<p> Shirai Seiichi&rsquo;s education in the context of the interwar events influenced his path and molded him into a defender of idealism. Starting from the early evolution of his ideas, Shirai&rsquo;s significant concepts are outlined to show how they stood apart from and challenged the Japanese modernist debates over the architectural responses to war and industrialization. Examples of Shirai&rsquo;s early work along with surrounding historical events show how Shirai&rsquo;s perceptions of the use of space and its manifestation in architecture, based on Kantian ideas of a priori creation, contradicted orthodox modernist architectural theory and practice. Shirai&rsquo;s evolving theories and their impact on his design are introduced through his early training and related projects. However, it is his unrealized plan for the Genbakud? that is analyzed as primary evidence for the idea that Shirai was the only mid-twentieth century Japanese architect who could effectively express the sad destiny of the nuclear age. Last, specific examples of Shirai&rsquo;s mid to late career work to demonstrate how his conceptual framework evolved. Interviews, commentary, and theoretical analyses of his works show his unique trajectory and role in contrast to his modernist colleagues, and provide insight into Shirai&rsquo;s investigation into the universality and potential of the human spirit (fuhen no anima). Finally, recent discussion about constructing the Genbakud? based on Shirai&rsquo;s blueprints raise the idea that Shirai&rsquo;s early ideals are now ready to be presented in the post-modernist age.</p>

<p> This thesis analyzes Yinka Shonibare's appropriation of narratives to address identity-as-construct and develops a theoretical framework for interpreting his art using theories alternative to postmodernism and identity politics. I begin the analysis by citing Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault whose ideas have influenced Shonibare. Then I apply postpositivist realism and conceptual narrativity to Shonibare's work. These theories are intriguing because they offer a more complex and therefore more accurate way of viewing identity, allowing for a multiplicity of signifiers to form an individual's identity, not just one signifier such as race. Thus they account for the differences that explain individual reactions to shared experience within a group. This acknowledgement of differences frees people from category-based expectations such as Shonibare's tutor wanting to limit him, a Yoruba artist, to creating African-themed art. This incident was the catalyst for Shonibare's practice. Use of the alternative theories allows me to accomplish my objectives. </p>

<p> The field of artists' books is a realm in which a phenomenon is mapped and territorialized. This is based on the human necessity to map the world and have a better grasp of it. Additionally, it is constructed on the understanding of the history of the book&rsquo;s physicality as an important emblem in civilization. An artist&rsquo;s book is an isolated realm, both a map and a territory. It is closed in itself, and has its own rules and dynamics, yet carries varied affinities with the outside world.</p>

<p> The rise of social practice art in Europe and North America since the 1990s has provoked a variety of critical alignments and contestations around multi-authored "post-studio" artwork, aimed at collapsing the boundaries between visual and performing art, and between art and everyday life. One of the most visible and impassioned contestations has centered on the value assigned by different critics to so-called convivial and antagonistic directions for social practice art. This project enters the debate on collaborative and participatory art by highlighting the commonalities between the turn away from spectatorialism in philosophy and the politically-driven, activist social practices coming out of the visual arts. Contending that the more salient problems under debate revolve around what art historian Grant Kester has described as "a series of largely unproductive debates over the epistemological status of the work," I focus on the way different epistemological frames impact the reception of convivial and antagonistic directions in art. With attention to the theory and criticism of Clare Bishop, Grant Kester, Shannon Jackson and Tom Finkelpearl, I examine how a variety of epistemological frames both reflect the work's values around social change, and also impact the critical lenses through which such values are communicated to the public through art criticism. While Bishop raises important questions around the limits of a turn against traditional art spectatorship and singular authorship of visual art, I claim that her view of a convivial tendency in social practice art overlooks key epistemological insights embodied in feminist standpoint theory and American pragmatist epistemology. I contend that John Dewey's view of knowledge as <i>transactional</i> captures the epistemological framing of some of the more socially ameliorative directions social practice work has taken in recent decades because Dewey rejects a view of knowledge that divides subjective entities from each other and from their wider environments. Bishop's traditional spectatorship model fails to capture the aesthetico-political ethos of an area of art that acknowledges the fragile contingency of standpoints. I show that the criticism of Kester, Jackson and Finkelpearl recognize this contingency and then enlarge their perspectives by bringing attention to feminist standpoint theory and pragmatist aesthetics and epistemology. I conclude by claiming that a more robust way of understanding the value of social practices in art recognizes that transactional and contingent standpoints demand an ethos rooted in the continuity of convivial and antagonistic features of aesthetico-political experience.</p>

Taking as a guiding thread the idea of absence or emptiness as a constitutive trait of all images, this dissertation reviews how this idea has been defended or ignored throughout diverse iconoclast moments in Western Christian civilization, focusing on the possible consequences that the basculating movement of acceptance-rejection of the image's emptiness might have for contemporary approaches to the image. The iconoclast debate from the eighth century, and the works of Freud and Lacan will be used as paradigmatic moments to penetrate into the difficult relationship man has had with images and the imaginary throughout an extended period of Western Christian history.