Cette thèse propose de revenir sur des questionnements majeurs dans l'histoire de nos représentations en portant un regard évolutionniste sur des thèmes tels que l'art et l'anatomie. L’art du corps et l'art du visage, regroupés sous une pellicule désespécée, c'est-à-dire une proposition d'hommes et d’animaux aux épidermes fragiles et douloureux. Le terme « désespécé » émane du vocabulaire beckettien, une signature en parfaite corrélation avec mon univers plastique. Ma picturalité s'apparente à un puzzle d'organes et d'ossements, des « tas » qui se mettent à vivre grâce à l'organologie sciences irraisonnée ou non raisonnable sous mon pinceau qui ignore ce qu'elle deviendra. Qu'est-ce qui exprime au mieux le devenir d'un corps, ses limites, ses modulations ? Il faut rechercher ceci dans la matière première. Seul moyen de mettre en tension les choses écrites et peintes pour les faire exister. Le chemin de l'homme désespécé s'est tracé sur ces terres guerrières dont l'artiste a su en saisir l'écho pictural. La trace s'est faite empreinte, l'empreinte s'est faite peinture au service de la mémoire. Des papes hurlants en passant par les enfants de chœur contristés jusqu'aux gueules cassées, il n'y avait qu'un pas. L'homme universel avec l'union des disciplines que sont l'histoire, l'art et la chirurgie. / This doctoral dissertation aims at renewing the exploration of the major questions in the history of our representations. It adopts an evolutionary perspective on topics such as art and anatomy.The art of the body and the art of the face of men and animals, having both lost any resemblance to their species are perceived only through their painful and fragile skins: they have become “désespécé”, to quote Beckett; a reference that takes on its meaning from a plastic perspective.My work consists in a puzzle of organs and bones, "heaps" that come alive through organology, an irrational or unreasonable science under my brush that has no preconceived idea of what it will ultimately become. What best expresses the fate of a body, its limits, its modulations? Only the raw material can provide an answer. The only means of creating a tension between the written and the painted things to make them come to life.The path of the “désespécé” man goes through these warlike lands whose pictorial echoes the artist was able to capture. Men and animals left footprints which were then printed in the canvas to keep alive that memory. From howling popes to grieving choirboys, the next step were these broken faces. A universal human being bringing together such disciplines as history, art and surgery.

This thesis is a comparison between the work of Tracey Karima Emin and He Chengyao in global contemporary art of East and West. My original contribution to knowledge is, firstly, this comparative research of Emin and Chengyao, secondly, to demonstrate how and why their work constitutes an ontological identification relationship between subjectivity and art practice that exhibits three aspects of Emin and Chengyao’s subjectivity: performativity, visibility, and univocity, and thirdly, to claim and to offer an exposition of how and why their naked self-portraiture is a new nude. I argue that an ‘ontological identification relationship’ occurs when their subjectivity merges with art practice, where an intimate relationship between artist and work is established in which the being of the artist is deeply imbued with the being of the artwork: there is an ontological relationship between them when they identify themselves with art practice and work. After explicating the thesis in the introduction, the ontological identification relationship between artist and work is addressed in chapter one, which unfolds the reasons why their ontology of being embodies the three aspects of Emin and Chengyao’s subjectivity. Chapter two is devoted to the first aspect of subjectivity, performativity, which will draw from Butler’s idea of performativity. Juxtaposing their artwork will exhibit how their naked self-portraits draw our attention to their female subjectivity, the lack of female subjectivity in global art practice, and to question a patriarchal society in the twentieth-twenty first century. Emin and Chengyao’s work not only refracts as a new kind of nude to resist the male dominated aesthetic realm but to attempt to address a female lack in the artistic realm. The third chapter explicates the second aspect of subjectivity: visibility, analysing particular works of Emin and Chengyao that exhibit how visibility discloses invisibility. Their subjectivity in artwork exhibits a personal history in the public sphere, which invites interpretation not only from a local audience but also a global one. The invisible to the visible is a journey of becoming through an actualisation of subjectivity within art practice. Actualising subjectivity as female artists is reflecting on the self ontologically; it is a way of being with one’s body and art as one, and a way of making sense of things. Chapter four addresses the third aspect of subjectivity, ‘Univocity of Faceless Bodies,’ which parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of bodies without organs (BWO) for univocity, and explicates why ‘faceless bodies’ is a crucial feminist depiction of the female body. They draw our attention to a lack of subjectivity in univocity, but a univocity that is not universality.

This project explicitly addresses the persistent question of the monochrome. I want to develop several figures of thought such as inscription, erasure and trace in order to examine new ways in which this question might find fresh trajectories of formulation. Historically, the monochrome has attracted discussions related to the autonomy of painting, the circularity of process, chromatic purity, repetition, limits, transcendence, the beyond of representation. The project does not aim to formulate the question of the identity of contemporary abstraction but instead explore the questions related to abstraction’s temporality. The monochrome appears to resist a pure art historical discourse because of the way that it has always been close to a speculative drive within philosophical aesthetics. In this regard I wish to test this relationship between ways of mediating the visual in terms of language and the schemas assumed by the modulation of the ‘seeable’ into the ‘sayable’. Jacques Derrida is an important figure for my research in terms of his thinking about the trace and the play of absence and presence. These concepts will be engaged with alongside accounts of the monochrome in contemporary art history. This intellectual project is anchored by the relationship to my own studio practice, which involves an overlapping of elements that are added and dismantled until a definitive form is achieved. The physical nature of the materials is, thus, central to the activity. Materials are added and removed; the latter process is frequently the more important. The surface is worked through a restrained process of making, trading one factor against another until a resolution becomes possible. By working with increased physicality, plus highly calibrated or austere means, the ambition is then to engage the viewer as a total sentient being as opposed to a receiver of images. The work thus resists the conventions that govern the presentation of image-based paintings and this implies the possibility that the work creates other schemas of both place and temporality.

The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object. This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time. Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry. 4 The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.

The thesis formulates a theory of Gypsy visuality based on the identification of key elements within Gypsy visual arts, crafts and décor. This is achieved through the analysis of Romany artefacts using the combined theories of anthropologist Alfred Gell (1945-1997) and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). The research highlights the social significance of Gypsy visual culture and argues its potential impact upon Romany/non-Romany social relations. Findings in relation to Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus: Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus has limited potential for application in its current form due to the lack of a method with which to analyse artefacts themselves. The links between Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus and Peirce’s Semeiotic theory have been strengthened during this research. Combining Gell’s theory with elements from Peirce’s Semeiotic theory increases the potential application of both methods by offering both social and semeiotic interpretations of the artefact. This combined method generates findings that offer a more precise account of the distribution of social agency via the artefact than Gell’s original theory allows. A combined Gellian and Peircean method of analysing artefacts makes Gell’s notion of agency more widely available for application by artists. Implications in relation to Gypsy visuality: By using a combined Gellian and Peircean analysis I have established some significant recurrent elements that constitute Gypsy visuality for the first time. These elements include; flashiness, allure, enchantment, entrapment, ornament, diversion, discordance, contingency, functionality, performance, community, family, home, traditional skills, wildlife, countryside and gender. The constituent elements of Gypsy visuality both reflect and inform Gypsy culture. This new understanding of Gypsy visuality offers a new understanding of the social relations that surround Gypsy culture. Gypsy visuality both reflects and informs the behaviour of Gypsy communities and in so doing articulates a set of relations that characterise Gypsy social agency. Implications in relation to art practice: Using painting as method to research Gypsy visuality in its constituent elements has generated new interpretations of Gypsy visuality. These are; Western art practices, glamour, interruption, disorientation and reflection. These new interpretations allow new access to the meanings inherent in Gypsy visuality and therefore new access to the meanings inherent in Gypsy culture.

This thesis investigates the panel paintings produced in the Riminese context in the first half of the Trecento. These altarpieces, crosses and devotional panels have been widely dispersed, fragmented and decontextualised over the centuries, and this study reunites the panels and investigates the unusual iconographical traits and distinctive formats employed. The introduction looks at previous discussions of the panels and at the available documentary evidence. It also discusses the historical context in which the panels were produced. The first chapter re-examines the relationship of Giotto to Rimini and to the Riminese painters by investigating the nature of Giotto's work in Rimini, at the beginning of the Trecento, and how this work influenced local panel painting in the following decades. The second chapter investigates the surviving visual evidence and analyses the forms of iconography, and the types of visual language, utilised by the Riminese painters. The chapter also investigates, in detail, specific images employed by the painters. It reveals that the narrative image was predominant, whereas iconic imagery tended to be subordinated, and highlights the dual impact of Byzantine and modern Italian iconography. The third chapter investigates the group of extant painted crosses from the area around Rimini and proposes that the Franciscan Order was instrumental in the popularity of the painted cross in the region. The fourth chapter discusses the extant altarpieces and attempts to contextualise these fragmented works. It investigates the development of the Riminese altarpiece, from dossal to polyptych, with particular reference to the unusual formats employed in the structures. The final chapter investigates the Riminese devotional panels and links the iconographies with the female mystics of the early Trecento, as well as the Franciscan Spirituals of the Marches. The impact of Adriatic trade on the devotional panels is discussed in terms of the powerful influence of imports from Byzantium, such as mosaic and ivory icons.

This research project asks how a consideration of Greek herm sculpture can be put to use in exploring prosthetic conditions of painting. This question is addressed through a series of essays and a body of studio-based art work, undertaken at the RCA from 2010 to 2015. The written submission contains a series of interconnected essays, through which prosthetic conditions of painting are explored via Greek herm sculpture, in order to reassess the work of contemporary and historical painter’s practices. The first chapter looks to a history of herm sculpture, focusing on the roles it has performed around the age of Alcibiades, of Athens 4 B.C. This assessment is aided by Michel Foucault’s notion of askesis and Pierre Hadot’s work on spiritual exercises. They enable a shift, from understanding the herm as a physical object to the historical roles it has performed in Greek culture — as a desecrated object, boundary-marker, object of ritual and, via its connection to hermes, a means of interpretation, bodily passage and transition. I address a collection of essays ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’, by Italo Calvino, and his connection to The Workshop for Potential Literature (Oulipo), in order to understand the use of literary restraints as exercises which offer a preliminary guide to how the herm can be used in this project. Through Foucault, Hadot and Calvino, the herm transitions from object to an askesis — undertaking tasks that perform in essays and paintings. The subsequent essays focus on the work of Lynda Benglis, Orlan, Caravaggio, François Boucher and Imi Knoebel, addressed through contemporary thinkers that undertake considerations of the prosthetic. The intersection of material culture studies, feminist theory, disabilities studies and poststructuralism, offer a view to the prosthetic that creates a platform for a reconsideration of these artists’ work. The herm becomes a silent guide in this project, understanding the prosthetic as imbedded in ideas of the relational — sensitive to the way in which body and paint, silicone and skin can adjoin, supplant, intersect, enhance and compensate, between subjects and objects. By inserting the prosthetic into narratives that question the relationships between bodies, objects and surfaces in these artist’s work — and in asking what they can produce — this project explores and articulates prosthetic conditions of painting.

‘Uncompanionable’ is the word Leo Steinberg used to describe the female figures in Pablo Picasso’s paintings of the early forties. This project demonstrates a series of attempts to imagine acts of companionship in an area of tension between art history and fine art, which it constructs anew. The object I’ve most tried to companion is the reproduction of a small portrait picture, Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), which developed from work surrounding his celebrated political mural, Guernica. The effort of companionship makes a fool of me and I take my fool as methodology, understood as a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done. A key principle of my fool is a logic of encounter in which what’s conscientiously sought gives way to something else that emerges, repeats, insists; it is to this level of experience that my project addresses itself. For my fool’s procedures, I turn to a number of others, including Picasso’s lover in 1937, the photographer and painter Dora Maar (of whom Weeping Woman is a portrait) who made her own enigmatic companion to Weeping Woman, a half-painted copy known as Woman in a Red Hat; and psychoanalysis, whose own development might be seen as a sustained effort to companion the seemingly uncompanionable in the human subject. I’ve engaged with the PhD as an educational site through which to expose and reconstitute previous moments in my education as an artist and art historian. Reaching back to my childhood bedroom, the project opens to a reproduction of Weeping Woman in one of two art books I owned in my pre- to early teens, around 1986 to 1992. The other book is a monograph on Dürer, open at plate 38, Melencolia I (1514). Rather than becoming involved in this image’s details, my fool turns from it towards the field of melancholy, ultimately coming to the art historical literature of the eighties and early nineties that derogated melancholy as a pathological attitude to the end of painting, and which informed the discourse of art history to which I was exposed as an undergraduate student. My fool speculates as to whether painting’s sickness might have been misdiagnosed and the search for a cure misguided; following psychoanalytic insights, a slightly different problem for painting is proposed, one that Dora Maar’s copy of Picasso’s Weeping Woman is seen as a response to. The bedroom setting, two images, and several historical moments, cross the painting Weeping Woman with what is experienced as uncompanionable in me. This is a kind of pleasure, felt as both strange and intimate, which I take in this and other modernist paintings, and which my work continues to circle. Given this pleasure troubles as much as supports the working ‘I’, the project adopts the first person as the preferred pronoun of my fool and bearer of its principal problems. Here, by way of the lacunary autobiographical subject, art history and fine art find their interaction, not in fusional plenitude but in restive exchanges that precipitate a series of blind fields.

This study is an attempt to reexamine prevailing views concerning the question of politioal power during the first three and a half decades of the fourth/tenth century Abbisid caliphate.

Zielsetzung des im Rahmen vom WWTF geförderten Projektes "Creative Industries in Vienna" durchgeführten Forschungsvorhabens ist es, die Entwicklung der Kunst als soziales System und Medium der Kommunikation in Europa und in Wien exemplarisch herauszuarbeiten. Damit wird der vorherrschende CI-Diskurs um eine systemtheoretische Perspektive erweitert. Im hier präsentierten Vorbericht werden die dafür aufbereiteten theoretischen Ausgangspositionen, Fragestellungen und Zielsetzungen dargestellt. Zu diesem Zweck wird zunächst in der Einleitung das Gesamtprojekt im internationalen CI-Diskurs verortet und der Mainstream der Diskussion aus systemtheoretischer Perspektive in Frage gestellt. Die Entscheidung, einen systemtheoretischen Zugang zu wählen, wird bereits in der Einleitung begründet und durch die Gliederung der Gesamtarbeit vorgestellt. Im Kapitel 1. Theorie wird die angewandte Theorie der sozialen Systeme im Kontext des sogenannten radikalen Konstruktivismus verortet und die übergeordnete Fragestellung der Zusammenhänge von Kunst Politik und Wirtschaft aus systemtheoretischer Perspektive aufbereitet. Im abschließenden Kapitel zur sogenannten Habermas-Luhmann-Kontroverse wird schließlich die Entscheidung für die Systemtheorie noch einmal veranschaulicht und reflektiert. / Series: Creative Industries in Vienna: Development, Dynamics and Potentials