part of the sculptural situation, gave rise to site-specificity and its ramifications as Minimalist concerns. Approximately the first third of this study examines Vitalism as the dominant and enduring theme and background for modern sculpture. Vitalism formed an inherited intellectual situation that was directly challenged by the materialism of the Minimalists. In the second part of the study, Barnett Newman and Constantin Brancusi provide the two central historical precedents for the re-introduction of the precinctual into contemporary sculpture. Newman's interest in place as a spatio-temporal experience, and his extension of the artwork to include the interstice between the viewer and the artwork was an extremely important step for Minimalism. Brancusi is of interest mainly for his addressing of temporality as a sculptural concern, and the relationship of material to place. 11 His early use of assemblage, as a method of drawing with materials in space, facilitated not only the Minimalists but also modern sculpture at large. A section of the study is devoted to the sculpture of Richard Serra and the idea of critical distance, something that he shares with Newman. This intellectual attitude aids Serra in his declaration of the space of sculpture as parallel to, and critical of, its context. The work of Robert Smithson is examined in the light of site-specificity and ubiety, and, in particular, his use of symbols as structural prompts. Smithson's dystopian Futurism is examined as a significant way of helping to draw the distinction between his intellectual position and that of a Vitalist. The study concludes with a consideration of contextualization in general, and of Maya Lin's site-specific memorial to the causalities of the Vietnam War. What has emerged from this study is that precinctual space was firmly re-established in contemporary sculptural practice by the Minimalist sculptors. I have used the term ubiety to describe the re-emphasis, and re-emergent awareness, of place as an interstitial space that was associated with the Minimalists. Ubiety is understood to be the condition of being in a particular place, and comes from the Latin 'where'. In contrast, ubiquity is the condition of being everywhere. In the light of ubiety, sculpture, particularly site-specific sculpture, is discussed and understood as a spatio-temporal event.