<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>

No description available.

<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>

<p> "Dissociated Verses" is a collection of poems inviting its readers to step into a space of cleansed perception&mdash;a poetic field that enables the apparition of objects and phenomena as they are in themselves, as though they were uncontaminated by human subjectivity. Avoiding the traditional predicative use of the English language and favoring the use of paratactical linguistic constructions, the verses in this collection literally carve out the white space of the page to display luminous aesthetic moments. </p><p> "Intonation" is a complementary opus&mdash;an antidote to the solemnity and escape-from-emotion-ness of "Dissociated Verses." Although steeped in a similar apocalyptic vision of phenomenology, the poems in this collection clearly differ in form: they are pulled by a lyrical and symbolic drive. Winking at Blake and Baudelaire, they bring the dissociated reader back to human-ness&mdash;the symphony of joy and sadness.</p>

No description available.

<p> This paper discusses the relationship of ideas to their media, through the relationship of contents to a book and through the use of aesthetic barriers. The conceptual content of the artworks produced center around epistemological self-betterment and practical mysticism. I discuss in this paper my thought process, the work itself, and the works intended functions. I discuss the idea of the book and my rationale behind working in printmaking.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2006. / Title from title screen (viewed 26 February 2007). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Sydney College of the Arts. Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.

This practice-led research concerns how participatory and dialogic art practice can come to terms with conditions after the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), the epoch when humans were recognized as 'an earth-changing force' (Lorimer 2015). These forms of art practice draw heavily on a social-constructivism that emphasizes human cultural endeavour above all else. But if we are to live in an epoch when humans can no longer presume to have mastery over nature (Plumwood 1993), then how can such a anthropocentric practice remain tenable? Indeed, it now seems impossible, inappropriate even, to make such a clear distinction between humans and others things. This is not to claim the end of the human. Rather, it is an invitation to think the 'more-than-human' (Whatmore 2002; 2006), and to ask, who else takes part with us in the social forms enacted through participatory and dialogic art practice after the Anthropocene? In doing so, this research turns towards aspects of new materialism (Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2015), and despite the associated risks - most obviously an accusation of "vulgarity" in insisting on the materiality of relations which subtend cultural and social ones - concludes that the benefits abound as the rest of the universe suddenly becomes our kin (Haraway 2015), our collaborators in research (Barad 2007), participants in art, and interlocutors in dialogue. This research is conducted through art (Frayling 1993), and is presented as a series of artworks and accompanying printed publications. Together, they attempt to admit the more-than-human into art practice - both as things and as a concept.