Broadly speaking, this research involves a philosophical and socio-political investigation of creative force entailed in the realm of art. It focuses on how to assess the elusive aspect of power that is engaged with the notion of `we'; and explores what the notion contributes to art-making. The written thesis consists of four chapters, each of which is concerned with the notion of `we' in different ways. Firstly, a matter of ethics that is involved in the notion of `we' will be looked at using Derrida's reading on Levinas's idea of the Face of the Other; Deleuze's image of thought; Deleuze's becoming; Derrida's hospitality and responsibility. Secondly, the ways in which curators and artists-as-curators engage with the authoritarian voice entailed within the curatorial practice will be discussed by looking at some works of display and exhibition making. Thirdly, artwork made by artists such as Cildo Meireles and Jeremy Deller will be evaluated from the point of view that the artist does not necessarily play the role of the author who controls the meaning of their own work. In the light of this, how artists establish their different artistic strategies will be assessed. In the fourth section, some of the texts which I have produced during the research period and which are accompanied with visual images of my works will be presented to demonstrate the mutual interdependence of my writing and making. Throughout the research period, studio-oriented work, collaborative works including co-curation and co-organizing events, artist's talks, and writing as art have been developed and realized with a particular emphasis on looking at the ways and kinds of communication that are possible through works of art. This includes my final show at Chelsea College of Art & Design (19-21 May 2006); the solo shows 100 Books Which I Didn't Buy at Unit 2 (2005, London) and from the middle through the middle at Changing Room (2002, Scotland); co-curation of the video screening SCRAMBLE at Brunei Theatre (2002, London) and CCA (2003, Glasgow); the symposium Interrupting Connections: performative Interventions at West Space (London, 2003).

The written aspect of this practice-based thesis ‘collates’ a one-day event exploring the question, ‘What is dialogic art?’ into a textual account. The practical aspect threads through this account, with reference to its dissemination elsewhere made frequently. The event ‘documented’ here is a ‘barcamp’, a kind of ‘unconference’ that combines presentations with responsive discussion. This barcamp brings together practitioners of art, activism, education, philosophy, sociology, sociolinguistics, literary theory and criticism, and others to explore dialogic art through a dialogue that moves amongst their respective points of view. The barcamp’s collation tracks the contributors’ discursive struggle to co-author dialogic art as a dialogue-based approach to contemporary art practice. ‘The dialogic’ that qualifies this art accretes through the barcamp as an artistic disposition preoccupied with the constitutive agency of dialogue, understood here in an expanded sense. This disposition explores the myriad relations that preoccupy authorship qua authorship. These include the material and conceptual thresholds organising creative agents and their cultural production: participation and collaboration, process and outcome, the author and the authored. The epistemological foundation of this barcamp can be defined as dialogic because it understands knowledge as arising from social relations and enacted through intersubjective exchange. Similarly, the ontological basis for this project issues from a post-structuralist sense of subjectivity as simultaneously dispersed and multiple, distributed amongst authors. These philosophical perspectives underpin the theory of subjectivity evolved through dialogic art. This theory recommends the art’s authors as ‘responsive subjects’—artist-agents who are themselves reciprocally authored through their artistic practice. This reciprocal authorship explodes the twin myths of the independent artistauthor and the discrete artwork without abandoning the facticity of their historical existence. Always contingent, dialogic artworks and their artist-agents are presented in this project as polyphonic portraits of heterogeneous becoming achieved through dialogic exchange.

This project argues that deceptions are worth studying as creative acts. The resulting discoveries are applied to discourses within contemporary narrative illustration. Almost all complex deceptions are texts composed of visual and verbal elements. This research is interested in those deceptions that appear in print and particularly those that involve the creation of a fictional author through a sustained text meant to be considered real by a particular audience. The deceptions concerning this research are not momentary; they exist as specially created artefacts and documents and are sustained over a substantial period of time. These deceptions are not necessarily created by artists or authors, they may be created by any person who utilises a particular methodology: the appropriation and collage of visual and narrative fragments to create the illusion of a seamless whole. The images in these deceptions respond to the Internet and fragmentary, circular or real time narrative in a way that mainstream illustration, as yet, does not. The research methodology is empirical; evidence of the deceptions’ dissemination and repetition is collected. These are the texts; the illustrated fictions analysed by the thesis. The taxonomy organises them according to their aesthetic characteristics, avoiding psychological speculation and focusing on their substance. The concept of ‘fake literature’ within literary theory and the increasing use of strategies amongst artists that question discredited notions of authenticity are also considered. Certain philosophical theories about the nature of language are used to clarify the discussion.

This practice-led research examines the paradox of seamlessness in fashion, drawing on the similarities found between the process of making garments, the process of their embodiment and process of research. Integrating practical and theoretical methods, it suggests that the process of making and using garments can be a transitional experience, as well as a device that creates ambiguity of subjectivity, which in turn promotes the subject’s reflexive re-adjustment. This analysis informed and was informed by making a series of seamless woven garments which reveal their own construction, showing themselves to be forms in process, representing the ambiguity of modern subjects. Inconsistency and contradiction are intrinsic to fashion: it is both matter and meaning, both cover and display, both imitation and differentiation, but it is always difficult to locate clear demarcation. As a garment-maker, I metaphorically placed this ambiguity at the material level of seams, openings and edges of garments, from which emerged the research question: What is the meaning and function of the seam and seamlessness? My investigation through making garments via hand-woven seaming methods, and my search for an adequate theoretical rendering of the reflections arising from the making, led me beyond the discipline of fashion, to the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology and art, literary and cultural theory, from which a series of perspectives are derived. Articulated in this thesis and the accompanying exhibition are thus the process and result of my explorations through making, writing, and theory. The making process involving contact with material is a displacing experience that generates a reflexive value. This demonstrates the ability of garments to test and reset the essential boundary of corporeal subjectivity through the experience of both illusion and reality. Dressing practice is thus the making of the self via repeated reality testing. The poetic function of making thus enables us to generate an authentic knowledge from the experience of oscillating between disparate states. Therefore, together, the seam and seamlessness represent the subject-in-process, and fashion as a particular way of being in this transitional passage. The estranging effect of my hand-woven seams demonstrate this poetic function of making. In the same way, the thesis reveals the seams between practice and theory, and between diverse references, but also their mutually informing relationship.

This thesis is based on a journey of practice undertaken by emerging theatre company, Massive Owl between 2012 and 2016. The thesis has been written by company member, Jenny Duffy but is reflective of the broader experience of the company as a whole. It exposes and discusses key trends, tactics, strategies and constraints of this journey, generating a unique contextual account of the experience and work of an emerging company working in the field of contemporary performance today. Through this the thesis responds to an identified gap in literature within the field of contemporary performance that examines the work of emerging artists. It analyses select frameworks currently available to and prolifically used by emerging artists including: Arts Council England’s funding programme, Grants for the Arts and ‘Scratch’ and Work-in-Progress events, from the perspective of an emerging company. Through examining the role of the arts within recent cultural policy and surrounding agendas of this policy, the thesis critiques the predominant instrumental and economic rationale for arts funding in relation to the neoliberal capitalist context and the impact this has on emerging artists’ development and their work. The thesis concludes with a call to arms from within the unstable and rapidly changing political climate of 2017, to value artists on their own merits and to not make claims for art within frameworks that place constraint on its wider role and value.

In different countries participation in the arts has become a significant theme of government policies which foster the instrumentalisation of culture; Yúdice (2003), Belfiore and Bennett (2010), Eagleton (2014). Increasingly it is claimed that the arts have positive effects on social, political and economic well-being. The emphasis on people changing the arts ― common in the political discourses of 1970s ― has been substituted by arguments about the power of the arts to transform people’s lives. This study tests these claims comparatively. The main questions asked are: what are the differences between instrumentalism from above or below in the political order; and how do the world of the arts and letters and the world of politics speak to each other today? Through extended interviews, life stories and discourse analysis, based on fieldwork in Britain and Venezuela, the study demonstrates the complex moral interdependency between European notions of aesthetic virtue and political or civic virtues. The political structuring of these virtuous relations is shown to be morally tenuous. It is argued they express the institutionalised but inadequate compensations associated with the ‘good-faith economy’ (Bourdieu 1977). Politically these relations are problematic; among other things they discursively separate the mind from the body which means that time and other basic needs tend to be neglected. It is argued that this complex relationship between aesthetic and political virtue is a significant factor in Statecraft, and in unmaking the militant role of the organised working class. It is suggested that these dynamics are a contributory factor in the ascendancy of the political far-right internationally. To counter the influence of the good-faith economy this study proposes greater public participation in the funding processes which support the arts.

This research problematises the contemporary phenomenon of alternative arts education after art’s ‘Educational Turn’, encompassed by evidence of a critical discourse between 2006 and 2016. The thesis addresses the questions: what are the alternatives to models of the alternative art school having emerged through the Educational Turn? And, how might dialogic engagement with organisations outside of the Turn propose something other for the future of alternative arts education? Contemporary art’s capacity to instrumentalise education, through its reimagining by artists and the co-option of ‘the alternative’ by arts institutions, must be countered by considering organisational models that sit outside of the Educational Turn. The field is contextualised by a ‘crisis in education’ in the UK, contributing to an abundant manifestation of ‘alternative’ art schools. An often-overlooked plurality exists to ‘the alternative’ that, in its co-option by contemporary art, is rendered homogenised. Existing discourse considers artistic, self-organised and curatorial practices, framed by institutional and infrastructural critique, but neglects to step outside of the Turn to imagine other models for alternative arts education. ‘Knowledge mobility’, ‘the dialogic’ and ‘(trans)formation’ form a framework for the thesis, functioning according to a methodology of critique and proposition. The research derives ‘knowledge mobility’ to critique the Turn’s instrumentalisation of education, by examining existing discourse and practice that problematise the paradoxes of the Turn and frame knowledge as a form of social organisation. The research aligns ‘the dialogic’ from Mikhail Bakhtin and Paulo Freire, with Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes’ ‘intertextuality’ and Maurice Blanchot’s ‘infinite conversation’. The function of ‘the dialogic’ is twofold: as a structural metaphor and conversational research practice. Four dialogues with organisations operating outside of the remit of the Turn consider the productive and transformative capacities of models not framed as alternative art schools. These are with: Leeds Creative Timebank, IF Project, THECUBE and Syllabus programme. Negotiating critical and applied interpretations of ‘knowledge mobility’, findings from these are reconciled with the research through a process of ‘(trans)formation’, resulting in the proposition of speculative principles to contribute to the field of alternative arts education. The research has been produced as part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Creative Exchange knowledge exchange hub, providing the context for stepping outside of the domain of contemporary art. The value of this approach for the field of alternative arts education is in its capacity to have drawn together thinking from each organisation. This research makes its contribution to the field of alternative arts education by working dialogically with organisations where the practice of knowledge is central, establishing a connection between organisations outside of the Turn, which would otherwise be excluded from its discourse, with contemporary art. The research formulates and puts into practice methods of critique, conversation and proposition: producing a critical vocabulary, lens and through deriving speculative propositions towards a possible future for alternative arts education.

Understanding and managing emotion in psychological therapy is a complex and challenging problem for practitioners and clients. The traditional emphasis on verbal language as the mediating process in therapy is expanding with the inclusion of multimodal creative arts, based on visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic perceptions, to better support the reaccessing of emotion. This can be followed recursively by the use of words to develop narrative and meaning. The main research emphasis in this thesis was on visual art. Studies of other art forms may follow. Philosophical understanding, neuroscience advances and developments in psychological therapy underpin and explain this therapeutic expansion. A qualitative research approach is taken, engaging several different actions from within that research paradigm. The thesis is written as a metaphorical journey and conveys the experience of art dialogue and the experience of researching, as parallel stories. Psychological learning journeys undertaken by its author and a colleague, some clients, therapists and teachers, are described in three encounters. The first encounter explored visual art dialogue as a process addition to a developing experiential phenomenological approach using multimodal creative arts (The MIECAT Process � Lett 2001). The objective was for the colleagues to experience a lengthy creative arts sequence, developing and undertaking the process of visual art dialogue. Multilevel actions and outcomes were recorded throughout the collegial engagement. The collegial encounter required that the co-researchers pursue their own personal psychological meanings and report on their experience of the process. Personal narrative meanings exposed in exploring visual art dialogue, are not discussed, the emphasis being on confirming how actions occurred and their effectiveness for application. Actions stopped where direct verbal therapeutic engagement might occur. Following collegial experience, visual art dialogue was used with clients and other therapists and teachers, to question its broader relevance. The second inquiry, involving three clients of the author, asked how the process would support professional actions in a therapeutic situation. The third encounter engaged other therapists and teachers to expand on questions of by whom and how, art dialogue could be used. Psychological therapy theory suggests process location within a humanistic framework, in an eclectic focus or supporting the development of an experiential, phenomenological psychology process approach based on the known functions of mind and body. The associated personal and professional aspects of the experience of process exploration constituted a step in authorial understanding and may contribute to increasing knowledge of the creative arts applied to psychological therapy.

The goal of this thesis is to look at the emergence of the thematic contemporary art exhibition in Italy through an analysis of the influence of Fascism and the commercial sector in the three exhibitions composing the Cycle of Vitality, organised between 1959 and 1961 at the Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume (CIAC), opened at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1951. The cycle falls within the fields of both curatorial studies and the history of modern and contemporary exhibitions, two disciplines that have been developed since the 1990s. This inquiry contributes to them by clarifying further their specific fields of investigation, or in presenting alternative genealogies by casting light on overlooked antecedents; and by addressing the curator as a distinct cultural producer, the institution as a medium for social change and the history of exhibitions. The exhibitions analysed belong to the genealogy that resulted from the shift in the display language of international inter-war avant-garde experiments in exhibition design as manipulated by Fascism and commerce in the 1930s. Modernist architects were engaged in turning the exhibition into a medium for social change, and a mass-medium to bring a sense of the future into the present: It was from this premise that the model of the thematic exhibition emerged. Its further development in post-war Italy paralleled the questioning of the fine art museum’s entanglement with the discipline of art history, enacted by those architects trained in the 1930s. The Cycle of Vitality paired the two models in the thematic contemporary art exhibitions – Vitalità nell’arte (1959); Dalla natura all’arte (1960) and Arte e contemplazione (1961) – organised by curators avant-la-lettre Paolo Marinotti and Willem Sandberg. Crucial to the analysis of the Cycle of Vitality is the questioning of the relationship between contemporary curators, museums and the discipline of art history, as a consequence of Italian exhibition culture between 1932 and 1961. Within this historical framework, these exhibitions were influenced by the original profile of the CIAC, a cultural centre sponsored by the SNIA Viscosa, a company manufacturing man-made fibres. The CIAC allowed for the development of exhibitions that were intended to reshape the social body rather than to present the results of art historical research as was traditionally the role of museum or fine art exhibitions. In the 1950s, modernist Italian architects played a strategic role in rethinking the museum, a tendency further fostered by curators avant-la-lettre who, as cultural producers, turned the institution into their medium rather than considering it a function of the discipline of art history.

The history of design criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century in the US and the UK is punctuated with self-reflective interruptions during which design critics were acutely self-conscious about their purpose, role in society, relationship to their publics and use of critical techniques and formats. This thesis examines a selection of such moments and considers the extent to which they disrupted, and even redirected, the ways in which design criticism was practiced, produced, and consumed. The chapter focuses are as follows: a selection of articles published in the design magazines of the mid-late 1950s and early 1960s which forcibly activated a new set of values with which to engage with expendable, mass produced product design; a protest at the International Design Conference at Aspen in 1970 which posed a challenge to the established conference lecture format and to a lack of political engagement on the part of the liberal design establishment; a set of articles by cultural critics that critiqued the prevailing celebratory commentary on style and lifestyle in 1980s London; an independent exhibition that offered an alternative view of contemporary design in contrast to government-endorsed design exhibitions in 1990s London, with an additional focus on an intensification of thought about the designed object as a potentially viable critical format; and, lastly, a debate between the authors of a US design blog and an established British design critic writing in Print magazine that drew attention to a rift between the energetic amateur impulses of blogging culture and the editorial values of traditional print media. Three main problematics are used to provide continuity throughout the discrete time periods of this thesis, as well as points of comparison between the critical works examined: criticism’s contesting conceptions of its instrumentality, purpose and methods; criticism’s idealized perceptions of, and actual engagement with, its publics; and, finally, criticism’s adoption of a literary sensibility and narrative qualities in an attempt to transcend the limitations of design’s promotional and market-based concerns. In identifying five moments of historical discontinuity in the practice of design criticism, therefore, this thesis assembles a time-lapse portrait of the intellectual, stylistic and material constitution of design criticism between the early 1950s and the early 2000s, and in doing so, aims to contribute meaningfully to a growing historiography of design criticism.