I conduct a series of experiments culminating in a gallery exhibition, I Never Stopped Being A Curator, which investigate and reinterpret what it means to ‘care’ and ‘profane’ in the context of an expanded notion of curatorial practice. I call what I’m doing ‘performative micro-curating,’ a playfully performative practice with precedents dating back to Marcel Duchamp and The Richard Mutt Case. More specifically, I’m interpreting and practising performative micro-curating as a relational, meta-conceptual art practice that uses mirroring and repetition as a method for posing questions, making knowledge and forging social bonds, while, at the same time, dissolving the boundaries that customarily distinguish artmaking from curating.

I conduct a series of experiments culminating in a gallery exhibition, I Never Stopped Being A Curator, which investigate and reinterpret what it means to ‘care’ and ‘profane’ in the context of an expanded notion of curatorial practice. I call what I’m doing ‘performative micro-curating,’ a playfully performative practice with precedents dating back to Marcel Duchamp and The Richard Mutt Case. More specifically, I’m interpreting and practising performative micro-curating as a relational, meta-conceptual art practice that uses mirroring and repetition as a method for posing questions, making knowledge and forging social bonds, while, at the same time, dissolving the boundaries that customarily distinguish artmaking from curating.

Le grand projet à l’origine de la réalisation de cette thèse est de proposer une nouvelle manière de comprendre la nature instable et décloisonnée du pop art, ce courant pictural presque sorti de l’histoire de l’art pour s’ériger en signe diffus de la culture populaire.Les enjeux plus conceptuels, qu’il dissimule derrière une imagerie devenue familière, sont pourtant d’une importance capitale pour la reconfiguration de la définition contemporaine de l’œuvre d’art. Toujours entre surface et profondeur, l’image pop se développe insidieusement.Le concept de « coïncidence des opposés », hérité d’une tradition théologico-philosophique dont Nicolas De Cues est le dépositaire le plus illustre, nous servira d’outil opératoire pour tenter de comprendre les implications sémantiques liées à la nature glissante de cet espace artistique aux contours flous. L’instabilité de ses frontières s’exprime d’abord par la proximité entre « art » et « non-art ». Elle s’illustre ensuite et surtout par le développement d’une multitude de microstructures internes reproduisant le même schéma conceptuel de « coïncidence des opposés ». Nous utiliserons alors, pour faciliter notre approche philosophique le concept d’ « ambivalences instables ».Trois grands moments jalonneront notre enquête. Ils seront synthétisés par les trois notions suivantes : « le paradoxe de la destruction créatrice », « la littéralité anti-littérale », et « la désacralisation hyper-sacralisée ». / The aim of this PhD project is to propose a new way of understanding the profoundly unstable and essentially decompartmentalized nature of pop art, this pictorial stream which is almost going beyond the scope of art history to elevate itself to be a vague symbol of popular culture.However, its familiar image hides more conceptual matters of dispute which are of crucial importance when it comes to reconfiguring the contemporary definition of a work of art. Always between surface and depth, pop imagery is developing insidiously.The “coincidence of opposites” concept, inherited from a theological-philosophical tradition, with Nicolas De Cues as its most famous depositary, will be used as an operating tool in our attempt to understand the semantic implications bound to the changing nature of this artistic space, the limits of which are still clearly blurry. This fuzziness of its frontiers appears first and foremost through the proximity between “art” and “non-art”, and then, most of all, through the development of a multitude of internal microstructures mimicking the pattern of the “coincidence of opposites” concept. In order to facilitate the philosophical flexibility of our approach, we will therefore use the concept of “unstable ambivalences”. Three milestones mark our investigation. They are summarized by the three following notions: “the creative destruction paradox”,”anti-literal literalism” and ”hyper-sacralized desecration”.

The colourful past of the late 18th century marquetry furniture has seldom been highlighted. Through ageing and environmental influences, colourful marquetry furniture has lost their original expression. The current knowledge of how Swedish cabinet-makers in the late 18th century used dyes to colour their furniture is limited. Trace of colour has been observed and the use of dyes has been mentioned, but deeper research in this filed is missing. A visual examination and studies of archive documents and previous research have been performed to investigate the colourful past of Gottlieb Iwerssons masterpiece, a secretaire in Gustavian style made for the king Gustav III. The result shows that the secretaire has a colourful past in accordance with its original drawing. A hypothetical picture has been created to illustrate the colourful original appearance.

The discursive and critical positions of the ‘classic’ nineteenth-century novel, particularly the woman’s novel, in the field of adaptation studies have been dominated by long-standing concerns about textual fidelity and the generic processes of the text-screen transfer. The sociocultural patterns of adaptation criticism have also been largely ensconced in representations of literary women on screen. Taking a decisive twist from tradition, this thesis traces the evolution of representations of masculinity in the malleable characters of Rochester and Heathcliff in film and television adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights between 1939 and 2009. Concepts of masculinity have been a neglected area of enquiry in studies of the ‘classic’ novel on screen. Adaptations of the Brontës’ novels, as well as the adapted novels of other ‘classic’ women authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, increasingly foreground male character in traditionally female-oriented narratives or narratives whose primary protagonist is female. This thesis brings together industrial histories, textual frames and sociocultural influences that form the wider contexts of the adaptations to demonstrate how male characterisation and different representations of masculinity are reformulated and foregrounded through three different adaptive histories of the narratives of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Through the contours of the film and television industries, the application of text and context analysis, and wider sociocultural considerations of each period an understanding of how Rochester and Heathcliff have been transmuted and centralised within the adaptive history of the Brontë novel.