This thesis re-evaluates Italian Futurist art's relationship with the past, focusing on the years 1909-1919. This aspect of the movement is fundamental to its complex identity, yet has not received prolonged scholarly attention. In order to reconsider Futurism's temporality this thesis focuses on the fine art practice and theoretical writings of Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, and also the writings on the movement's leader F.T. Marinetti, plus the Florentine Futurists Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici. The historiography of Futurism, which both produces the reductive antipassatista model of the movement and highlights the presence of formal similarities between the Italian artistic tradition and Futurism, is also interrogated. The first part of this thesis argues that the Futurist temporality is more nuanced than the widely accepted model of adoration of the future and repudiation of the past, and that it is related to the conflicting notions of time present in the decade in question. Using the Futurists' concept of time to analyse their relationships with the past, present and future, it argues that the present is the most important temporal mode for Futurism, but that the past and future are part of this present. This thesis approaches Futurism's relationship with Italy's artistic past in tandem with its interrogation of its temporality. This requires a consideration of the temporality of art history, the temporal orientation of avant-gardism and the connotations of tradition and appropriation in art historical practice in order to produce a spiralling art historical model in which returns to the past can be forms of progress. In the second part of this thesis, these possible appropriations of the Italian artistic tradition from Magna Graecia to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo are surveyed, using the reception of earlier art historical periods in early twentieth century Italy to consider how and why the Futurists could have appropriated them. The Futurists' continuation of the recent past of Italian and French art from Italian unification up to the launch of Futurism is also addressed, noting the anti passatismo of these precedents to show that the Futurist relationship with the past, as reconstructed in this thesis, was not sui generis. The aim of this thesis is to bring together Futurism's rhetoric about the past, understanding of time, and relationship with art history in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the movement's antipassatismo.

This practice led doctoral thesis explores the meaning of spirituality and its manifestation in figUrative art in the wider historical, religious and artistic contexts of Pakistan, alongside the presentation of a new body of artistic work which explores the contemporary possibilities of materialising spirituality in a predominately Muslim culture. The illustrated thesis engages with these two interconnected but distinct forms of research which underpin its two-part structure. The first part, Section A, comprises four chapters which investigate the various cultural and religious contexts of figurative art with particular reference to Muslim painting; Islamic attitudes to figurative art based upon the study of Islamic law and the various interpretations of the Qur'an and the hadith. It assesses the impact of colonial and postcolonial politics on the arts produced in the Indo Pak Sub-continent and the specific area that later came to constitute Pakistan (a pre-dominantly Muslim country) after the Partition of 1947. The section concludes with im exploration of Islamic spiritual ideals of truth and beauty, through Sufi thought, including the significance of for Allah and the concept of Tauhid. or His Oneness. The three chapters in the second part, Section B, represent a critical reflection on ongoing artistic practice as a female figurative artist in contemporary Pakistan. Drawing upon autobiographical material and fieldwork conducted at Sufi shrines as part this research, I discuss the series of more than twenty five paintings, drawings and siœtcnes which aim to materialise the spiritual. These are supported by a thirty minute documentation of the shrine culture with a voice over along with a video installation film on a DVD exploring the concept of fana or 'spiritual annihilation', which is the key aspect of the shrine culture. In conclusion the vital concern of finding means to materialise the concept of spirituality by creating a body of art work is an effort to fill the gap in Pakistani painting the impact of Sufi philosophy on artistic endeavours is yet to be fully explored in contemporary painting in Pakistan.

The core of this research are the paintings and cultural context of Alan Cuthbert, a hitherto un-researched figure who trained in the English art school of the late 1950s under the Constructionists Kenneth and Mary Martin and subsequently became the Head of the Foundation course at Wimbledon School of Art from 1963-1979. Cuthbert produced a substantial body of over a hundred geometric abstract paintings, lecture papers and writing and played a significant role in training future generations of artists and designers from the 1960s onwards. This thesis proposes that Cuthbert is part of a broader tendency in British art schools and that practice and teaching is intimately connected to the reorganisation of the art schools and the introduction of the Foundation course in the early 196Ös. I put forward the argument that through a study of Cuthbert and the shifts in art schools one can map a much under-researched aspect of British art. This research encompasses the three fields of art history, art education and art practice and centres on an artist-lecturer, a subject of study largely ignored by the majority of art historical writing, which is dominated by the modernist model of monographs, movements/groupings, and periods. In placing the case study of an artist-lecturer in a critical and historical context, this study maps British art through organicism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus art school pedagogy and colour as they pertain to basic design and the changes in art school teaching between 1955 and 1979. Through this case study of a colourist and systems painter this thesis suggests a different, Continental orientation for British post-war geometric abstraction.

Conceived inside a chronological frame, which starts in 1948, the year the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London founded, and ends in 1963, when Gillo Dorfles wrote a crucial essay on industrial design, concluding more than a decade of discussions, the thesis aims to examine some artistic and cultural phenomena identified in Italy and Great Britain, and seen as the acknowledgement or as the reaction to modernity. Topics and fields taken in consideration within the thesis are technology, science (fact and fiction), vision of the future, the relationship between arts and the awareness of industrial design as a new discipline. All these aspects, that might seems unusual in relationship with visual arts, are perceived as the expression of a second phase of Modernism. The British personalities included in the thesis are Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, all members of the Independent Group. With the presence of architects, visual artists, photographers, critics and, in a broader sense, designers, the group encompassed a variety of popular interests, with the inclusion of mass‐produced goods. The Italian figures presented in the thesis – Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass and Giuseppe Pinot‐Gallizio – focused on industrial design objects, viewed as a new artistic branch, to promote, to plan or to question. Other recurring figures analysed in the thesis are Max Bill, Asger Jorn and Tomás Maldonado, who give international connections to the themes and British and Italian personalities examined. In order to provide a wider understanding of the 1950s and their crucial function in the story of post‐war Europe, the thesis aims to emphasise the role played at different level by British and Italian visual artists, designers and critics, and explain the reasons that, in the following decade, would push Italy in its industrial miracle and Great Britain at the peak for its popular culture, pop music and fashion creativity.

This practice-based PHD project tests cross/trans disciplinary approaches to historical artifacts, set in the field of contemporary fine art research. It is predicated specifically upon my discovery in 2013 of a forgotten deck of fortune-telling cards, hand painted 1906 by the English artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare. Spare's cards had lain unnoticed for almost seventy years within the collection of London's secretive Magic Circle, following their accession to the magic club's museum in 1944; before that date, no record of the deck exists. I respond to this historical find in the form of two interdependent "readings" of the artist's deck of cards. 'Reading One' provides the first in-depth descriptive survey of the deck, as well as establishing its provenance, its place in the artist's oeuvre and within the wider histories of cartomancy. 'Reading Two' adopts complementary approaches that are contingent upon, and shaped by, specific findings within 'Reading One'. These include an elaboration of the deck's release from captivity at The Magic Circle ('Facsimilate and proliferate'), an evaluation of its internal connective logic ('Combinatoric consciousness'), its introduction to the moving image ('Cartomantic cinema') and to historical time ('Making up for lost time'), and the articulation of a card that is missing from the deck ('Casting for the voice of Strength'). The relationship between these two constituent readings is explored as a continuity which follows a cyclical, rather than linear, progression - second readings are contingent upon first but often lead to renewed first readings, leading to renewed second readings and so on. Within this reanimating process, the object can be seen directing its researcher, sometimes casting her/him in particular roles that meet its needs. In the realm of art production, this orientation towards the object implies that the appropriation of historical material by artists be appropriate, with all the psychological, ethical, and political consequences that such encounters entail. While applied here to a single object - Austin Spare's cartomancy deck - the project's model of contingent and continuous knowledge production encourages other researchers to respond innovatively to the directives, even demands of their chosen objects of research.

This thesis investigates the intersection of art, feminism and postwar memory in Japan through lens of artist Yoshiko Shimada. Coinciding with unprecedented geopolitical shifts occurring in the final thaw of the Cold War, the year 1989 marks a fraught moment in Japan when spectres of the nation's imperialist past and its historical entanglements acquired renewed potency in the wake of Emperor Hirohito's death. Born in 159, Shimada gained international prominence in the 1990s for her critique of the national body, in particular, the relationship between women and the imperial wartime state. Her work, which unapologetically confronts Japan's WWII aggressions in Asia, its wider histories of occupation, and issues such as the fiercely contested legacies of former 'comfort women' vitally reflects on the social role and agency of art and artist in a climate of political unease emergent at Showa's close. Based on extensive interviews with the artist and research into her primary archive, this is the first comprehensive survey chronicling Shimad;s twenty-five year oeuvre. It situates her practice between two vectors: feminism in Japan and its engagement with Western scholarship, and traces the 1990s 'feminist turn' led by art historians such as Chino Kaori, who began to champion the application of gender perspectives in the study of Japanese art. Within the wider Asian region, the concurrent development of transnational women's art' networks, exhibitions and publications dovetailed with the burgeoning of performance art was protest. As one of the most outspoken feminist art activists of her generation, Shimada has borne key witness to the changing cultural conditions informing women artists' organised activities and the writing of their social histories. This interdisciplinary study incorporates a range of perspectives drawn from art history and gender studies, film and performance theory, memory and trauma studies, Japanese studies and cross-cultural scholarship. It highlights the formal and conceptual interactions between printmaking, performance, installation and lens-based media in Shimada's practice, and demonstrates the plural ways in which her reflexive aesthetics and visual strategies express the tensions and complexities characterising processes of remembering, forgetting and representing the past. By interweaving arguments about the crucial role of feminism in challenging dominant narratives of nation, race, sex and ethnicity, with critical perspectives central to discourse on postmodern Japan, questions are raised concerning the implications of gender, tradition and popular culture for art produced in this age of anxiety. The recent proliferation of problem-oriented, politically engaged practices following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami marks an ostensible 'return to the social' and departure from privileged tropes of 'Japaneseness' in artistic experimentation. Taking this into account, this thesis proposes that revisiting the recent history of feminist art interventions reveals valuable insights into the role of art in understanding and addressing trauma, and engaging marginalised histories and communities. This is exemplified by Shimada's work, which offers a powerful vantage point from which to contemplate art's political inflections, its social potential and the urgency of memory work both in Japan, and in our contemporary societies today.

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 ‘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.’

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.