This dissertation investigates thematic unities within Robert Morris's seemingly disparate body of work. It demonstrates the thematic similarities, structural continuities and formal associations used throughout his art despite the great diversity of the media employed. It departs at times from a strictly chronological approach because its primary purpose is to explore how one work begets another or one style morphs into the next. The research involved extensive archival work studying unpublished correspondence and texts, contracts, drawings and emails, along with traditional sources like books, interviews, lectures and Morris's own published criticism and texts. The author also examined many original artworks or reproductions of unavailable ones. Chapter One discusses the definition and problem of style, establishment of artistic influences, and Morris's reluctance to accept traditional boundaries. Chapter Two addresses the choreography and its task-oriented vocabulary, and Morris's minimalist sculptures, examining his ideas on process and the phenomenology of perception. Chapter Three is devoted to Morris's concept of space and exploration of the horizontal as a spatial vector. It studies his interest in structural continuity throughout his lead, mirror and felt works, and touches on both the physical space of the sculptures, and the virtual space of the mirrors, as well as the fleeting evanescent space of the steam. His elaborations on “how to make a mark” are considered, too, from the Blind Time drawings, riding on horseback and body-part imprints, to language and the natural world. Chapter Four turns to Morris's philosophical investigations, his studies of language and imagery—some apocalyptic—and his increasing concern with destructive contemporary attitudes. Chapter Five takes up the works of the last two decades, his interest in memory and his growing cultural pessimism. Finally, analyzing one of the most recent works, the Conclusion makes clear that through its recurrent timeliness, Morris's art achieves a certain sublimity which aims towards a suspension of time—a timelessness.

The thesis explores the relationships between sound and mobility through an examination of sound art. The research engages with the intersection of sound, mobility and art through original empirical work and theoretically through a critical engagement with sound studies. In dialogue with the work of De Certeau, Lefebvre, Huhtamo and Habermas in terms of the poetics of walking, rhythms, media archeology and questions of publicness, I understand sound art as an experimental mobile and public space. The thesis establishes and situates the emerging field of mobile sound art by mapping three key traditions of mobile sound art - locative art, sound art and public art - and creates a taxonomy of mobile sound art by defining four categories: 'placing sounds', 'sound platforms', 'sonifying mobility' and 'musical instruments' (each represented by one case study). In doing so it develops a methodology that is attentive to the specifics of the sonic and mobile of media experience. I demonstrate how sonic interactions and embodied mobility are designed and experienced in specific ways in each of the four case studies - 'Aura' by Symons (UK), 'Pophorns' by Torstensson and Sandelin (Sweden), 'SmSage' by Redfern and Borland (US) and 'Core Sample' by Rueb (US) (all 2007). In tracing the topos of the musical telephone, discussing the making and breaking of relevant micro publics, accounting for the polyphonies of footsteps and unwrapping bundles of rhythms, this thesis contributes to understanding complex media experiences in hybrid spaces. In doing so it critically sheds light on the quality of sonic artistic experiences, the audience engagement with urban, public and networked spaces and the relationship between sound art and everyday media experience. My thesis provides valuable insight into auditory ways of mobilising and making public spaces, non-verbal and embodied media practices, and rhythms and scales of mobile media experiences.

To date, the study of Chinese propaganda photography has been limited. While some research has been made on post-1949 photography, the photographic production of the pre-1949 period has not been sufficiently explored. Focusing on the years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), this thesis aims at addressing this gap in the literature and at providing an analysis of how the Chinese Communist Party exploited photography for propaganda purposes during the war. Through the images taken by Party-affiliated photographers and printed on the Jin Cha Ji Pictorial, the first Communist photographic propaganda magazine, this study aims to show how this type of visual propaganda aimed not only at narrating the events of the war against Japan, but also at creating a new idea of the Chinese nation. This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first, The Jin Cha Ji Pictorial: A Brief History presents the history of the magazine and the work of the CCP affiliated photographers who contributed to its creation and popularity. Chapter two, The Geography of a Revolution, explores how a new cultural landscape was visually constructed to create the basis of the political legitimation that the CCP needed during wartime. Chapter three, Becoming Modern Women, investigates the symbolic and ideological value of the spinning wheel in 1943 in relation to women’s contribution to the war effort and the thorny issue of women empowerment. Lastly, chapter four, Moulding the Future looks at the visual representation of childhood and discusses the issue of militarisation and masculinisation of childhood during wartime. This study ends with few considerations on the propagandistic, historical and artistic value of Communist propaganda photography during the Second Sino-Japanese War as well as a reflection on how the symbolic and ideological significance of some of the photographs presented here are still recognisable in contemporary Chinese propaganda.

This thesis examines sketched portraits of Amerindian peoples created by the English artist Edward Goodall during the 1841-1844 Boundary Survey of British Guiana, now Guyana, which was carried out by the German scientific explorer, Robert Schomburgk. The portraits formed part of a larger body of over 250 drawn and watercolour works labelled as Sketches in British Guiana, and carried out by Goodall in his role as official expedition illustrator. These sketches captured a wide range of geographical subjects, from botany, topography and zoology, to hydrography, geology and historical scenes of the expedition itself, in addition to the ethnographic representations upon which this thesis focuses, and which dominate the body in terms of their numbers and interest. The sketches were carried out in relation to the cartographic and geographical mapping and documenting of the Guayana territory and its peoples by Schomburgk as he moved across the disputed border regions between British Guiana and its neighbouring colonial states, Brazil, Venezuela and Surinam. Focusing on the works as a manifestation of the different subjective forces and ideologies at play within this colonial enterprise, I argue the portraits and Sketches more generally, exemplify art’s cooption as a tool of colonial reconnaissance, expansion and domination during the mid-nineteenth century, playing a key role in visualising the geographical colonization that Schomburgk’s Boundary Survey represented, capturing disputed inhabitants and their locales as they were inscribed onto British colonial maps, and substantiating British imperial claims over them. In essence, through Goodall’s work, Schomburgk sought to cultivate and performatively demonstrate knowledge of and control over Amerindians through their representation, which paralleled the way the Guayana landscape was brought into British guardianship, all under the aegis of Christian humanitarianism, scientific advance and national-imperial prestige.

The objective of this thesis is to challenge the patriarchal traditions of Surrealism by examining the topic from the perspective of its women practitioners. Unlike past research, which often focuses on the biographical details of women artists, this thesis provides a case study of a select group of women Surrealists – chosen for the variety of their artistic practice and creativity – based on the close textual analysis of selected works. Specifically, this study will deal with names that are familiar (Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim, Frida Kahlo), marginal (Elsa Schiaparelli) or simply ignored or dismissed within existing critical analyses (Alice Rahon). The focus of individual chapters will range from photography and sculpture to fashion, alchemy and folklore. By exploring subjects neglected in much orthodox male Surrealist practice, it will become evident that the women artists discussed here created their own form of Surrealism, one that was respectful and loyal to the movement’s founding principles even while it playfully and provocatively transformed them.

This study draws on and interprets an extensive corpus of archived materials, in particular from the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, to offer the first wide-ranging critical analysis of the written and visual images of the life and legend of Weimar Germany’s most important ‘modern’ art dealers - Johanna Ey (1864 - 1947), commonly known as ‘Mutter Ey’. Once feted by the press as the most portrayed woman in Germany, she contributed greatly to the careers of artists such as Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Gert Wollheim, Otto Pankok and many others and was a vital figure in the ‘modern’ Düsseldorf art scene until she was evicted from her gallery by the Nazis in 1934. This study opens with a factual overview of Ey’s biography. Chapters are then devoted to an analysis of the development, reception and prevalence of aspects of her legend: the use of the ‘Mutter Ey’ image in the Weimar Period; an exploration of the notion of Ey’s modernity using the trope of the ‘Neue Frau’; an investigation into her attitude to politics in general and the Nazis in particular, in the first detailed reading of Ey’s 1936 memoirs and her correspondence from 1933-1947; and an analysis of the factors influencing the rise, fall and rise of her celebrity status and her memorialisation since her death.

This thesis explores the life and work of the Kuwaiti artist Khalifa Qattan (1934-2003). The first chapter views Qattan in the context of twentieth-century visual culture in Kuwait. It also shows the European influence on his work, as he lived and studied in Britain in the 1950s. A second chapter is dedicated to Qattan's aesthetic theory called Circulism; it shows that it is a philosophy and a style, and situates Circulism between western and Arabic sources. The third chapter deals with the Gulf War of 1991 as a particular topic in Qattan's work, and compares his work about the war with the work of John Keane, the British artist who was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum as an official recorder to cover that war. Considering western and Arabic writings on the war, this chapter argues that different visual interpretations of the war are rooted in an 'insider' and 'outsider' experience. A conclusion discusses the general problems involved when viewing non-western visual cultures with western eyes. An appendix, a bibliography and a list of illustrations followed by 61 illustrations conclude the thesis.

This study aims to present the state of outsourcing design in the Turkish manufacturing industry, which, in the past, has been scrutinized in a limited sense. An investigation has been carried out in order to reveal the reasons for and procedures of hiring product design services from outside resources and to explore -if any- the benefits gained from this collaboration through a survey conducted with either design or production managers from a sample selection of firms manufacturing and/or marketing products in Turkey. Findings regarding the processes of outsourcing design have been recorded as well as an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of external design resources.

Photorealism was a movement which focused on meticulously reproducing the quotidian photograph on a large scale. Despite its popularity from between 1967-1977, it was often considered by critics to be vacuous and anachronistic. This was due to several factors, most significant of which were its focus on the outmoded practice of pictorial realism, the banality of its subjects and its apparent plagiaristic approach to the photograph-as-source. This neutral and cool aesthetic was misunderstood as superficial and served to render the movement the very antithesis of aesthetic creativity. This thesis seeks to reconsider such apparent objectivity in Photorealist painting by presenting a semiotic reading of Photorealist practice that will form the basis of the central argument in this thesis. This argument posits that there are evidential layers of signification embedded within the making of a Photorealist work which enact perceptual, conventional and historical conditions that deny the project of visual neutrality. This argument will prove that Photorealism was not a clear continuation of traditional pictorial realism, but a more conceptual movement which questioned conceptions of the phenomenological real. It will also show how, in Photorealism’s transmutation of the photographic aesthetic, it instigated the development of a hybrid visual language – a ‘route to meaning’ – which served to occupy the vacant space between the painting and the photograph. To reveal the development of such a language, and its inherently subjectivist foundations, I will inquire into the Photorealist painting from its very beginnings – from perceptual conception to conclusion – within the realm of the artist. The methodology for such an inquiry will involve the development and application of a heuristic model, informed by a semiotic approach, which will show how reality in Photorealism is mediated and transformed in the process of (re)-presenting the photograph. This model will categorise the key stages of activity and influence in the Photorealist process, showing at each stage how visual language is engendered and compounded. By adopting such an approach this thesis will show that Photorealist paintings, contrary to much criticism, managed to establish a unique and significant manner of depicting the real that is now worthy of contemporary reappraisal.

This thesis is concerned with the didactic function of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular religious literature and art in contemporary medieval English society, and particularly the ways in which texts and images participate in emergent lay religious culture and inform social practices of the time. The focus is on apocryphal and legendary depictions of episodes in the Life of the Virgin Mary in vernacular works of the later Middle Ages and special consideration is given to the ways in which certain female audiences in England may have received and responded to Mary narratives. An introductory chapter outlines the process and means by which biblical and extra-biblical knowledge was disseminated to the late medieval laity via the range of literary and pictorial material brought into comparison in this thesis. Additionally, the introductory chapter surveys existing research on the socio-economic and spiritual circumstances that made accounts of Mary’s life particularly useful to ‘merchant-class’ wives whose way of life, it is argued, is emblematic of change in the period. Five central chapters each provide interpretations of common motifs in a key event in Christian history involving Mary and assess their engagement with the experiences and aspirations of lay unlearned audiences, primarily (though not exclusively) domesticated bourgeois women. The events referred to and discussed in chronological order in this thesis are the Annunciation, Nativity, Passion of Christ, and the Death, Assumption and Coronation of Mary. The material analysed comprises biblical drama, sermons, poetry, lyrics, wall-paintings, manuscript illustrations, and tapestries. A number of core works are referred to throughout and, as detailed in the introduction, include texts such as the four extant mystery cycle plays, Nicholas Love’s Mirror, John Mirk’s Festial, the Cursor Mundi, and art works such as contained in the Biblia Pauperum, and books of hours.