After the invention of photography, modern theoreticians were hopeful that photographys faithfulness to nature would resolve painterly deficiencies by providing a more recognizable and convincing reproduction. Paradoxically, the advent of photography did not improve upon paintings failures, but exhibited an inherent problem. In particular, aspects of temporality hindered photographys ability to reproduce a convincing likeness. Concerning this issue, Gombrich opines that it could be [] true to say that we never see [in reality] what the instantaneous photograph reveals, for we gather up successions of movements, and never see static configurations as such.1 Because the constant motion of the eyes as well as the ephemeral nature of existence limits perception, I am studying the techniques used to convey aspects of likeness in the celebrity photo-portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson. To establish what stylistic choices contribute to a recognizable portrait, I will analyze Bressons photographical methods which he delineated in The Decisive Moment. Bressons concept of the decisive moment, far from falling within modernist accounts of photographys medium specificity, actually traces back to a much older discussion, one concerned with unearthing relations between photographs and paintings. As examples of this discussion, I look to ideas expressed by late nineteenth-century photographer-scientist Francis Galton and police officer Alphonse Bertillon. These theorists ascertained that photographs are not representative of a sum-total or synthetic image which humans perceive, but are indicative of an imperceptible instant. While Bressons conception of photographic likeness relates to ideas espoused by Francis Galton, I also prove that Bressons work is distinct from Galtons as it relates to human typicality. Whereas Galtons ideas concerning likeness relate to a need to arrive at ideal types, a comparison of Bressons work with broader developments in the history of the concept of objectivity and image making reveals the ways in which Bressons conception of typicality is distinct from that of Galton. 1 Ernst Hans Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 50.

This dissertation focuses on the refashioning of Veronas urban space and identity during the Fascist regime. Traditionally, Fascist-sponsored restoration projects were interpreted as top-down undertakings decided and directly controlled by central state authority. Only recently have studies begun to test this thesis and show the involvement of local forces in the reshaping of Fascist Italys urban spaces. My research builds on this recent scholarship by showing the active role played by Veronas socio-political elites in the refashioning of the citys urban fabric. However, my study also extends the current literature on Fascist-sponsored restoration projects by discussing the contribution of international narratives to the debate surrounding the refashioning of Italys built heritage. In this study I explore the ways in which these narrativesparticularly those advanced by tourism and the Hollywood film industryinfluenced local and national socio-political groups, forcing them to renegotiate their project of appropriation of the citys historic heritage within a broader framework of international assumptions about Veronas famous history. Far from being a top-down undertaking, the reshaping of the citys urban space emerges as a complex process of mediation between distinct groups, with different interests at stake, each trying to capitalize on Veronas world-wide reputation to further its own agenda. While preservation groups insisted on the importance of maintaining and restoring the citys multiple historical layers, the local socio-political elite pressed for an idealalthough sometimes fictitious recreation of Veronas built heritage with the intent to foster tourism and support their myth of identity. The central government, on the other hand, fully supported local initiatives in order to build consensus for the regime as long as such projects could be reconciled with Fascisms agenda of nation and empire building. The study of the refashioning of Veronas architectural fabric shows that Mussolini appropriated the citys cultural tradition but left ample freedom of action to local officials and the urban bourgeoisie in their urban renewal efforts. Ultimately, this project contributes to a deeper understanding of Fascisms relationship with the past and provides insight into the culturally constructed nature of urban spaces and identities.

The thesis discusses the causes of the failure of the early Victorian textile industries to produce fine designs, and analyses the responses of manufacturers, artisans and critics to the issues raised by the problem. In Part 1 the historical changes of 'key words' such as art craft, artisan and artist are surveyed. It is suggested that changes in technology and work organisation and the formation of new social classes were mainly responsible for changes in the use of language. Part 2 looks at the labour process: technological changes and their results in the production of design are traced back and aesthetic aspects of the machinery question are analysed. The division of labour, its consequences in the designing process, and the nature of work (child labour in particular) are examined. The workers' defence of their skills and their desire to regain lost skills are also emphasised in the first two Parts: Part 3 then analyses economic, social and cultural aspects of the artistic education that was provided as a remedy for declining artistic standards and workmanship. Industrial exhibitions are discussed in the context of the education of the public in 'taste', as well as of the commercial interests of the manufacturing sectors. Part 4 discusses the market, where the design had become a relatively important part of the value of commodities. Manufacturers' concern with piracy and the protection of design copyright are examined; the interests of pro- and anti-copyright campaigners are discussed in relation to the free trade movement. Finally, the responses of manufacturers and merchants towards 'fashion' in the market are analysed: it is argued that the arbiters of 'taste' were more likely to be manufacturers and merchants than designers, and that the former did indeed damage the reputation of British design and created a problem which became apparent when other industrial nations caught up with Britain in technological achievement.

The primary aim of this thesis is to focus attention on the bourgeois, 'un-named' collector. The driving force behind most museum and art gallery collections of the Victorian and Edwardian period. British museum and art gallery records of gifted collections, bequests and loans usually note their donors. However, with a few notable exceptions, little is known about the collectors, their activities and motivation in making such presentations. Using the interests and activities of the Quaker miller and collector Ernest Marsh (1843-1945) as a case study, this thesis explores how in the period 1890-1945 a collector came to be a key agent in the construction and manifestation of taste in British Applied Arts and to a lesser degree in the Fine Arts. Through primary visual and documentary evidence of the Marsh home, and reference to contemporary and later commentaries it considers the relative influences of husband and wife on decorating and furnishing the domestic interior, the evolution of taste, and, for Ernest Marsh, its impact upon his artistic interests within the public arena. By examination of private papers, metropolitan and provincial art gallery and museum archives it also considers evidence of the inter-relationships between donors and curators, and the mutual advantages and disadvantages accruing to both, particularly focussing on the processes in bringing about changes in individual and institutional collecting policy. Further, by review of records of, in particular, the Contemporary Art Society and the Greenslade archive, it examines the degree to which private benefactors and those in public or semi-public office, acting as fund-raisers and spenders exercise influence through patronage of particular practitioners, choice of works and initiating new designs.

Through painting, drawing, photography and digital design, I have investigated the relationship between, on the one hand, my fine art practice—with its interest in postcolonial African and diaspora identities (or, ‘Africana’)—and on the other hand, works at The Tate Gallery—with its remit to hold the National Collection of British Art. By interrogating iconological ‘conditions of existence’ for works by Fehr, Sargent and Brock, I created new artworks that indicated hidden (or, ‘fugitive’) African connections with the intention of disrupting complacent assumptions and reimagining unacknowledged (or, ‘masked’) themes. I considered concepts of Africa: described by Mudimbe as ‘discursive formations’ (after Foucault) and embodying postcolonial, transracial identities; in addition, I addressed the problematics of Tate’s British Art collection as a post-imperial brand of ‘cultural capital’. Unmasking fugitive Africana was a practical methodology designed to produce artworks. So,while aware of many theoretical interlocutors, I pursued a convoluted, sometimes intuitive path through the creative process by making drawings, digital designs, photographs and paintings. Nonetheless, Stuart Hall’s framework of an ‘oppositional code’ was key and so I suggest that, as practiced by artists, ‘unmasking Africana’ might be an inherently counter-hegemonic,critical project. My investigation embodied technical and conceptual problematics of critical enquiry as a mode of studio practice. I explored unmasking methodologies through reading, observation,reflection and painterly, synthesised appropriations—also witnessing an evolution in my imagery, from iconographically layered compositions to works in which identities and motifs seemed to fuse. As well as the studio investigation and writing, my project had a pedagogic element. In a series of seminars, I taught MA students at C.C.W. Graduate School the preliminary findings of my research. My interviews with students produced evaluations about their learning, which I later disseminated as part of UAL’s programme to reduce disparities between white and B.A.M.E. British undergraduate students.

The aim of this practice-based research project is to examine how specular highlights and proximal spaces, when perceived through the Lacanian gaze, might confound our perception of Cartesian perspectivalism in representational painting. I will analyse and question such a combination of specific visual characteristics identified within three of my paintings and related theories of looking. Specifically, these include Hal Foster’s (1996: 138) reading of the ways in which the Lacanian ‘gaze’ disrupts Cartesian perspectivalism, Norman Bryson’s (1990: 71, 79) writing on the reversal of the ‘Albertian gaze’ and Arthur Faisman and Michael S. Langer’s (2013: 1) definition of ‘specular highlights’. By analysing and mapping theoretical concerns that come from close readings of three of my paintings I will investigate whether or not our perception of Cartesian perspectivalism can be somewhat confounded by these specific visual characteristics. I will also discuss how overloading the viewer with an excessive use of specular highlights could disrupt any underlying narratives within the paintings. This will be done by subsequently re-examining these theoretical concerns back through my painting practice, forming what Dean and Smith (2009: 19) have termed an ‘Iterative Cyclic Web’. My hypothesis is that these three paintings may be nexus for a particular oscillation between different ways of looking contained within the paintings I will discuss: looking through the surface, looking across the surface and a form of being looked at from inside the surface. This thesis will be underpinned by two interconnected elements. Firstly, there will be an exhibition of selected paintings I have made, together with painting experiments and supporting material. Secondly, chapters in this text will outline the theoretical analysis of my painting practice and the subsequent studio-based analysis of questions derived from the theoretical analysis. This thesis as a whole will closely follow a practice-based research methodology drawn from Katie MacLeod’s (2000: online) writing on ‘revealing a practice’. I will move back and forth between practice and writing as a method for analysing and developing a multifaceted response to my research question.

This research arises out of my situated experience and the subsequent indeterminate positioning of my practice in-between the traditional disciplinary fields of textiles and fine art. Through a body of studio enquiry and accompanying theoretical and reflective commentary, the research questions whether a practice and knowledge base that is historically grounded in the interrogation of medium specific conventions can continue to be viable within a post medium/ postmodern contemporary art context. Implicit within this are two further considerations concerning the relationship between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic contexts and the tensions between subjective and material agency that arise in negotiating these positions. Through a sculptural and installational practice I propose a constellatory opening up of textile in conjunction with other materials, in terms of material agency and ‘productive indeterminacy’, where boundaries become blurred, meaning is unable to settle and fundamental categorical divisions between subject and object are destabilised. The processual inter-relational model of ‘attachment/detachment’ is offered as a conceptual framework and overarching practice methodology that maintains these productive tensions and opens up a complexity through which the medium specific can be mapped in a fluid and fragmentary way. Three interdisciplinary concepts; ‘camouflage’ (Neal Leach/architecture), mimetic comportment (Theodor Adorno/philosophy) and ‘complicity’ (Johanna Drucker/contemporary art) provide theoretical models which allow for assimilation and differentiation and embodied adaptive behaviour. Drawing particular reference from Adorno’s notion of mimetic comportment, the research involves a mode of behaviour that actively opens up to alterity and returns authority to the indeterminacy of the aesthetic encounter in a way that overturns the centrality of the subject. This is manifest through a range of practice strategies - ‘thingness’, ‘staging’ and the confluence of ‘sensuous immediacy and corporeal containment’ - which forge connections where distinctions remain mutable and mobilise a productive tension between subjective attachment and detachment. The research takes the ‘affective turn’, and increasing interest in the agency of material across the arts, humanities and social sciences over the course of the last decade, as contexts which mark a shift away from concerns with signification and which focus instead on the corporeal intensities of material/matter. Acknowledging the critical currency afforded to textile in terms of signifying agency, the project is notable in placing an emphasis on materially embodied experience that privileges aesthetic artifice, complicit formalism and an ambiguous abstract sculptural language over more overt strategies of representation. The research offers a reinscription of medium specificity in terms of material agency, where contrary to modernist conceptions of self-contained aesthetic autonomy there is a simultaneous concern with the distinct material properties of the medium and what they do in the social world. The research reveals that it is the ontological condition of textile as simultaneously social and material that has paradoxically accounted for its historical cultural ambivalence and its cultural significance. Moreover, it demonstrates that it is the interweaving of the sensuous and semantic so effectively mobilised through textile that gives rise to its affective indeterminacy. This affords it agential capacity as a transformative sensuous mode of knowledge production and artistic medium where boundaries between subject and object are destabilised and aesthetic considerations can be continuous with an engagement with social, historical and cultural contexts.

This is a practice–based PhD that seeks to contest limited and reductive tropes of female representation in a contemporary Western context. The focus of the thesis is on video art, which, I argue, can be both a radical tool for deconstructing dominant mainstream images of femininity and play a role in developing progressive re–presentations of female subjectivities. This thesis argues that there is a need to revisit feminist artworks from the 1970s and 1980s, the critical potential of which remains under–examined. Video as an artistic medium emerged during the late 1960s to 1980s over the same period that the women’s liberation movement gained momentum and achieved historic societal and legislative change in the West. Women artists used the medium of video as a means to contest the representational economy of traditional gender roles that placed a broad array of limitations upon women. The camera apparatus allowed women to control the production of their own image, articulate their subjective experiences and directly address the spectator. The re–imaging of female subjectivities progressed by feminist artists was, however, largely halted by the backlash against feminism in the 1990s. The issues raised by feminism, particularly in relation to female representation, therefore remain unresolved. This thesis argues that artistic strategies deployed by feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s, underpinned by the radical principle ‘the personal is political’, which emerged in the 1970s, are still useful today. Through in depth analysis of selected video works from the 1970s onwards as well as reflection on my own art practice research, this thesis investigates how formal strategies employed by feminist artists can operate to undermine the status quo of hegemonic gender representations and to propose new potentialities of female subjectivities and gender identities.

This thesis begins with an examination of collective art practices in Cuba in relation to the wider collectivised society. This acts as a counterbalance for engaging with the strategy of artists’ groups in the United Kingdom and the differences between political thinking in Cuba and the West. Practice-based research in the form of curatorial activity has constantly responded to the theoretical underpinnings of this thesis. The multi-platform project 'Assembling' (2013-2015) understands the exhibition to be collaborative from the moment of inception. Through the circulation of material in a process of gathering, electing and making visible objects and ideas, 'Assembling' has brought together artists previously unknown to each other from Cuba and the United Kingdom to find and cluster around a shared sense of social imaginary, a shared issue of concern. A 'Typology of Association' runs throughout the thesis to trace thought on grouping found in political theory, art history, exhibitionary practice and sociology to produce a nuanced interpretation of how it is that we envisage ourselves in relation to group identifiers. Concomitantly, the main text of the thesis asks, ‘Does the “social” exist in and of itself at all?’. Although this is a wide-reaching question, it is key for understanding artists’ groups as the social becomes a composed (Latour, 2005) space in which elements can be actively distributed (Rancière, 2000) to form temporal assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) making the social 'a practice'. Rather than enquire for example, what is ‘community art’, this research removes an assumptive meaning and asks what is ‘community’ and how does art practice activate its composition? Shifting social space is understood in terms of consistency: solid, fluid (Berman, 1982; Bauman, 2010) and foam (Sloterdijk, 2007, 2011).

This thesis aims to conduct a study of battle jackets using painting as a recording and analytical tool. A battle jacket is a customised garment worn in heavy metal subcultures that features decorative patches, band insignia, studs and other embellishments. Battle jackets are significant in the expression of subcultural identity for those that wear them, and constitute a global phenomenon dating back at least to the 1970s. The art practice juxtaposes and re-contextualises cultural artefacts in order to explore the narratives and traditions that they are a part of. As such, the work is situated within the genre of contemporary still life and appropriative painting. The paintings presented with the written thesis document a series of jackets and creatively explore the jacket form and related imagery. The study uses a number of interrelated critical perspectives to explore the meaning and significance of the jackets. Intertextual approaches explore the relationship of the jackets to other cultural forms. David Muggleton’s ‘distinctive individuality’ and Sarah Thornton’s ‘subcultural capital’ are used to emphasise the importance of jacket making practices for expressions of personal and corporate subcultural identity. Italo Calvino’s use of postmodern semiotic structures gives a tool for placing battle jacket practice within a shifting network of meanings, whilst Richard Sennett’s‘material consciousness’ helps to understand the importance of DIY making practices used by fans. The project refers extensively to a series of interviews conducted with battle jacket makers between 2014 and 2016. Recent art historical studies of still life painting have used a materialist critique of historic works to demonstrate the uniqueness of painting as a method of analysis. The context for my practice involves historical references such as seventeenth century Dutch still life painting. The work of contemporary artists who are exploring the themes and imagery of extreme metal music is also reviewed.