My original contribution to knowledge is a framework constructed via the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin for understanding what distinguishes art as a political object from art as a socially engaged, politicising force. The dominant understanding of art's reformative social agency raises two ethical problems that the thesis addresses. The first involves the artist's right to assume the authority to represent people and social conditions. The second involves an ethical aesthetic of tastefulness that engages with viewing as opposed to action. The framework I develop argues that art's functionalisms, for good or for ill, do not work with categories of art but are embedded in the politics of all cultural production. By disentangling art from the elitist paradigms enmeshed in concepts of artistic skill and art's own internal history of development, the thesis clarifies what separates art as political object from art as a socially engaged, politicising force. In the thesis, I argue for the advantages of the framework I develop via critical engagements with influential approaches such as those advocated by Clement Greenberg and Roland Barthes, artworks such as those produced by Judy Chicago and Art & Language, and theorists of art's social and political role such as those offered by Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière. A key point made across the thesis is that political art is not necessarily politicising art, with the former being more interested in modifying the forms taken by art - what art is - and the latter asking how art can contribute to social and political change - what art does. Subsequently, the thesis outlines in detail the aforementioned framework inspired by Gramsci and Benjamin. This sets the scene for the second half of the thesis, which discusses the installations and interventions of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, whose practices are an exemplary case for illustrating the potential of the framework outlined above. As a self-professed Gramscian, Jaar works to actively participate in practical life as a constructor, organiser and 'permanent persuader' (Gramsci, 1971, p.10), through creating models for 'learning to think, for solving a problem' (Jaar, 2006, p.76). Moreover, as someone who is explicitly political in his practices, and who has been lauded worldwide for his works since the late 1970s, Jaar is a highly appropriate artist through which to highlight the challenges inherent to attempts to make the most of art's social and political potential. The chapters on Jaar consider, in turn, his Chilean works in the late 1970s and early 1980s, his photographic installations, and his explicitly political interventions. I argue that, while at times the work has embodied a politicising dynamic, more often than not the work has remained political and thus within more traditional understandings of art and of the artist. As such, the thesis offers a richer, more holistic approach to theorising art and discussing artistic practices compared to existing scholarship and criticism, and it also enables us to develop more nuanced analyses of artworks which are presented as political and potentially transformative than has hitherto been the case.

This thesis examines the intersection of authorship and fiction in artistic practices from the 1980s until the present. Based on a series of examples of imaginary or partially fictional artists who are, nevertheless, able to function as authors in the contemporary art world, the thesis proposes the term “parafictional artists.” The concept of the parafictional, coined by the art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, is here revised to emphasize the capacity of these artists to interact with the art world in a plausible manner despite the disclosure of their imaginary nature. Such interactions include exhibiting and selling works, giving interviews, publishing books, or performing under their own name. Rather than focusing on why numerous artists from a broad geographic background have decided to employ fictional authorial strategies, this thesis explores a different set of questions: How does the extended practice of developing and exhibiting parafictional artists reflect as well as modify the ways in which contemporary authorship functions in todays’ highly institutionalized, mostly global, art world? And, what are the consequences of the introduction of these fictional explorations into artistic identity for the interpretation, presentation, and encounter with artworks? In order to answer the above questions, the thesis is divided in two parts. Part I utilises an art historical framework to propose interpretative models to analyse parafictional artists. Starting from the critique of authorship and its articulation by new art history in the 1980s, the thesis applies revised ideas on the importance of biography and intentionality to a number of selected case studies, including Reena Spaulings, Barbara Cleveland, Robbie Williams, The Atlas Group, and the three Janez Janšas, amongst others. Part II brings these debates up to date and questions the working logic of the critique of authorship from the 1990s onwards. This second part draws a parallel between the emergence of parafictional strategies and of curating as a professional activity and discourse, as a consequence of changes in the organization of the art world. The thesis concludes by examining a series of exhibitions and argues for a curatorial understanding of parafictional artists that, beyond critique, contributes to the production of knowledge through fiction.

This thesis articulates a tropology of the line, when presented in the singular, across theory, literature and visual art. It articulates and tests the singular line’s rhetoric and associated values exhibited in these modes of cultural production, suggesting that they cross-refer in light of Agamben’s arguments put forth in his Signature of All Things (2009), using a discourse following Lyotard’s concept of ‘drift’ put forth in his Driftworks (1984), and addresses the question of how such a study might be written from within the locus of the subject matter itself.

Through practice-based research, I propose to reflect critically on my practicethrough a dialogue with the work of other artists and theorists that include Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Theaster Gates, Marine Hugonnier, and Claire Fontaine. I explore the possibility of self and collective emancipation from sedimented socio-historical and political violence. The forms of violence that concern me are those produced by legacies of war,colonialism, economic ideologies and religious practices. As an integral part of the methodology, I have selected examples of modern and contemporary artworks considered as being engaged with art's social significance. Through a dialogue with these artworks, I draw out significant pressures and develop a toolkit of concepts: dispositif-of-dissent,able-agent, and universim. The selected examples of artworks suggest potentially disseminable strategies of social, political, critical and ethical value. Socially engaged art has been a constant presence for over a century, the Wanderers in Russia, William Morris in the UK, and Oswald de Andrade in Brazil are great examples of its span. My thesis selects an aspect of current socially engaged practice that argues for a particular conceptual strength and socio-political agency. I assert the idea that small strategic gestures are of far greater critical significance than grand reactionary actions. I also focus on the idea that empowerment and emancipation can only come from an engagement with the structures of power already at play — and the social, political and economic conditions that these have produced. My approach foregrounds the construction of the aforementioned toolkit aiming to contribute to the widening of a field of inquiry, born of already existing practices. These practices produce encounters with others and suggest ways of discovering agency in everyday life and experience in ways that are potentially collective and social in orientation. The artists of interest to my research forge modes of production open to experimentation, and offer critical expressions of being and relating to others. This toolkit, its terms of use and the artworks I create in relation to it, aims to reflect and animate the development of this field of practice. Throughout this thesis I ask: how individuals become socially engaged, and how the strategies employed by these individuals inform the construction of tools of everyday emancipation? I address these questions through the creation of exploratory artworks, the developement of a toolkit of terms and an exposition of practices that pervade this field of production.

This thesis explores forms of Pop Art on the territory of the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, seeking to identify its local variants. Yugoslavia, a single party state, built on the legacy of the anti-fascist Partisan struggle, principles of solidarity, egalitarianism, self-management and a strong sense of internationalism due to its founding role in the Non-Aligned Movement, was, at the same time, a country immersed in what has been termed 'utopian consumerism'. The thesis examines how Yugoslav artists during this period dealt with the burgeoning consumer society and media boom, kitsch and the Westernization of Yugoslav culture, phenomena which were ideologically at odds with the country’s own socialist principles. Starting from an analysis of the role of the artist in post-war Yugoslav system of self-management, the thesis proposes that Pop in Yugoslavia can be read as a critical site of articulation and negotiation of that role. Yugoslavia’s founding principles, formed as a legacy of the People’s Liberation Struggle (1941 – 1945), were based upon self-management and the introduction of social property, with art being a democratizing force with a central emancipatory role in the building of the new socialist state. But socialist modernism gradually relegated culture to a more illustrative role, as a form of ‘soft power’ for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The thesis proposes a reading of artists’ diverse engagements with popular culture and materials as varied expressions of resistance to the severing of links with Yugoslavia’s founding principles. My original contribution to knowledge lies in the identification of two strands of Pop in the country–‘Yugoslav Pop Reactions’ and ‘Yugoslav Countercultural Pop’ which each turned to popular culture and cheap everyday materials as an alternative channel through which to respond to socialist modernism. My claim is that the two positions represent two diametrically opposed responses to the disenchantment with socialist modernism and artists’ roles in society – both using the language of Pop Art but representing two different conceptual positions. The thesis is structured around three core questions. Firstly it asks whether it is possible to retrospectively apply the category of Pop Art to artworks which never originally claimed this term. Secondly it examines ways in which Pop tendencies altered the position of Yugoslav female artists, who, marginalised in a heavily male-dominated environment, looked to Pop as an enabling force, allowing new working methods and‘giving licence’ to new types of practices. The third question is concerned with the relationship between power, politics and Pop Art in Yugoslavia, asking to what extent Yugoslav Pop was a form ofpolitical practice, and to what extent is it was a local adaptation of international currents and themes. This thesis is associated with Tate’s multiannual research into ‘global pop’, which culminated in the exhibition ‘The World Goes Pop’ (September 2015 – January 2016, Tate Modern) through a Collaborative Doctoral Award (AHRC). This involved an advisory role in the exhibition research on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, identifying artists and artworks for potential inclusion in the exhibition. The methodology of the thesis was in part shaped by this context, beginning with close studies of artworks, their critical reception, and the study of their context–the sites of production and exhibition in the country at the time. Whilst both local and international literature on Yugoslav art history, global Pop Art as well as Yugoslav material culture and political context has been important, the core research involved oral histories, and visits to artists’ studios, museum collections, depots and archives in search of original artworks. The thesis draws on approximately twenty interviews with artists, curators, art historians and other art workers who were active in 1960s and 1970s, combined with the above-mentioned scholarship.

This thesis investigates the proliferation of alternative political imaginaries in the Web-based art produced during the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath (2008- 2015), with a particular focus on the influence of communist utopianism. The thesis begins by exploring the continuous relevance of utopianism to Western political thought, including the historical context within which the financial crisis of 2008 occurred. This context has been defined by the new political, social and cultural milieu produced by the development of Data Capitalism – the dominant economic paradigm of the last two decades. In parallel, the thesis identifies the “organic” connections between leftist utopian thought and networked technologies, in order to claim that the events of 2008 functioned as a catalyst for their reactivation and expansion. Following this analysis, the thesis focuses on how politically engaged artists have reacted to the global financial crisis through the use of the World Wide Web. More specifically, the thesis categorises a wide range of artworks, institutional and non-institutional initiatives, as well as theoretical texts that have either been written by artists, or have inspired them. The result of this exercise is a mapping of the post-crisis Web-based art, which is grounded on the technocultural tools employed by artists as well as on the main concepts and ideals that they have aimed at materialising through the use of such tools. Furthermore, the thesis examines the interests of Data Capitalists in art and the Internet, and the kinds of restrictions and obstacles that they have imposed on the political use of the Web in order to safeguard them. Finally, the thesis produces an overall evaluation of the previously analysed cultural products by taking into account both the objectives of their creators and the external and internal limitations that ultimately shape their character. Accordingly, the thesis locates the examined works within the ideological spectrum of Marxist and post-Marxist thought in order to formulate a series of proposals about the future of politically engaged Web-based art and the ideological potentialities of networked communication at large.

This research considers an artist’s encounter with works of art that carry or evoke the affective traces of an experience of loss. Examining images, photographs and sculptural objects and installations that inscribe and in turn expose absence in presence, this research through writing as a practice simultaneously investigates and performs the work as a response to loss. The thesis proposes that the work of art evokes loss by materialising absence. The work of art, like the work of mourning, works by inscribing a trace of the affective experience – the absence of the presence of the other. It is through the affective materiality of the work of art that we come to sense loss; when confronted with, and wounded by, the inscription of absence and its powerful relation to time. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, the study shows how loss can silence but also move us to create a new language when existing forms of representation fail to signify. Shifting between asignification and signification, the new poetic language carries an imprint of the body; it reconnects to affects to inscribe loss. In the languages of writing, photography and sculpture, I suggest, art attempts to give shape to what cannot be said, to what cannot be shown, to what resists representation. Through close readings of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Louise Bourgeois, the thesis suggests that by resisting representation these artists create works in which textile materials indicate a fundamental encounter with a material sign that gives rise to affects. I analyse works in which fabric is infused with the trace of an absent other. The analysis of contemporary works rubs against the narratives of the origins of art in the ‘Corinthian Maid’ and in the history of prehistoric handprints on cave walls, both of which reveal the gesture of inscribing a presence that anticipates absence. The study draws on philosophy to consider that what is inscribed is not only the absence of a presence but existence; what is inscribed is the vestige or trace of a ‘passing through the world’. The research is generated by a transformative encounter with loss and with art that invites yet resists interpretation; an affective encounter through which what is other can touch, and what touches can be thought. Art, I suggest (after Deleuze), can move us to recover the creative potency of thought in order to inscribe the singularity of the encounter. To write through loss is to write what is impossible to represent and yet insists on being written.

This research began as an investigation of the artist's subjectivity within the process of creating art. The focus of the research was the state of stasis, experienced by the artist as absence of action and nothingness. Reflexive methodology and autobiography were chosen as the basic epistemological and methodological approaches in order to fulfil the framework, questions and needs of this research. Diaries and Meta-Diaries as tools of the methodological approach were significant in the understanding of the artist's subjectivity and its manifestation in the written document. Diary entries were treated as instances of subjectivity rather than symptoms of the truth of the subject. I referred to diaries as part of a 'diary practice' which is inclusive of the time not writing in the diary. Additionally diaries developed an exchange with the artist's practice, became part of the concerns of this research and finally became part of the practice as much as a way of exploring it. Stasis was examined through diary practice and artworks and its characteristics were mapped out. These characteristics were uncertainty, frustration and anticipation of action for the subject. The artist's own diaries and works were examined within the contemporary artistic and theoretical context to determine the strategies the artist adopts to escape stasis. These strategies were initially determined as: Repetition creating a refuge for the subject; Submission to arkhé as a way of providing continuity and The creation of a network of complicity as an affirmation of existence. Drasis, a Greek concept the meaning of which includes both 'act' and the 'performance', was adopted to describe the strategy by which the eventisation of stasis is performed. In drasis the focus of my artwork would become stasis and not action. Through drasis the eventisation of stasis was carried out, marking a strategy of the artist in stasis. Drasis, a strategy for the artist as subject in stasis, is, together with the creative work, my main contribution to knowledge in this research.

This research examines the hypothesis that installation art: -is not a medium but a mode of address, addressing the world as a multiplicity; -uses tactics of 'dispersal', which as perceptual gesture is in affinity with notions of multiplicity. The explanatory framework, which legitimates 'dispersal' as installation's defining tactic, is introduced step by step, through the articulation of certain concepts such as: 'field of activities' (Kaye, 2000), 'intervening screen', (Deleuze, 1968), 'dilation' (Ahearne, 1995), afterwardness' (Laplanche, 1992), 'the knowing not to know' (Derrida, 1992), 'emotion-value' (Barthes, 1977) and 'autopoetics closure' (Luhmann, 2000). Structured by this framework, the practice for this research addresses, on one hand, the concept of otherness - understood as the infinite learning of 'differential truths' (Ahearne, 1995, p. 192) and on the other hand, a notion of urban image - understood as fragmentary imagery able to accommodate a sense of public space over imprints of experienced time. From the analysis of this practice the research concludes that: -the employment of 'dispersal' as a defining tactic allows the work to surface into visibility as a sharing of a system of relevance; -this sharing aims to displace meaning, by pushing it away from an autonomous condition, located on the work's surface; -meaning, when presented as a sharing of a system of relevance, is relocated throughout different 'levels of immersion' inside the work; -from this new positioning, meaning will only be retrieved by the work-in-situ of a particular viewer's reading; -this condition of random retrieval implies that the work will generate meaning as 'differential truth' (Ahearne, 1995, p. 192), which exists outside 'the disease of identity' (Certeau, 1969, p. 179); -as 'differential truth', meaning becomes a function, not of the authority of a specific voice, but of the ability to respond [a response-ability], exercised by the maker in facing the world, and by the viewer in the face of the work.

Between 1961 and 1986, the contexts in which artists could train and practice in Mozambique radically shifted. During the country’s transition from overseas territory of Portugal’s quasi-fascist Estado Novo regime, to Marxist-Leninist vanguard state, to neo-liberal democracy, expressions of international solidarity with the Mozambique liberation front (FRELIMO) generated dynamic flows of people, objects and ideas into and out of the country. This state of flux produced a range of opportunities for artists, as well as contingent expectations for the role of their work in the new nation. Understanding art education and patronage as both an apparatus of power and a locus of transnational exchange, this thesis focuses on the experience of three artists who navigated this shifting terrain: Malangatana (1936-2011), João Craveirinha (born 1947) and Celestino ‘Cejuma’ Matavele (born 1959). Whilst these artists all articulated, in different ways, the struggle against colonialism and their vision for a future nation, their approaches often ran counter to the prevailing political discourse and aesthetic pedagogies. Ultimately, I argue that this dissonance reveals how deeply the parameters for art in Mozambique were contested by artists during this time.