The Art Appreciation course explores the world’s visual arts, focusing on the development of visual awareness, assessment, and appreciation by examining a variety of styles from various periods and cultures while emphasizing the development of a common visual language. The materials are meant to foster a broader understanding of the role of visual art in human culture and experience from the prehistoric through the contemporary. This is an Open Educational Resource (OER), an openly licensed educational material designed to replace a traditional textbook. The course materials consist of 24 lessons each with a presentation, reading list, and/or sample assignment. For ease of adapting, materials are available as PDFs and Microsoft PowerPoint or Word documents. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-oer/1000/thumbnail.jpg

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This thesis explores the way in which interior decorating developed as a practice during the interwar period in Britain and seeks to address broader contexts of gender, class, taste and styles. While traditional design histories have tracked the development of the interior design model through a direct sequence of movements and ideologies through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this thesis addresses issues which have been problematic within the context of art and design history. It acknowledges the more linear dimension of the original strand and seeks to offer a complementary appraisal which considers and appreciates the role of class, wealth and privilege and deconstructs boundaries which have marginalized gender and obscured certain important influences. The study examines the way in which decorators, many of whom were female, negotiated a design agenda which engaged with modernity without fully renouncing hard-fought signifiers of their class, taste and individuality. It argues that in the development of its practices, significant alliances were formed with fashion and that the vital role performed by media representation and social commentary underpinned its commercial profile and provided the public locus of its discourse. The nature of professional decorating is explored against a background of emerging practices in the first decades of the twentieth-century which included the antiques trade; grand scale establishments such as Lenygon & Morant, White Allom, Thornton-Smith and Keebles; department-store studios including those at Heal’s, Waring & Gillow and Fortnum & Mason; and individual practitioners and designers including Syrie Maugham, Sibyl Colefax, Dolly Mann and Ronald Fleming. In a period rife with social and political upheavals and conflicting ideologies as well as technological advancement and life-style changes, the study’s analysis aims to provide a broader understanding of the way in which decorators proactively negotiated such conditions and presented a cultural and aesthetic response to modernity through the diversity of their styles.

The current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account. How can artists address social politics when the politics of art remain opaque? Artists situated critically within the museum self-consciously acknowledge the institutional frame and their own complicity with it. Artists’ compromised role within the institution of art obscures their radically opposed values. Institutions are conservative hierarchies that aim to augment and consolidate their authority. How can works of art be liberating when the institutional conditions within which they are exhibited are exclusive, compromised and exploitive? Despite their purported neutrality, art institutions instrumentalise art politically and ideologically. Institutional mediation defines the work of art in the terms of its own ideology, controlling the legitimate discourse on value and meaning in art. In a society where everything is instrumentalised and heteronomously defined, autonomous art performs a social critique. Yet how is it possible to make autonomous works of art when they are instantly recuperated by commercial and ideological interests? At a certain point, my own art practice could no longer sustain these contradictions. This thesis researches the possibilities for a sustainable and uncompromised art practice. If art is the critical alternative to society then it must function critically and alternatively. Artistic ambition is not just a matter of aesthetic objectives or professional anxiety; it is particularly a matter of the values that artists affirm through their practice. Art can define its own terms of production and the burden of responsibility falls on artists. The Exploding Cinema Collective has survived independently for twenty years, testifying to this principle. Autonomy is a valuable tool in the critique of heteronomy, but artists must assert it. The concept of the autonomy of art must be replaced with the concept of the autonomy of the artist.

The ‘Avant-Garde’ in architecture seems a challenging subject: first, because the term has not yet clearly defined, despite the ubiquity of its use; second, because through that ubiquity it has become a buzz-word that is empty of precise meaning; third, because although this use includes the history of modern architecture, its application to this field has been largely unreflective and often unconsidered, as this thesis demonstrates. There is ambivalence as to which architectures are ‘Avant-Garde’ or should be regarded as ‘Avant-Garde.’ Therefore, there is a challenge in any question such as: what is the Avant-Garde in architecture? How can the architectural Avant-Garde be defined? What is the concept of the Avant-Garde in architecture? My thesis is a sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde in architecture. It is based on the mapping of the use the‘ term ‘Avant-Garde’ in architectural history, theory and criticism and its analytical tools are sociological. While it belongs to the above fields, it is informed by art theory and history, cultural studies, and the sociology of the professions, and includes sociological, cultural and political analyses. I suggest that the Avant-Garde is an Operation internal to architecture; a mechanism that does not only describe it but formulates it, motivates it, or else, influences our perception of it. I propose that the Avant-Garde is directed by prominent elements of its internal domain. It includes a filtering process, a rough selection process, and a selection process, by which one or more architectures internal conditions - are introduced to the discipline to renew the profession toward the desired and necessary, for the element who directs the operation, direction (see fig. 2, appendix). The end result of the selection process is what we commonly understand as ‘Avant-Garde’ architecture, e.g. Russian Constructivism or Bauhaus. I also propose that the Avant-Garde lies in and operates within the socio-ideological sphere of architecture and that renewal of the architecture's internal domain is necessary, thus the Avant-Garde is necessary, so as to make architecture respond to each time new external conditions and so endure, as a profession, over time. The Avant-Garde is for me an operation of renewal, a driver of difference and change in architecture (see fig. 1, appendix). The methodology adopted is as follows: I first introduce my analytical tools, some key sociological concepts, and concepts from the ‘Avant-Garde’ discourse (chapter 1). I then examine the filtering process and rough selection process in architectural history: I map the usage of the term in a historiographic corpus and arrive at the more frequently and the less frequently named ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures, which become my two case studies. These are Russian Revolutionary Architecture and Italian Rationalism (chapter 2). The third step is to arrive, through the comparison of my case studies, at those parameters that are crucial in being selected as ‘Avant-Garde,’ i.e. their ‘Avantgardification’ - this occurs after 1960 when the term starts being used describing architectures (part 2). The fourth step is to examine the period of the extended 19605 when the term starts appearing as a means of describing architectures and thus the selection process begins (chapter 6). As a fifth step I research the selection process in the discourse of architectural theory and criticism: I investigate in a particular corpus of writings which architectures, by whom they are chosen as ‘Avant-Garde,’ and the reason why, as Well as which are the concomitant effects of the usage of the term on architecture. In other words, beyond concentrating on which architectures or architectural movements are ‘Avant-Garde' in these writings, I focus on the effects of this selection and denomination (chapter 7). As a sixth step, I examine the selection process of my two case studies in architectural theory and criticism, i.e the Avantgardification of Russian Revolutionary Architecture and less of Italian Rationalism. I investigate when, by whom, and the reason why the first architecture is mostly selected as ‘Avant- Garde,’ as well as which are the concomitant effects on architecture (chapter 8, see also fig. 3, appendix). As a final step I examine the Avant-Garde as a sociological concept based on the key-concepts introduced in chapter 1 (Conclusions). A sociological conceptualization of the Avant-Garde is important for shedding light on issues beyond those of ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures. Through such a concept of the Avant-Garde we recognize issues of the profession, issues which are wider than questions which are directly connected to those architectures selected as such. Looking through the ‘Avant-Garde’ we understand the ways by which architecture is being renewed and Operated. By recognizing the conditions, in which the ‘Avant-Garde’ architectures have been created, and the way and time in which the term was employed to describe them, we understand the mode in which architecture, as a discipline, functions. My thesis is a hermeneutics of the architectural profession through the term ‘Avant-Garde.’

As a practice-led thesis comprised of drawing, sculpture, video, notebooks, and a written dissertation, this study by way of art making argues against the provocation that life sciences aided by the advances in visualizing techniques will hegemonise much of what there is to see and know about biological life. Historian James Elkins argued that non-art informational images were historically relevant considering the strategies scientists use for visualizing phenomena and W. J. T. Mitchell noted the impact of proliferation in image production together with computer technology as the epistemological shift from word to image and coined the phrase pictorial turn. Concurrently philosopher Gottfried Boehm deployed the term iconic turn to discuss the problematics associated with the power of images. I incorporate these insights to examine the affects of biomedical imaging as seen in artworks formed out of biologically sourced organic materials and techniques. Especially once grouped as Bio Art (Kac 1997) or organic media art (Hauser 2006) these artworks further accentuate the problem of representation and its relationship to knowledge and power underscored by the phenomena that biotechnology is changing perceptions of what the body is and can become. The written component of the thesis addresses these problems. It does this by critiquing visualization through the example fluorescent tagging as this technique exemplifies the most innovative and transgressive procedure for imaging biology in-vivo. I argue the following: the visualization of biology, like the mathematization of the surface of reflection pioneered by Ibn al-Haytham is not a problem because it shows Man’s technological prowess but rather because mathematization brings with it the legacy of ontological uneasiness with images in Western philosophical tradition. This tension persists and gets exacerbated especially in contexts where molecular scale visualizing aids the invention of novel life forms as art or laboratory creatures. To reconcile the paradoxes that emerge from critical analysis of the effects of biotechnology that have been discussed in binary terms such as natural or artificial, mimetic or real, I introduce to the lexicon of new media art and theory the concept of non-duality from Arabic philosophy formalized by Ibn ‘Arabi through the analogy of barzakh. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s scheme images are a part of the imaginal sphere and are not perceived as mimetic. Neither is the image given primacy in the formation of knowledge nor is the image given an absolute position of certainty. Instead, images are the intermediary and dynamic part of cognitive process that brings with reason knowledge and with knowledge, responsibility. Thus theorized, imaginal are able to facilitate the possibility to actualise the fullest comprehension of wujud that in translation is also the pursuit for knowledge that guides action. In this way informed by practice, this thesis dissolves the distrust of vision and proposes that scientific images are like art that can embolden the intellectual capacity for creativity and abstract thought.

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which whiteness and authenticity are manifested within contemporary visual culture in South Africa. The project begins as an artistic inquiry grounded in autobiography, which becomes an elaborate self-portrait narrated from the distance of the third person. My practice aims to address the trajectories that I am unable to articulate through my theoretical analysis. Through a process of solvent release printing, I explore the dualities of my own identity as African and white in an attempt to counteract the view that one negates the other. Part I attempts to provide an archive-able record of this practice. Part II shows that a long history of dichotomous art-historical practice has resulted in differentiated artistic pressures for black and white South African artists. I discuss the development of platforms that have contributed to the shifting of such classificatory trends without dissolving them completely, namely the first and second Johannesburg Biennales, Africus (1995) and Trade Routes (1997). In doing so, I trace how these events have troubled such stereotypes. Whiteness is identified as the overriding factor which allows the dominant discourse of Western- and Euro-centric ideals to remain prioritised. Brett Murray and Minnette Vári are discussed as examples of white South African artists who problematise whiteness by addressing racial fluidity, belonging, authenticity and identity. The theme of autobiography is reintroduced in the conclusion, where I argue that my own practice could be seen to mirror the strategies that each artist has employed to subvert their whiteness, and to build a case for accessing a multiple identity that is African in its ability to be diverse. I conclude that it is ultimately the artists’ performative use of their own bodies which allows them to discuss issues of representation without falling into the ideological position of the coloniser.

This research project operates from the perspective of the author as graphic design practitioner and considers how practice-based visual methods may be used to form a novel system of analysis in graphic design research. The focus of this research is the Conservative Party poster, produced for the British General Elections held between 1979 and 2010. With practice at the core of the research methodology, visual design methods have been configured and applied to a range of material in order to generate insights about how visual language is used in a variety of contexts. The research includes a review of the graphic communication of the British political poster, existing visual methods, and practice-based research within the field of graphic design. From there, a system of practice-based methods was devised, and then applied to the Conservative Party posters. The design system employs methods that disassemble each poster into its individual components (type, image, hierarchy, colour and negative space), mapping each using simple visual techniques, before reassembling these components to identify trends and insights in relation to various political themes. In order to test this design system, these methods were applied to a very different type of visual communication material produced for Sense, a charitable organisation that advocates for the rights of deaf-blind people. This proved valuable to the study, and demonstrated how this system could function in a very different context. The output of this study proposes potential visual devices for aiding visually impaired readers engage with photographic imagery. The findings and visual outputs of this investigation are described in this thesis, and are also housed in a series of three books that form the practice component of this research project. This thesis aims to highlight the value of practice-based methods within graphic design research, and specifically, methods more exclusively available to the graphic design practitioner. Practice is of central importance to this research project, forming the core of the methodology, as well as the outputs produced in response to the research findings. Through establishing the visual characteristics of the Conservative Party poster (1979-2010), this research seeks to demonstrate how a novel system of practice-based methods might help further an understanding of visual communication design.

This practice-based doctoral research project is an artist’s response to the ‘unique status’ ascribed to human remains in the DCMS Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums (2005): as objects, in scientific, medical/anthropological contexts, or subjects, which may be understood in associative, symbolic and/or emotional ways. It is concerned with the circumstances in which human remains were collected and interpreted in the past, and with the legacies of historical practice regarding their presence in museum collections today. Overall, it aims to contribute to public engagement concerning these issues. Taking the form of a Comparative Study the project focuses on the late nineteenth century, when human skulls were collected in great numbers for comparative anatomical and anthropological research, while in wider society the fashion for incorporating human hair into mourning artefacts became ubiquitous following the death of Prince Albert in 1861. William Henry Flower’s craniological work at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, where he amassed a vast collection of human skulls that he interpreted according to theories of racial “type” (in which hair was identified as an important distinguishing characteristic), is investigated, and its legacy reviewed. His scientific objectification of human remains is presented for comparison, in parallel, with the emotional and associative significance popularly attributed to mourning hairwork, evidenced in accompanying documentation, contemporary diaries, literature, and hairworkers’ manuals. Combining inter-related historical, archival- and object-based research with subjective and intuitive elements in my practice, a synthesis of the artistic and academic is developed in the production of a new “archive” of The Wildgoose Memorial Library - my collection of found and made objects, photographs, documents and books that takes a central place in my practice. Victorian hairworking skills are researched, and a new piece of commemorative hairwork devised and made as the focus for a site-specific presentation of this archive at the Crypt Gallery St. Pancras, in which a new approach to public engagement is implemented and tested, concerning the legacy and special status of human remains in museum collections today.

This thesis explores the design and modernisation of public houses in London and environs in the period between the licensing acts of 1872 and 1902. The late nineteenth century public house of historical account has emerged as a site spatially and materially designed and organised to meet the needs of customers anxious to preserve class-based social distinctions within the public sphere. The thesis argues that this dominant socio-spatial mapping of the interior has obscured other important and intersecting influences on the design and organisation of London's public houses in the period, notably the relationship with the home and the influence of gender on the development of the interior. Further, the productive -and socially constitutive nature of the interior has been left largely unconsidered. The study explores the spatial, material and aesthetic models upon which London's . late nineteenth century public houses developed. It employs a public/private framework as an historical analytic with the flexibility to investigate social, spatial and intellectual constructs, and as a way of examining the site in terms used by publicans, customers and legislators to define its spaces and negotiate its boundaries. The thesis aims to extend current understanding of the public/private relationship through an examination of material change in a single building type; to evidence the historical processes by which the boundaries between public and private spaces and activities were negotiated, contested and formalised; to explore the implications of these negotiations for class and gender identities; and to provide a material focus for more abstract discussions about space.