This thesis examines the manifestation of ‘presence’ in contemporary sculpture and the nature of the viewer’s encounter. In particular, it investigates the ways in which inert materials are transformed into objects that appear to possess life. Presence has been considered in terms of the image in different media; however, this thesis shows that a work does not have to be figurative for presence to be evoked. Through a detailed investigation of individual artworks, each of the chapters explores different ways in which presence manifests itself. The identification of diverse examples across time and place reveals unexpected similarities between modes of presence observed in ancient and religious sculpture and the practices of making and viewing art in the contemporary sculptural encounter. The thesis examines the shared agency between artist and materials, and how this manifests itself as presence; how presence operates when the site and the viewer become part of the work; and how materials are activated through specific beliefs or through an intervention made to their form or context. It aims to show that these different layers are interconnected and that together they determine the nature of presence.

The point of departure of this dissertation is a few words extracted from “Agesilaus Santander,” an autobiographical fragment Walter Benjamin wrote in 1933 while in exile on Ibiza. The first version reads: “...I came into the world under the sign of Saturn, the star of hesitation and delay ...” He later revised the latter clause to: “the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays...” Through processes of suspension, obstruction and potentiality implied by ‘delay,’ ‘hesitation,’ and ‘detour’ as ‘methods’ of thinking through art, this thesis revisits aspects of Benjamin’s understanding of time, history, origin and the artwork through conditional readings of selected contemporary artworks. Specifically, I am interested in understanding certain contemporary art and theoretical practices as modalities of resistance to modernist art historical and critical frameworks. In this tactical resistance, immanent in Benjamin’s reading of modernity, ‘delay,’ ‘hesitation’ and ‘detour’ are seen as characteristic of a form of critical thinking through and about art and history. ‘Hesitation,’ ‘delay’ and ‘detour’ are then understood as unconventional ‘methods’ that seek to break away from prescribed, or disciplinary, pathways of reading and interpreting works of art. In order to explore these general issues, I sketch out critical constellations for three artworks, each of which both engages and resists pedagogical structures and processes. This underlying pedagogical theme is signposted by the titles of the three chapters: I. “Lecture: ... of delay in Robert Morris’s 21.3, (1964/1994)”; II. “Study: ...of hesitation in Bethan Huws’s Origin and Source I-VI, (1997)”; and III. “Essay: ...of detour in The Otilith Group’s Otilith III, (2009).” I offer ‘slow,’ conditional readings of the particularities and relational contexts of these works, re-inscribing Benjamin’s creative approach to critical research work embedded in the processes of both making and writing through art. Since my approach is tempered by structures of incompletion and indeterminacy embodied by delay, hesitation and detour, I address questions concerning the borders of the process of ‘reading’ artworks and of categorizing both the ‘artwork’ and the ‘artist’ as bounded conceptual unities. My engagement with these questions signifies both a resistance to and an opening out of the limits of representation.

Through a new idea of ‘the art of decolonisation’, this thesis explores the possibility of socially engaged art in the postcolonial context of East Asia. Japan, throughout its national history as an expanding empire from the late 19th century to the Second World War, has left a large number of unresolved legacies of colonialism in East Asia. These problematic legacies had remained almost intact within the architecture of Cold War, the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, formed immediately following WWII. After the collapse of the Cold War structure in the late 1980s, then, the task of ‘decolonisation’ has become extremely pressing in East Asia. This thesis aims to unearth the potential contribution of art to the incomplete project of decolonisation, with its emphasis on, first, its visual and sensory nature and, second, the significance of ‘participation’ and ‘collaboration’ as method. The first part of this thesis is an art-historical and cultural studies investigation of discursive practices of decolonisation in East Asia and Britain. It accompanies a theoretical reconsideration of the concept of ‘decolonisation’ and a historical reflection of the postcolonial statuses of these regions. The second part is a practice-based investigation on art’s potentiality in tackling postcolonial issues in East Asia. It discusses and analyses my own art projects conducted in Japan and Korea between 2014 and 2016. ii This thesis will help advance decolonisation of knowledge in two directions. The contribution to knowledge of this thesis is twofold. First, it expands the notion of ‘socially engaged art’ theorised in the West by examining works and projects in East Asia in conjunction with a geo-historical setting of the non-Western world. This will contribute to the development of the scholarship critical to Euro-American centrism, dominant in Cultural Studies, in understanding non-Western art. Second, it proposes applied methods integrating artistic practice for addressing the contentious agendas that stem from colonial historiography of East Asia. This will lead us to a viable methodology that might open up alternative pathways toward more reconciled postcolonial relations among East Asian countries and regions.

Through painting, drawing, photography and digital design, I have investigated the relationship between, on the one hand, my fine art practice—with its interest in postcolonial African and diaspora identities (or, ‘Africana’)—and on the other hand, works at The Tate Gallery—with its remit to hold the National Collection of British Art. By interrogating iconological ‘conditions of existence’ for works by Fehr, Sargent and Brock, I created new artworks that indicated hidden (or, ‘fugitive’) African connections with the intention of disrupting complacent assumptions and reimagining unacknowledged (or, ‘masked’) themes. I considered concepts of Africa: described by Mudimbe as ‘discursive formations’ (after Foucault) and embodying postcolonial, transracial identities; in addition, I addressed the problematics of Tate’s British Art collection as a post-imperial brand of ‘cultural capital’. Unmasking fugitive Africana was a practical methodology designed to produce artworks. So,while aware of many theoretical interlocutors, I pursued a convoluted, sometimes intuitive path through the creative process by making drawings, digital designs, photographs and paintings. Nonetheless, Stuart Hall’s framework of an ‘oppositional code’ was key and so I suggest that, as practiced by artists, ‘unmasking Africana’ might be an inherently counter-hegemonic,critical project. My investigation embodied technical and conceptual problematics of critical enquiry as a mode of studio practice. I explored unmasking methodologies through reading, observation,reflection and painterly, synthesised appropriations—also witnessing an evolution in my imagery, from iconographically layered compositions to works in which identities and motifs seemed to fuse. As well as the studio investigation and writing, my project had a pedagogic element. In a series of seminars, I taught MA students at C.C.W. Graduate School the preliminary findings of my research. My interviews with students produced evaluations about their learning, which I later disseminated as part of UAL’s programme to reduce disparities between white and B.A.M.E. British undergraduate students.

This is a practice–based PhD that seeks to contest limited and reductive tropes of female representation in a contemporary Western context. The focus of the thesis is on video art, which, I argue, can be both a radical tool for deconstructing dominant mainstream images of femininity and play a role in developing progressive re–presentations of female subjectivities. This thesis argues that there is a need to revisit feminist artworks from the 1970s and 1980s, the critical potential of which remains under–examined. Video as an artistic medium emerged during the late 1960s to 1980s over the same period that the women’s liberation movement gained momentum and achieved historic societal and legislative change in the West. Women artists used the medium of video as a means to contest the representational economy of traditional gender roles that placed a broad array of limitations upon women. The camera apparatus allowed women to control the production of their own image, articulate their subjective experiences and directly address the spectator. The re–imaging of female subjectivities progressed by feminist artists was, however, largely halted by the backlash against feminism in the 1990s. The issues raised by feminism, particularly in relation to female representation, therefore remain unresolved. This thesis argues that artistic strategies deployed by feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s, underpinned by the radical principle ‘the personal is political’, which emerged in the 1970s, are still useful today. Through in depth analysis of selected video works from the 1970s onwards as well as reflection on my own art practice research, this thesis investigates how formal strategies employed by feminist artists can operate to undermine the status quo of hegemonic gender representations and to propose new potentialities of female subjectivities and gender identities.

The current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account. How can artists address social politics when the politics of art remain opaque? Artists situated critically within the museum self-consciously acknowledge the institutional frame and their own complicity with it. Artists’ compromised role within the institution of art obscures their radically opposed values. Institutions are conservative hierarchies that aim to augment and consolidate their authority. How can works of art be liberating when the institutional conditions within which they are exhibited are exclusive, compromised and exploitive? Despite their purported neutrality, art institutions instrumentalise art politically and ideologically. Institutional mediation defines the work of art in the terms of its own ideology, controlling the legitimate discourse on value and meaning in art. In a society where everything is instrumentalised and heteronomously defined, autonomous art performs a social critique. Yet how is it possible to make autonomous works of art when they are instantly recuperated by commercial and ideological interests? At a certain point, my own art practice could no longer sustain these contradictions. This thesis researches the possibilities for a sustainable and uncompromised art practice. If art is the critical alternative to society then it must function critically and alternatively. Artistic ambition is not just a matter of aesthetic objectives or professional anxiety; it is particularly a matter of the values that artists affirm through their practice. Art can define its own terms of production and the burden of responsibility falls on artists. The Exploding Cinema Collective has survived independently for twenty years, testifying to this principle. Autonomy is a valuable tool in the critique of heteronomy, but artists must assert it. The concept of the autonomy of art must be replaced with the concept of the autonomy of the artist.

The focus of this research is the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for a number of British publications between c. 1893 and 1917. The thesis seeks to identify and analyse the corpus of his previously unexamined work, positioning it in relation to contemporaneous media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the early development of the British comic. This thesis seeks to establish the key role that Yeats played in the early development of the form, during a key phase in its evolution. The claims that the thesis makes for Yeats as an important comic strip artist are based on extensive archival research, focused on comics such as Comic Cuts, The Big Budget and The Halfpenny Comic published in London by Alfred Harmsworth, Arthur Pearson and George Newnes respectively. He went through a number of identifiable phases in terms of his graphic style, producing a very substantial volume of work over the course of his career, largely in the form of series of strips featuring recurring characters, a number of which became very popular with the reading public. Yeats has almost exclusively been discussed in terms of his fame as a fine artist, despite the fact that his comics work was widely disseminated during his lifetime. Given that the work was once well known, as part of a novel and widely circulated mass medium, it is necessary to interrogate the absence of this material from art-historical accounts of his work and reassess Yeats as a comic strip artist. In Ireland there has been a tendency to articulate Yeats in terms of national identity, and thus avoid recognition of his engagement with, and contribution to, British popular culture. Issues regarding the mutual exclusivity of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural registers in which he operated has likewise resulted in the valorization of a particular area of his creative activity and the exclusion of the material acknowledged, discussed, and celebrated here. The repositioning of Yeats in relation to comic strip art has profound implications for the study of twentieth century Irish art generally, and for Yeats connoisseurship specifically, and proposes significant challenges to both, as well as making a contribution to British comics history.

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.

My body of work involves photographic and video explorations around the concept that cinema has a great influence over who we are as a culture and as individuals. I use the tableaux technique to illustrate the archetypal language of film through fictional film stills. Congruously, I use video to interject myself into scenes from movies, referencing the way viewers mentally project themselves into movies as they watch them. I am interested in decoding visual stereotypes promoted by cinema through the lens of my own experience with movies.

The following thesis applies theories and findings from cognitive psychology to notions of pictorial address and seriality in art. It is interdisciplinary and practice-led, culminating in a written outcome and a portfolio of creative work. The thesis suggests a model for the exchange of ideas within experimental psychology, art practice and art theory. The research evaluates historical and theoretical notions of pictorial address in light of concepts within visual cognition. Theories of address often refer to the temporal, spatial and postural qualities of art spectatorship. Here they are aligned with relevant psychological concepts including gist extraction, spatial representation and embodied simulation in order to make the underlying perceptual and cognitive processes explicit. There is an emphasis on seriality as a mode of address and pictorial artworks that comprise multiple discrete but related instances displayed together. Two case studies consider the serial output of Claude Monet and Andy Warhol in terms of cognitive theories of concept formation and exposure effects, respectively. The direct impact of features of seriality on the viewer in each case is discussed relative to existing art theory and established art historical narratives. The thesis culminates with presentation and discussion of the portfolio of creative work that both informed and was informed by the theoretical research. The outcomes comprise paintings, drawings, photography and mixed media installation that explore properties of variation, repetition and relational knowledge within pictorial address.