Varying approaches to interpretation, debated in aesthetic and literary criticism since the very beginnings of philosophy, favour the artist’s (author’s) intentionality, the viewer’s (reader’s) interpretation, and/or the artwork (text) itself. The merit of these approaches, in terms of what informs the artwork’s meaning or significance, is not at issue in this research project. Rather this project is concerned with how these different approaches play out within referential frameworks in teaching, learning and assessment interactions in higher education, and their significance for creativity in fine art studio practice. To comprehend the complex interplay of structure, culture and agency, the study draws from qualitative case studies of two art schools, in England and in South Africa, which differed in their espoused approach to assessment and interpretation. In addition, comparative case analysis of five studio practice teachers and their students considers agential approaches to interpretation and their significance for student engagement. Data was collected from course documentation and generated utilising a variety of hybrid methods. This included observations of assessments, questionnaires and interviews with staff; and to generate data from students, an image-based narrative method, focus group interviews and questionnaires. At various points during such researcher-participant interactions, possibilities for reciprocality, transgression and challenge of interpretations were enabled. Utilising critical discourse analysis, each case was analysed individually and then comparatively. Firstly, that which was espoused and practiced by staff was mapped to a framework constructed for the purpose of identifying approaches to interpretation: whether eucharistic, objective, or operative criticism, in relation to the author, text and reader. Secondly, insights from staff and student participants were related to the optimal conditions for creativity in this domain. Schema of the environment, relationships and curricula were then sketched, indicating the significance of interpretative approaches on students’ emotional, critical and reflective engagement with themselves as artist-students, their artmaking processes, and their artworks. This project contributes to research in assessment in fine art studio practice by providing a means to both identify the discipline’s embedded referential frameworks and consider their significance for creativity. The findings from this study revealed that whether or not the interpretative community of assessors were informed by educational development or quality assurances discourses, or utilised explicit criterion-referenced assessment, the more powerful and implicit discourses were those of their professional practice, informed by art criticism. As such, actual intentionality was not given prominence in either institution’s summative assessments. Despite this, its importance for the nominal authenticity of the artist-student emerged. As students’ reflective engagement of assessors’ readings of their artworks against their own meaning-making was unsupported, students evidenced underdeveloped skills of metacognition and critical judgment. However, the study found that those teachers with longer experience, of the particularity of institutional structures and cultures, had developed the capacity to better manage the effects on their students’ formative experiences. Such relationships emerged as having a strong formative influence. Those students, who believed their teacher was concerned with their actual intentionality, experienced less alienation and felt better supported to persevere with or problematize their desires, and to handle uncertainty. An argument is made for the negotiation of interpretation as discursive and inclusive of students’ actual intentionality in assessment practices in fine art studio practice. This turn, to situating the author within interpretation, is towards enabling possibilities of agency and the responsibility of ethics within teaching, learning and assessment of reflexive practitioners. In questioning the significance of interpretation on authorship and the conditions for creativity within the higher education context, of which there has been little in the way of empirical research, this research contributes to contemporary literary and aesthetic criticism.

This thesis investigates the explicit interconnection of radical art and politics in Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s through an in-depth study of the alternative art school Gendaishicho-sha Bigakko (1969-75). Founded in 1969 in Tokyo in the aftermath of the student movement by the radical publishing company Gendaishicho¬sha, Bígakko was the brainchild of the director Ishii Kyoji, the editor Kawani Hiroshi, and art critic Imaizumi Yoshihiko. Although some of the most important Japanese artists of the 1960s such as Nakanishi Natsuyuki and Akasegawa Genpei (of Hi Red Center), the painters Nakamura Hiroshi and Kikuhata Mokuma (of Kyushu-ha), and Matsuzawa Yutaka - who is regarded as a forerunner of Japanese Conceptualism - were among the teachers there, this is the first detailed study of Bigakko. Based upon extensive primary research, including interviews with the founders, administrators, teachers and students, and the recovery of significant original material from several personal archives, I establish and assess both the school's significance in the history of Japanese art and the part it played in the country' s socio-political history, which have hitherto been largely ignored. As part of the re-construction of Bigakko's history and teaching methods, the PhD includes practice based components: a visual chronology of Gendaishicho-sha Bigakko as a supplement to the thesis ; the documentation of my-re-enactments of Nakanishi Natsuyuki's drawing class exercises at Kyoto Art Center in 2010, at Bigakkö in 2011, and in London in 2012, and documentation of two exhibitions I curated and installed : the Bigakko section of the 'Anti-Academy' exhibition (realized between Novomber 2013 and January 2014 at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, UK) and 'World Uprising'(April 2014 at Bunpodo Gallery, Tokyo), an exhibition of mail art originally conceived and realized by Matsuzawa Yutaka and his Final Art Thoughts workshop at Bigakko in 1971- 1973. This includes the documentation of Matsuzawa's 'Psy Room' at Suwa, Nagano. Through this body of PhD research, I argue that the various experiments conducted by the artists/teachers at Bigakko - with their emphasis on the revival of handwork and communal, physical experience - had the potential to bring about the new artistic language for communication and changes. Although the Bigakko experiment was prematurely terminated in 1975, I propose that the fundamental questions it raised are still relevant today, and their notion of embracing contradictions presents an important agency in confronting the stagnation that Japanese society faces today.

This practice-based thesis focuses on the Emirati burqa or ‘mask’, a form of face covering worn by the majority of Emirati women in the United Arab Emirates until the late 1960s that reveals the eyes but does not cover the hair or body. Framed by Daniel Miller and Aida Kanafani’s theories of material culture and embodiment that focus on dress as an intimate sensory object, this practice-based thesis is the first in-depth study of the Emirati burqa that engages with the histories and materiality of the burqa as an intimate object once made and worn by Emirati women. At the core of this thesis is women’s practice: the practices of women burqa makers, the diverse female practices of burqa wearing and my practice as a woman artist from the UAE. Through experiments with traditional craft materials, inscription methods, workshop initiatives, film, photography and installation, my engagement is with performing the material culture of the female burqa as a response to its disappearing practices and its previously little recorded history. The thesis first analyses the history of the burqa face covering in the Arabian peninsula through a specific focus on the written and visual accounts of mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth-century British travellers in Arabia. It then examines and records the material craft of Emirati burqa-making based upon interviews with burqa makers and textile producers and accompanying ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the UAE and India. This includes photographic documentation of the processes involved in the production of the burqa textile, a study of burqa manufacturing brands and packaging, and an analysis of the material construction of the burqa and how it is worn in the UAE. Based on interviews in the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar and a variety of visual and textual sources, the thesis identifies the different types of Emirati burqa in relation to age, status, and regional identities. It further shows that the Emirati burqa differs from those worn in the neighbouring Gulf States of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and focuses on burqa wearing practices and associated uses of the burqa textile in the UAE. Engaging with these research findings, the culmination of the thesis is the body of art works exhibited in the 2014 London exhibition, ‘An Intimate Object’, that re-animates the burqa as a living object with its own history and new contemporary meanings. Focusing on the significance of the body and senses in knowledge production, the art practice shows the burqa has ‘a voice’ in a conversation that draws upon past traditions referencing protection and its value as a personal and precious object. The burqa speaks, its indigo residue bleeds as an active witness to its lost past. It also plays a part in rediscovery or keeping the past of this material object alive through contemporary art practice as an aesthetic and political strategy.

In recent decades, the retrospective survey exhibition has become one of the primary sites for the presentation of art historical propositions. This thesis examines the contribution of four such exhibitions to a history of Conceptual art: L'Art Conceptuel, Une Perspective (Paris, 1989); Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975 (Los Angeles, 1995-96); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s (New York, 1999); and Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain, 1965-1975 (London, 2000). These exhibitions could not claim access to an objective and empirically verifiable category of 'Conceptual art,' but played an active role in the construction of that category. Through individual case studies, this thesis analyses the processes through which the history of this relatively recent art 'movement' has been elaborated. It seeks to understand how works of art can be accommodated to a museum-based art history and how they can be called upon to support particular curatorial narratives. At the same time, it considers to what extent they may be able to resist the conditions of display imposed upon them and may, instead, continue to signify independently of curatorial intention. In so doing, this thesis re-emphasizes the notion of critical practice, as well as the performative and discursive dimensions of Conceptual art that have often been passed over in historical exhibitions. It rejects the "oppositional" model of radical artists pitted against conservative institutions and argues for an understanding of Conceptual art based upon the recognition that claims for its independence from the institutional art world were made within the available rhetorics of a discourse that sustains the self-identities of both artists and institutions. Ultimately, this thesis reflects the understanding that to continue to regard artist and institution, artwork and exhibition, in their isolated functions is to fail to attend to the ways in which art, as a social practice, may support broader ideological structures.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine socio-cultural and political interventions in meaning-making by the design profession and to present an explicit model of meaning-making in the design profession by investigating members of that profession as an audience in a design museum. First, professional meaning-making is addressed from the viewpoint of theoretical understandings of the way in which the design profession makes meaning and gains knowledge. This study starts from an interaction-theoretical approach to meaning-making, suggested by interactionists such as Goffman, and a power-theoretical approach as proposed by, among others, Bourdieu. Both of these approaches have their own limitations, however. The first (the interaction-theoretical approach) is too personal to account for the affects of power relationships between members of the field and the second (the power-theoretical approach) is too deterministic to enable an understanding of the capacity of the individual. Neither approach gives a satisfactory explanation of professional meaning-making. For this reason, the thesis intends to combine these two theoretical approaches. The second aim of the thesis is to conduct research into a particular design museum (the Design Museum London), taking it as an example in order to investigate the design profession's actual meaning-making process. The research subjects consist of designer visitors who reflect their own field while visiting the design museum. The empirical findings are combined with the theoretical foundations to show that the museum visit is an important symbolic ritual in which members of the profession present their habitus, as a notion of self-identity, to other people as well as themselves. In light of the empirical findings, the last section of the thesis is dedicated to building a model of meaning-making among design professionals in design museums in order to gain a more complete understanding of the social system embedded in the profession. The model suggests that the key factors affecting the way in which the design profession makes meaning of design exhibits are “self-identity”, “interaction”, “ritual”, “habitus”, “social practice” and “symbolic power”. It is anticipated that the thesis will illustrate the application of sociological theories and discourses to investigations of the design profession and to related cultural and institutional activities for higher education, museum curatorial practice and creative industry development.

This thesis investigates the work of a selected number of artists of Algerian origin who rose to prominence in France between 1989 and 2012 and analyses the reception of their work in French institutions of art. The artists are Adel Abdessemed (b.1971), Kader Attia (b. 1970), Faycal Baghriche (b. 1972), Samta Benhyahia (b.1950), Zoulikha Bouabdellah (b. 1977), Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978), Katia Kameli (b.1973) and Zineb Sedira (b.1963). This is the first in-depth study on these artists's work within a French exhibiting context and it also represents the first critical analysis of the impact that collective memory, French cultural policies and an emerging discourse ofa 'global' art world system has had on the reception of their work. Based upon extensive primary research on the exhibiting practices of French institutions and responses of the French press, alongside interviews with the artists, the thesis engages with art historical, sociological and cultural memory methods in order to examine the emergence and reception of these artist' work. The analysis also brings into focus the aesthetic preoccupations of the artists and their diverse contexts of production. Chapter one presents a critical overview through a historiography of major . exhibitions of artists of Algerian origin in French institutions of art between 1989- 2012. The following four chapters are structured through themes that are recurrent in the artists's work: the urban, the home and the Arab woman and the global world. Chapter two focuses on Abdessemed and Attia's engagement with urban themes, and questions the impact of collective narratives of the 'banlieue' on their work. Chapter three analyses the representations of the self and the domestic in the early work of Benyahia, Bouabdellah, Kameli and Sedira, and proposes that their critical diasporic narratives problematize the dominant discourses of collective memory in France. An analysis of the work of Abdessemed, Attia and Sedira in chapter four foregrounds the discontinuities and continuities within a 'global' world-order with specific reference to Franco/Algerian crossings. Overall, through a detailed analysis of the institutional contexts of France and the 'global' art world, the thesis offers an institutional critique arguing that diasporic experiences - evident in the work of artists of Algerian origin - are rarely acknowledged or debated in French institutions, while artistic nationality is over-determined. Informed by Isobel Armstrong's concept of a 'radical aesthetic' and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome, the thesis also argues that aesthetics and contexts of production need to be acknowledged in the analyses of the artist's work.

This thesis explores the catering firm J. Lyons & Co as contributors of hotel expansion in the West End of London between 1888 and 1935. Introducing the development of the steel-framed building type, it aims to provide a design historical explanation for the advance of hotels in location, design and interior decoration. The spatial layout of the West End and Piccadilly provide a specific focus for the Regent Palace Hotel, as a building proposed upon the redevelopment of the Regent Street quadrant in 1915. A central argument includes an emergence of the economy hotel in the public space of Edwardian urban reconstruction, as a consequence of material, technological and social processes of the early twentieth century. Removing the imperialist connotations represented by the previous grand Victorian hotels, this study uses design history to investigate the history of interior design and architecture in new luxury hotels. Specifying site location, building facades and urban geographies in Piccadilly as extended architectural frameworks from thoroughfares to thresholds. The main objectives are to reveal how new hotels were built in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, by examining interiors, gender and luxury in relation to one hotel. Analysing the public and private rooms on three levels: lower ground, ground, and upper floors, the thesis examines these as socio-spatial layouts. The large public rooms in the Regent Palace Hotel adapted to incorporate new modes of interior decoration, which established how the new luxury hotel attracted a broader clientele in the modernisation of the West End. The Regent Street quadrant had originated on empire and spectacle in a period of economic transformation, yet in the Edwardian period this space witnessed increased patterns of consumption and a new commodity culture. The study emphasises the capitalist enterprise in hotels, new services and industries, by placing J. Lyons & Co into the urban history of the West End.

People have become accustomed to living with - and inside of - the media screen. Not just in the cinema or living room, but more pervasively with mobile telephones, advertising hoardings, and computer interfaces. It has infiltrated the art gallery, its high definition, contrast ratio and immersive scale tending to blind the audience to its mediating presence. And what about the genre of landscape today, beyond the latest BBC wildlife spectacular, computer simulated Hollywood blockbuster, video game or Google Earth? As the screen populates the cultural landscape, and increasingly mediates between the actual landscape and humanity, where are the points of contemporary artistic reflection on - or resistance to - the screen's increasing ubiquity and transparency? The thesis comprises three components to be taken as a whole: Screen as landscape, an exhibition of seven paintings; Touch screen, documenting the development of practical research; and Screen as Landscape, a dissertation examining contemporary artworks across a diversity of media, including film, photography, printmaking, painting, and computer-generated imagery. Supplementing these, a Guide book offers an overview of the thesis: its origins in an established practice; its developing themes and research methods, emerging out of making and writing; its resolution into three interrelated parts; and its distinctiveness within a range of recent curatorial projects. Echoing the landscape theme, the thesis takes a journeying form rather than being fixed in a specific geographic, art-historical, or theoretical situation. Landscape is salvaged as a live genre for visual art, as a web of interrelated perceptual and symbolic forms that are insistently present. This is despite landscape's annexation as an art-historical anachronism after Post-Impressionism, ripe for nostalgia and parody; its default appearance as seamless photographed or simulated backdrop to fantasies of wilderness and escape; or as a cartographic plane for the projection of information and ideas of control, containment, or exploitation. Landscape is an idea born of familiarity and estrangement, with which artistic interventions with screen technology can actually offer insights. Through its apparatuses - its obstructive lenses and artificial surfaces - the screen can reveal forms of imaging analogous to - yet not identical with - the perceptual and cultural formation of landscape, between experiences of nearness and distance, presence and absence, discovery and loss. Screen as landscape proposes an inter-medial approach, describing a field of contemporary concerns with potent art-historical resonances, harbouring essential questions about human subjectivity in the face of the screen's replacement of landscape with depthless surfaces. For the screen interface threatens subjectivity through the fluid integration of perspectival viewpoints, textual or graphical information, and networked interconnectivity. Through the immediacy of spatial and temporal proximities, and the replacement of physical location by virtual access points, the dimension of depth is increasingly lost to perception. The screen must be landscaped to counter the screening of the landscape - the supplanting of atmospheric, ambiguous, and multisensory encounter. Against the backdrop of cyberspace, it fathomless depths and infinity of virtual frames, Screen as landscape performs a bold or foolhardy attempt on the sheer, inhuman edifice of the screen.

The aim of this project was to pilot, assess and develop the globally worn everyday garment – the ‘humble’ T-shirt – as a wearable probe, defined in this research as the T-probe, to advance engagement with, and understanding of, challenging concepts relating to novel materials and sensory experiences. In the course of addressing this primary aim the research expanded into a three-part enquiry reflecting the complexity of factors involved in introducing novel material concepts via a design probe, and attaining sensory experience and perception data via the two-pronged approach of observation and self-reported measures. The value of the T-probe was thus explored via three separate but methodologically interlinked projects, selected based on common challenges associated with public perception and engagement: Project (I) Fungi materials for clothing: Explores perception of mould as a novel material for garment design and fabrication. Project (II) Fashion for deafblind people: Studies how a fashion experience may be introduced to a sensitive user group, i.e. people with visual and auditory impairment. Project (III) Synthetic ingredients for fine fragrance: Engages consumer understanding of synthetic ingredients in perfumery ii Research Project (I) was a pilot study based on the researcher’s personal design interest in the development and market introduction of novel biobased materials. Projects (II) and (III) were set up in partnerships with non-academic organisations: the charity for deafblind people Sense and the global company International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) respectively, to further test the value of the T-probe in advancing understanding of materials and sensory experiences within contexts of social and / or market interest (s). The findings of the research enquiry demonstrate that the T-shirt is well accepted and engaged with, and functions well as a probe in eliciting and enhancing participant sensory experience and perception of novel and challenging material concepts. By following a systematic approach to the design and implementation of the T-probe from concept to actualisation, this doctoral research project contributes to an advanced understanding of issues related to the design and application of probes to fulfil specific research and design objectives within the various evolutionary stages of materials, products, technologies, and consumer experiences.

The core of this research has been to undertake both an analytical study of the role of colour in early twentieth century abstract art and to produce a CD-Rom as an interdisciplinary design tool, to convey the material in a manner through which complex ideas can be easily assimilated. Multimedia has the advantage of possibilities for interactivity, a graphic interface, sound, animation and of organising information in a matrix of cross-references. This adds new dimensions to the study of visual arts and facilitates an analytical approach to the subject. There are also innovative possibilities for the didactic function of the presentation as an educational tool, especially as the information has been organised in levels to appeal to different kinds of audiences, where original theories, essays, notes and internet links to related material, are accessible if the user wishes to investigate more deeply. With regard to the art historical content, although colour contains some inherent qualities which affect human perception; it still relies heavily on its cultural context in order to acquire meaning within works of art, the proposal in this research is therefore, to discuss the perception of colour within one specific tradition, that of Western modernism. It begins with the influence of nineteenth century colour theory on the early twentieth century European painters and focuses on how the change in the role of colour progressed in parallel with the development of abstract art. Using selected painters as examples, I have introduced French and German development of the role of colour, and then show how this technical and expressive understanding of colour also permeated the United States and influenced the American Abstract Expressionist painters. Thus demonstrating that the way that colour is used in their work relies on the same understanding of colour that was developed in the early twentieth century in Europe. Unlike previous research in colour, the analogies with music, calligraphy and poetry are explored as being strongly associated with the role of colour in Western abstract painting, especially their roots in `simultaneity', as evident in the work of Robert Delaunay, which involved issues of time and space in painting. Individual compositions are therefore analysed from various angles within their cultural context, which is made possible through the multifaceted qualities of new multimedia, mentioned above.