The 2nd Earl of Arundel was the first English collector to imitate directly Italian Renaissance collections, creating sculpture displays in Arundel House and its gardens in the 1640s which became famous throughout Europe . Translated into the quasi-domestic context, classical sculpture represented the veneration of the cultural and political mores of ancient Rome and Greece, the props and justification of political power, but could also be portrayed as an inspirational 'body of history' augmenting civic culture, as 'national treasure' and exemplars for the improvement of the arts, carrying the onus of granting opportunities for their public consumption . Arundel 's displays were piously recreated, at Wilton House, Easton Neston and the University of Oxford, but subsequent collectors adopted the Palladian format, based on Roman architectural vocabulary, as the convention for display until c.1760 . Dependent on symmetry and niche architecture, Palladian displays required full-length statues, or copies and casts of the best works in the antique canon. Outside the context of the 'atrium '/entrance hall. where busts and statues could stand as putative ancestors, sculpture continued to hold the same resonances, but in these controlled and formalised settings its significance could be diminished to that of grand furniture. The more intensive antiquarianism of the Enlightenment gradually eclipsed such resonances. From the 1760s, tastes broadened to encompass the works of Piranesi, inscriptions, funerary sculpture, and non-classical antiquities, placed in 'Museum' room displays . In the last full-blown aristocratic galleries, at Castle Howard, Woburn, Petworth and Chatsworth, between 1800-c.1840, marble antiquities were juxtaposed with modern sculpture, to convey a political message, or as antique exemplars. The cachet of ownership increased: Charles Townley's reputation was entirely vested in his antique marbles; his housemuseum at Park Street acquired a quasi-public status, becoming the model for the first public sculpture galleries, when his marbles were bought by the British Museum.

This thesis sets out to critically reposition contemporary figurative sculpture through a re- articulation of the hero. It starts by identifying the removal of the human figure in minimal art and with notions of objectivity, repetition and indifference. Here I argue against Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Rosalind E. Krauss, by claiming that there is a necessity to reflect upon the sculptural object and the subject beyond that which is produced by the principles outlined by these artists and critics. Working through readings of Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, Hannah Arendt, Bernard Stiegler, Jacques Lacan and others, the argument establishes the contingency and polemics of the term hero, the way it pertains to the introduction of the new and how it coalesces action and narrative with constant negotiation. Using the philosophy of Richard Rorty as a scaffold, I propose in turn that the hero constitutes a necessary idealism for improving vocabularies, and along with Bruno Latour’s position on composition, that this can be translated into figurative sculpture as a dialectical becoming-object. Additionally, the problem of knowing what constitutes a subject of heroism is associated with the formation of an ethical subject. I conclude, in contrast to Simon Critchley and Jacques Derrida, that this subject can be articulated using the hero strategically as a conceit. I also suggest that, as such, it can be realized through the work of figurative sculpture and the agonist space it produces. Alongside this, the thesis rethinks the materiality associated with figuration in terms of construction, and elaborates on the importance of the hero to the post-mannequin condition of figurative sculpture based on how it combines invention with political determination. This is further examined by looking at the work of Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison and Mark Manders, and especially at the practice-based component of this thesis.

This thesis constitutes a piece of practice-led research: its principal research aim is to reflect on, analyse, and explore the conceptual, cultural, and artistic framework within which the offered artworks stand. The introduction is designed to provide an overview of both the central ideas to be discussed and the methodology to be deployed. It will also offer a snapshot of the structure of the text as a whole. As I will indicate, both method and content can be approached via a common guiding form: that of the fixed bind or knot. I will begin by introducing those concepts as they apply both to my own works and to those with which I have brought them into relation. My central concern is with the way in which the imagination forms connections and associations, the way objects or visions are gathered together in the imagination, and the way in which such ties might form knots, might amass or fix within them. I use the terms ‘binds’ and ‘bonds’ to refer to all such relations: to investigate these binds is to investigate the architecture of the imagination. My aim is to explore the way in which the structure of such binds might be present or affirmed in a physical object. In this context, the sculptures I have submitted can thus be understood as points of consolidation, points around which imagination amasses, and points at which binds accrue and abide: they are forms wrought and fixed, but not motionless, in the imagination. In this sense, from a theoretical perspective, to reflect on the sculptures is to reflect on what it means for objects or visions to bind and fixate in the imagination and for sculptors to realise them. For example, the first sculpture arises from attempting to make a seamless and ongoing circle of rope from lengths of hair. Here a material that stops once unbound from the head is repeatedly knotted. The longer binds thereby arise through a process of perpetual repetition in seeking to form a perfect bind; I juxtapose this vision of repetition with, for example, Kierkegaard’s work on that concept in order to analyse the nature of such a joint and impulse. As I have introduced the term, ‘binds’ therefore carries a double weight; it refers both to the structure of the imagination and to the sculptural connections that affirm it. The primary aim of this thesis is to investigate the interplay between these two aspects in both my own work and in that of a number of authors and artists.