This practice-based PhD thesis begins with a question prompted by a noticeable shift, both visual and conceptual, in design trends observed in the European design industry from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Did this shift reflect designers' intuitive response to the present conditions of material culture? If so, what could be learnt from their response to it? Using the perspective of a 'reflective practitioner', the ideas and thoughts underpinning design that are manifested in material form as design products are critically investigated. The investigation unravels a problem of design, and of objects, in consumer society. Many of the designers who characterised the period examined were concerned with a mode of production and consumption, where despite the technological progress and increased material wealth, the quality of the relationship between objects and users seemed to be in decline. This investigation locates design in a socia-cultural sphere, as design and its objects have a strong link to the everyday experience of the material environment. The thesis explores the values that were proposed by designers as particularly important as an antidote to the 'problems of objects'. The 'materiality' of functional objects is identified as a key feature observed in design concepts seeking to provide a more meaningful experience of design objects. The investigation then attempts to reveal what is behind this renewed atlention to the 'thing itself. Further investigation into the relationship, or 'tension', between practice and theory, suggests that the theorisatian of design in the proceeding periods has led itself away from objects' materiality. Increasingly, design objects are being produced as signs or representation of ideas. The thesis then explores the 'communicative' and 'performative' capacities of objects that invite users to engage with the objects' physical quality a,nd/or characteristics. Identifying the 'poetic' dimension of everyday experience as a design resource, it further discusses the 'expressive character of material culture'. The practice element of this research offers a bridge between multiple forms of thought process and analysis: in terms of objects, images and drawings, and words. Contextualisation of the practice, and a critical analysis of what is inherent in the practice of design and craft, help guide the theoretical part of the critical investigation into contemporary design practice, and the role the 'materiality' plays in design. The knowledge in practice revealed in this research offers a new perspective to understanding material culture, and encourage further exploration of the possibilities of design in creating a more engaging and meaningful user-object relationship.

This thesis critically analyses the implications of a now global capitalist modernity for Theodor W. Adorno's theory of art. The thesis takes as its starting point the sociological presuppositions at play in his social theory and problematises the spatial and historical dimensions in which they are embedded. The analysis of the process of homogenisation of social relations that Adorno presents as a constitutive feature of societies during monopoly capitalism brings to the fore the centrality of the state as administrator. This thesis claims that there is a spatial contradiction in Adorno's definition of society, given that the interconnectedness of capitalism as a system is negated by the restriction of that definition to industrialised societies. In other words, there is a universalisation of the particularity of industrialised societies underlying Adorno's social theory, that hides a functionalist understanding of the state and disavows its constitutive character for capitalist social relations. The introduction of an analysis of the particularity of the state in latin American societies serves as a counterpoint to the societies analysed by Adorno. latin American societies are analysed from the point of view of Dependency Theory, particularly in relation to Henrique Cardoso's and Enzo Faletto's concept of dependent development. This concept allows a further differentiation internal to latin American societies and problematises the common assumption that structural heterogeneity is a key concept for understanding these societies. Consequently, the thesis focuses its analysis on the socio-economic and political situation of the societies in the Southern Cone of South America, particularly Argentina, given their relative social homogenisation during the 1960s. The thesis claims that contrary to Adorno's assumption that capitalist social development destroys collective subjectivities while producing homogenisation, the Southern Cone societies show that development and relative social homogenisation in contexts of dependency do not necessarily produce political neutralisation but rather its opposite. The problematisation of Adorno's social theory is further complicated by the historical development of capitalism during neoliberalism. The decoupling of the spatial grounding of the relation between capital and labour constituted during monopoly capitalism is presented from the point of view of the radical transformation of Argentine society from the mid-1970s onwards. The thesis introduced the concept of the 'destruction of the social' in reference to the central role that the process of accumulation by dispossession, as theorised by David Harvey, has for the transformation of Argentina. Given this expanded global context, the thesis then discusses the effects that the transformation of the relation between capital and labour has for the conditions of production of artistic labour during neoliberalism. In particular, it claims that the 'developmentalist' dynamic that aligns technological development, industrialisation and artistic material in Adorno's concept of the new, has been problematised by the primacy of financial valorisation as a form of accumulation, and the dynamic role that accumulation by dispossession has in it. The emergence of a globally expanded labour theory of culture is analysed in relation to the contemporary art produced in Argentina between the late 1960s and the 2000s. The relation between the socially regressive tendencies developed during this period and artistic technique is analysed throguh the introduction of the notion of the 'return to craft.'

The central aim of this PhD thesis, From interior to brand : the British Overseas Airways Corporation, 1939-1974. A case study of post-second world war British commercial design, is to investigate the evolution of branding and identity in the context of British commercial design in the post-second world war period. However, rather than document the various changes and moments in this history of design in a general overview, as existing texts have successfully managed, the study uses the aircraft interior of the former national airline of Britain, the British Overseas Airways Corporation's (BOAC), as a focused lens through which to analyse this period's unique form of design in more depth. Two key interconnected questions shape this investigation: how can the evolution of BOAC's interiors be used to understand design's role in building a British brand in post-war Britain? An can this evolution shed light on the influence of America on British design during this period? These themes act as continual threads throughout the thesis's 10 chapters and helped to shape a new narrative within the history of British commercial design. While the BOAC aircraft interior is an important starting point, this research viewed it in the broader context of the design strategy of the Corporation. As this thesis will demonstrate, the interior played a central role in the expression of the airline, and in turn British identity, the focus being on how the design physically represented the brand and identity of BOAC. However, as the research moves through the airline's 35-year history, the interior plays a more strategic role in the company's brand image development, becoming an integral part of a unified brand strategy. In understanding the interior within this new narrative, it is the intention of this thesis to present a better understanding of the commercial design in Britain after the end of the second world war. It is the proposal of this thesis that, while several major themes have been covered in British design history, the theme of commercial design appears to have been overlooked, and it certainly seems undervalued in design history that allows this analysis. Rather, it is the processes and influences behind the designs that allow for a true understanding of commercial design and, therefore, a unique and original contribution to knowledge.

The main aim of theis thesis is to construct a critical concept of performance within a generic concept of art through a two-fold operation. Firstly, it reconstructs the development of a generic concept of performance - distinct from the performing arts - in the period of post-WWII art in North America by focusing on task-dance and the event-score as two emblematic artistic strategies of this period. Task-dance and event-score practices, it argues, had a central role in the practical transformation from a medium-specific to a generic concept of art. Secondly it examines the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from a generic concept of art, and are necessary for the reconstruction of a generic concept of performance: 'practice', 'labour', 'autonomy', 'abstraction', 'medium', 'mediation', 'subject', 'object', 'structure' and 'abstraction'. The central argument of the thesis is that a critical reconstruction of the concept of performance within the context of post-WWII art must take into account a generic and a autonomous concept of art. The latter refers to a post-medium-specific concept of art, which is still autonomous in Theodor Adorno's understanding of the term: art as derived from, yet distinctively and formally separated from empirical reality. Embedded but formally abstracted from the social relations from which it comes, the category of 'performance', the thesis argues, is a practice of relations. It is a practice in the sensein which Karl Marx formulates practice in his early writings as social and sensuously empirical. It also refers to practice in the sense in which Marx articulates a radically new concept of the subject through this category. The thesis also aims to make a contribution to art theory through its critical methodology. It forces a reconsideration of performance within the framework of 'art in general', and more specifically, it emphasises dance's central role in this history. It employs a number of terms and categories central to task-dance and event-score practices that, it argues, are internal to the generic category performance as it operates within the context of a generic concept of art. The central problem from which this thesis sets out concerns the way in which the dominating concept of performance - derived from cultural theory - is used within art theory. Cutting across disciplines such as Cultural Studies, Performance Studies and Theatre Studies, this conception fails to distinguish between art and culture more generally, and between art and other modes of reality. In short, the thesis confronts a cultural concept of performance - and the related category of performativity - as well as its application to performance practices in art, with a critical one that is reconstructed through a different set of philosophical categories and methods. Chapter 1 argues that the development of a generic concept of art and performance is best described as a shift towards practice, primarily through Marx's account of this. Chapter 2 confronts art-theoretical conceptions of the event-score and task-dance, based in structuralism and pragmatism with Immanuel Kant, and demostrates how John Dewey;s notion of art relies on a conflated notion of Aristotle's practice/poiesis-distinction. Drawing on Husserl's 'phenomenological reduction' and Kant's 'acts of abstraction', Chapter 3 argues that they negation of a medium-specific conception of the object in event-score and task-dance practices constructed a new conception of the art object: the performative structure-object. Chapter 4 considers the role of negation in task-dance, in relation to Adorno's concept of autonomous art and Marx's notion of abstract labour. Chapter 5 demonstrates the way in which the performative-structure object is transcendental and performative, and argues that it must be understood as the practical condition for the generalisation of the category of performance within art.

Since the turn of the century art criticism in the West has repeatedly declare itself "in crisis". This crisis had several iterations: the loss of stable formal criteria by which to criticise artworks in the wake of conceptual art and a related abdication of aesthetic judgement; the increasing dominance of the art market as the arbiter of artistic value; the functional replacement of art critics by curators, and the inadequacy of extant models of criticism in the face of contemporary practices that challenge traditional critical categories, practices that despite operating in the institutional field of art seem to dissolve into non-artistic activities. This work reads most of these positions as remaining too attached to a model of criticism grounded on aesthetic judgement, even when this is described as "aesthetic experience", "aesthetic framing", "affective intensity" or others. Against such an attachment, this work argues that it is artistic autonomy as the self-reflexion and autopoiesis of the artwork - as already advanced by the early German Romantics and developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno - that remains crucial: art as critique rather than a critique of art. With this in mind, rather than understanding the rise of curating as a threat to criticism, this work proposed that in the aftermath of what Thierry de Duve has called "art in general", it is within the institutional forms that have started to emerge in the wake of this new understanding of curating, that artistic autonomy can continue to be developed in the context of a globalised artworld.

As the early European avant-garde designers sought to repress the decorative in design, allegiance to the sensuality and symbolism of floral pattern triggered a sense of ambivalence amongst many English designers and design reformers. Minnie McLeish and Winifred Mold designed ornamental patterns for England's leading mass-market textile manufacturers and this thesis examines their work of 1910 - 1930. Offering McLeish and Mold as case studies, it explores the extent to which women designers exploited the medium of popular floral chintz to forge careers in a previously male-dominated profession. It asks to what extent the eclecticism of their practice - which employed both modern and traditional floral motifs and tropes - exemplified a quintessentially English and essentially modern early twentieth-century paradigm. Rejecting the notion of modernity as an unequivocal rupture in the design historical continuum it offers a close critical reading of specific commodities - printed floral textiles - and their production within the cultural context of consumption to illustrate how contemporaries negotiated 'producing the modern' and 'being modern' using combined narratives of continuity, tradition and progress. The fashionable chintz, and women designers' role in its production, are argued as evidence of what Wilson has described as 'modernity's other' in which the historically influenced, soft, colourful and abstracted surfaces of printed textiles represent the massproduced, the popular, and the irrational in direct reaction to Modernism's scientific ratlonalísrn." The historiography of modern design has largely dismissed floral design as narrowly derivative and as such, like many of those involved in its design and production, it has been rendered marginal in the written history of twentieth-century English modern design. By positioning Minnie McLeish's and Winifred Mold's designs within current discourse on the role of women designers and the decorative in interwar Modernism this thesis furthers our understanding of the history of the designer in the early twentieth century and argues that popular floral fabrics despite their romantic and nostalgic symbolism operated as unlikely agents of modernisation in the 1920s modern interior.

Ascension discusses multiple subjects concerning the art of the author, including death, religion, and painting.

The artist discusses her Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition, Stray, held at Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from April 4th to April 8th. The show exhibit consists largely of self-portraits derived from the artist’s dreams, in an array of media including mixed media on paper, oil on canvas, and wire frame sculpture, all completed in the Spring of 2011, with the exception of one sculpture. Ideas explored include the influence of dreams, representation of the self, masking, disguising, the loss of home, and the tendency of memory to fade. Influences discussed include the written work of Milan Kundera, as well as the painting of Marlene Dumas, the early printmaking of Paul Klee, and the work of John Currin.

The goal of this project was to create an illustrated story. The thesis is combination of research both on narrative theory and the process of storytelling, and different methods of narrative art. The research information obtained was used to create a body of work which was later analyzed on its successfulness at adhering to the ideas presented by the research.

This honor’s thesis and my solo exhibition, borne from the love of wilderness, seek to connect with the reader/viewer personally as nature is connected with us. My art refers to the responsibility we all share for a connection to and stewardship of nature. Through my show and thesis and through the lens of art, I hope to inform and raise consciousness of our waning and coveted American wildernesses and natural wonders. Each piece in my show has a historical context that provides information about my thought process and my need to educate. With my research providing the backlighting, the paper starts from my education and ends with a conclusive idea for a better way to consider wilderness.