In referring to psychoanalyst and theorist Julia Kristeva‟s claim that the maternal body has no subject, this research aimed at finding answers to the following question: in what ways might a maternal subjectivity be understood through art practice? The research focused on three themes: fragmentation, invisibility and boundaries. Initially, these themes were researched in the context of the maternal body and the abject. The engagement with the maternal body has led to expanding the inquiry to include kibbutz childhood memory, in general, and bodily memories, in particular. This has led to revealing a childhood trauma. It was established that fragmentation, invisibility and questions of boundaries are rooted in trauma. Trauma has been further explored, to be revealed as a sequence of traumas, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and intergenerational trauma, which span private and public spheres. The methodology research in action has been developed through the use of the „observer-participant‟ position, as well as the methods of persona and performative acts. Installation has been developed as a shared space, where traumatic memory has been re-visited and audience became witness. The research contributes to new knowledge in the field of trauma, in the contexts of maternal subjectivity, kibbutz childhood and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The text provides a critical reflection for the practice, both construct this research.

This practice based research focuses on events of the body, using the participating observer-researcher's experiences of medical events undertaken by her within a western medical environment to investigate her living existence as a 'unit', an 'experiencing corporeal body'. The project addresses a sharp awareness of body experienced by the researcher. It investigates this body in terms of the literal posthuman associated with Moravec, alongside the theoretical posthuman associated with Hayles where the 'defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity'. Using action research as the methodology and video installation as practice the project considers the position of the researcher in relationship to the medics, a situation of subject / object. With the female participating researcher as a given it becomes relevant to reference ideas from the ideals of feminism and to consider the question 'are women human?' The project produces evidence of change in the relationship of subject / object specific to this research when the researcher actively engages with attributes of the posthuman and it demonstrates how an altered emerging subject resulted from this engagement. There is a movement for the researcher from a liberal humanist subject to an emerging posthuman subject, an empowering and emancipating change.

The work of Ian Hamilton Finlay spans a fifty-year career, numerous media (many invented by Finlay himself) and thousands of years of Western history. Yet despite its range, it is the product of a singular artistic vision. The object of this thesis is to provide a philosophical and aesthetic framework through which Finlay’s work can be read comprehensively. Centred on the notion of the ‘non-secular’ – a term coined by Finlay in response to bureaucratic, social and artistic antagonisms – it proposes that Finlay’s entire body of work can be read as a project towards realisation of ‘non-secular’ awareness. This comprises, firstly, a longing for an ‘essential’ language and absolute truths, and a respect and reverence for those aspects of culture which strove to, if not discover, then construct and have faith in those truths. It also comprises, secondly and as a consequence, reconciliation with the fact that these absolutes can never be fully realised in the practice of everyday living. This prompts further reconciliation with the limits of our comprehension of the universe and, in the last analysis, our own mortality. This reconciliation is ‘non-secular’ insofar as it does not dispel, but rather emphasises, the notion of a ‘beyond’ inherent to these limits, without defining that ‘beyond’. Using the metaphor of a navigator’s compass, the thesis defines the borders of the ‘non-secular’ through study of Finlay’s work, his correspondence, and his relationship with his contemporaries and critics. It gathers together, develops and responds to previous criticism on Finlay in order to present a unified reading of the poet’s oeuvre which, though it cannot hope to cover every aspect, suggests how his work might best be approached, navigated and read. To this end, the thesis also draws from a number of philosophers working in the continental, hermeneutic tradition, who present ways of thinking the ‘non-secular’ which complement Finlay’s project and, in some cases, directly influence it. As the title would suggest, though the thesis explores Finlay’s work in all media, its locus is Stonypath/Little Sparta, the poet’s family home and magnum opus. Here, the tensions between life and art which give rise to the ‘non-secular’ are at their most palpable. Despite Finlay’s reputation as a visual and plastic artist, this thesis opens with the premise that his work is best approached as poetry, beginning with an extended Introduction which shows how Stonypath/Little Sparta develops from modernist poetry. Coining and defining the term ‘topographical poetics’ to describe Finlay’s site-specific works, it then constructs a formal and methodological approach for reading these ‘poems’. Preliminary discussion of the ‘non-secular’ follows, leading into a four-chapter structure concerned with sketching out the limits of the ‘non-secular compass’. The compass consists of four poles – the Poetic, the Homely, the Modern and the Classical – corresponding to Chapters One through Four respectively. Each pole serves as an absolute point by which to consider the idea of the ‘non-secular’. The exception is the Homely, a pragmatic anchor from which develops the ‘non-secular’ in its reconciliatory aspect and, ultimately, provides the unique foundation for Finlay’s work. This ‘non-secular compass’ is presented as a critical paradigm for reading Finlay. With the work itself, it may also be used as an interpretative tool which opens up to fresh and vital reflections on our comparatively ‘secularised’ existences.

The thesis proposes a comparative textual research on Hungarian and Romanian cinema by setting up a model that informs the implicit cinematic reflection on socialism in film. By establishing two aesthetic categories – horizontal and vertical enclosure –, the thesis argues that the spatial structure of the narratives reveals and alludes to the oppressive policy of the Hungarian and Romanian socialist regimes. The first part of the research scrutinises the space in Romanian cinema, and investigates the birth of the vertical enclosure. The analysis focuses on the spatial representation of Bucharest, that is the claustrophobic illustration of the urban landscape and its space depicted by the tools of notorious surveillance on screen. As argued in the thesis, the architectural forms and their film representations build up a spatial constellation identical to Bentham’s Panopticon discussed by Michel Foucault. The second part of the investigation concentrates on Hungarian cinema and the evolution of horizontal enclosure in film. Through textual analysis of the selected films that are set on the Great Hungarian Plain, the thesis discusses the allegorical use of space during and after socialism. Therefore, while concentrating on the circularity of the location and the mise-en-scène of the films – that refer to the isolation and indefiniteness of space – the author argues that the directors recall the parabolic language of the cinematic corpus of the socialist epoch. As concluded by the work, the contemporary art cinema of Romania and Hungary both reference socialism by using space as the main device for the implicit textual reflections. In this way, horizontal and vertical enclosure also emphasise the revival of the forms of the socialist aesthetics.

This thesis engages with the contribution made by literary and visual representations to debates about woman's role in Britain and America between 1860 and 1917. During, that is, a period of transition from the relative securities of the early Victorian period until the radical social shifts propelled by the First World War. I introduce design reform debates in painting and interior design, and examine how these were approached by George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton, both in the homes they actually lived in, and those they created in their fictions, particularly for their female characters. Issues of the aesthetic and the moral, and the shifting relationships between them, underpin responses to art and design of the period, and are reflected generally in the literary and visual arts. The representation of women in domestic space, in actual and literary interiors, necessarily has ideological implications regarding the proper place of women within society. Thus, directly and obliquely, questions were repeatedly being asked about what constituted a desirable and fulfilling life for women in this society, and how such a life was to be achieved. To support my contention that this is a wide debate, I am looking at representational paintings of women in interiors, and advice about decoration in manuals of household taste, to augment the primary focus of the thesis on various fictional portraits of ladies. In the Introduction I discuss some recent examinations of women's space and place in Victorian society in art historical, literary and cultural studies. I explain the ideology of separate spheres and how it was interpreted in the plan and decoration of the home, underpinning the codification of interior decoration. I consider also how theorisations of 'the gaze' have been used to analyse representations of women and to explore issues of female empowerment. In Chapter One I examine the history of the design reform movement, Aestheticism, the application of the separate spheres in practice and the influence of manuals of household taste on how the home was actually decorated. Women's taste was a contested issue and the conceptual conflation of the women's body with the house formed the background to Aesthetic paintings of women. Some women decorators, often connected to radical political movements, used their professionalism to make the home a site of power, countering the seeming entrapment of women within the interior. In Chapter Two I examine George Eliot's unconventional home life, particularly the decoration of The Priory. I discuss how she utilised interiors and related themes of seeing and commodity fetishism in the explication of character in The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Sympathy with the wider world enables Eliot's female characters to transcend the destruction of subjectivity threatened by constriction within an unhappy home. In Chapter Three I examine how Henry James dealt with the complicated conceptual relationship of Europe and America in The Europeans, using themes of the search for a home and the theatricality of self-presentation. I explain his notion of the House of Fiction, which was expanded by Edith Wharton. In The Portrait of a Lady, taste is used as a moral indicator in his discussion of the 'envelope of circumstance', with Aestheticism as the background to its use. James theorises the status of women as objects within interiors and what this means for Isabe1' s developing consciousness, as she searches for a husband and home. James uses the ambiguities of 'seeing' to explore how good taste is reached at expense of human relationships. In Chapter Four I discuss Henry James's own search for a home in his later years, and the significance of Lamb House. I discuss his friendship with Edith Wharton and compare their taste in decoration and how this related to moral themes in their novels. In The Spoils of Poynton good or bad taste seems to divide people morally. However, the rigidity of these divisions is questioned, and Fleda and Mrs Gereth discover unhappiness as an authentication of experience, in a small home without men. In Chapter Five I discuss Edith Wharton's development as a writer, the homes she grew up in and how this relates to the decoration and creation of her own homes. Her highly theorised approach to interior decoration is demonstrated by The Decoration of Houses, which was put into practice in her own homes, finding its most perfect expression in The Mount. Wharton's experiences of creating a home for herself gave her the strength to write out of a society disinclined to attribute serious artistic effort to women, and her writings re-enacted the problems she encountered living in this society. In Chapter Six I examine Wharton's The Houseo! Mirth, Ethan Frome and Summer, employing Wharton's aesthetic theories as a key to interpretation of her fictional works. Lily Bart is seen within different interiors as she descends through society, and gender issues are illuminated by a discussion of how the tableau vivant at the centre-point of the book brings together themes of theatricality and the gaze. Lily's self-fashioning is fraught with misreadings by her society, disastrous for her search for a happy and beautiful home. The poorer setting of the two novellas demonstrates that Wharton applied her theories across social strata. For Wharton, the achievement of a happy home, morally decorated, could be impossible for women in American Victorian society. In the Conclusion I look at paintings by progressive artists which enacted the instabilities of cultural change in their depiction of women in interiors. The Great War destroyed the bourgeois interior that the fictional women I have discussed found it so difficult to remain within. The rejection of the constrictions of separate spheres became part of a new feminist project, articulated by Virginia Woolf and Catherine Carswell. Women no longer felt the need to be constrained by the gilded cage, and looked for possibilities lying outside of the drawing room.

The present thesis investigates comics journalism, which is a subsection within the comics medium combining sequential images and journalism, and which has met with popular acclaim in the wake of Joe Sacco’s popularity in the 1990s. Since then, many examples of comics journalism have been published. However, the subject has not been comprehensively studied except for extensive research focusing on Sacco. This study aims to go some way towards filling this gap. This thesis focuses mainly on comics war journalism covering the turmoil in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by selecting graphic novels by two different authors from divergent backgrounds: Ayşegül Savaşta: Irak Şahini (Ayşegül at War: The Iraqi Falcon) by Kemal Gökhan Gürses from Turkey, and Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by the Quebecois author Guy Delisle. There are four main chapters in this thesis. The first chapter, ‘Comics Journalism’, analyses this hybrid genre and tries to place it with a theoretical framework. The second chapter, ‘National Identities and Comics Journalism’, discusses how national identities are represented in comics journalism. The third chapter examines Ayşegül Savaşta: Irak Şahini and shows how comics journalism can function as a response to a war. The fourth chapter discusses Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City and explores comics journalism as cultural reportage. This thesis argues that the roots of comics journalism can be found in the Glasgow Looking Glass of 1825. While Joyce Brabner and Lou Ann Merkle together created today’s understanding of comics journalism, Joe Sacco popularized the genre via his coverage of the Palestinian issue and the Bosnian War. Another conclusion is that the September 11 attacks explain the rise of comics journalism, as output related to comics journalism has since blossomed. I will claim that comics journalism functions as an alternative to mainstream journalism and serves to show unreported news. Additionally this thesis will find that stereotypes play a very important role in picturing the relationship between comics and national identities, and will show how Muslim stereotypes have changed in comics, especially in superhero comics, produced after 9/11. This observation leads me to argue that comics journalists, regardless of their backgrounds, use essentially the same stereotypes when they draw Middle Easterners, Arabs especially, although negative Muslim stereotypes are very rare in comics journalism. Since religion and nationalism are undeniably intermingled in the Middle East, the comics journalists studied here employ Islam as a part of their narratives.

This study analyses the invisible forms of repression in the Bolivian art system by interpreting Roberto Valcárcel’s artwork in the light of Herbert Marcuse’s ideas on repression and liberation as expounded in Eros and Civilization. It considers, on the one hand, Valcárcel’s artwork in relation to the liberating role that Marcuse attributes to art (via phantasy, polymorphous eroticism, and Orphic paradigm). On the other hand, it explores the strategies devised by Valcárcel against repression, such as self-promotion, multiple texts, play, humour and unmasking certain repressive truths. The reading of Valcárcel’s work via Marcuse is supported by archival research from contemporary newspapers, exhibition documentation and Bolivian art history, which provide relevant information about the sorts of latent repression to which Valcárcel’s artworks responds. The dissertation is organised in five chapters in which examples of repressive beliefs are unveiled. Chapter One examines El Movimiento Erótico (The Erotic Movement, 1983) and the manifold strategies used by Valcárcel to escape the traps of a presumed type of sexual liberation (sexist and genital oriented) and capitalism’s culture industry. Chapter Two discusses artworks where the intentional construction of open meaning challenges the norm of a univocal creation and consumption of art. Chapter Three studies some of Valcárcel’s humorous identities in contrast with the dramatic, and overly serious self-perception of Bolivians artists. Chapter Four explores Valcárcel’s use of play, black humour and deceit as effective devices to escape hidden authoritarianism in society during dictatorial regimes. Chapter Five analyses how Valcárcel’s work unveils the latent repression in the idealisation of indigenous heritage through play and anti-thesis. The dissertation introduces a new topic into the study of art in Bolivia – veiled repression – at the same time that it sheds light on the potential of the artwork of Roberto Valcárcel to open new ways of historicizing and thinking about art in Bolivia.

In Edo-Japan (c.1603 – 1868) shunga, sexually explicit prints, paintings and illustrated books, were widely produced and disseminated. However, from the 1850s onwards, shunga was suppressed by the government and it has largely been omitted from art history, excluded from exhibitions and censored in publications. Although changes have taken place, cultural institutions continue to be cautious about what they collect and exhibit, with shunga largely remaining a prohibited subject in Japan. Since the 1970s there has been a gradual increase in the acceptance of shunga outside Japan, as evidenced in the growing number of exhibitions and publications. The initial impetus behind this thesis was: Why and how did shunga become increasingly acceptable in Europe and North America in the twentieth century, whilst conversely becoming unacceptable in post-Edo Japan? I discuss how and why attitudes to shunga in the UK and Japan have changed from the Edo period to the present day, and consider how definitions can affect this. My research examines how shunga has been dealt with in relation to private and institutional collecting and exhibitions. In order to gauge modern responses, the 2013 Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art exhibition at the British Museum is used as an in-depth study – utilising mixed methods and an interdisciplinary approach to analyse curatorial and legal decisions, as well as visitor feedback. To-date there are no official or standardised guidelines for the acquisition, cataloguing, or display of sexually explicit artefacts. It is intended that institutions will benefit from my analysis of the changing perceptions of shunga and of previous shunga collections and exhibitions when dealing with shunga or other sexually explicit items in the future.

Dialogue is a tool that can be used to promote learning experiences amongst audiences in contemporary art museums, in particular due to the potential difficulty of interpreting this type of art. This study argues that when dialogue between the museum and audience promotes balanced opportunities to express ideas and information, the museum can also learn. The museum can share the learning findings about audiences with the rest of the staff members through a professional dialogue, which may impact, creating positive change on future museum practice, in order to facilitate exhibitions, programmes and activities better targeted to audiences. The research explores the concept of learning dialogue using interviews, content analysis, and a theoretical framework related to learning and dialogue in museums. The study also analyses the role of learning and education, and their context in contemporary art museum practice in Mexico, using critical texts and practical evidence from interviews with educators, curators and directors. The thesis investigates, in particular, the case study of the Enlaces programme at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MuAC). This is a learning activity where the Enlaces participants, who are university students, receive training about the specialist knowledge required to understand contemporary art. The participants aim to create further dialogue with audiences with the purpose of provoking questions, reflection and understanding of MuAC’s contemporary artworks and exhibitions. Findings from the Enlaces participants’ interviews reveal a learning dialogue with audiences, resulting in a model that considers the interaction of three categories of dialogue: visual internal, content and participatory dialogues. Furthermore, the research demonstrates that the interactions between the Enlaces participants and MuAC staff stimulate peer dialogue, professional dialogue and limited dialogue. The analysis of findings results in a model for professional learning dialogue based on the interaction between three key areas: communication, recognition and teamwork. The research proposes an optimal scenario where there is professional and audience learning dialogue taking place, these then feedback to the museum cyclically, allowing audiences to contribute and influence the organisation.

This thesis describes a project investigating conceptions of design in the community of design stakeholders. A 'democratization of design' is identified, in terms of a widened mode of design engagement. The origins of the project are located in the accompanying observation that 'design means different things to different people'. The project has three aims: (i) to establish the contemporary UK context for the social study of design; (ii) to expand upon the identified theme of the democratization of design; and (iii) to empirically investigate conceptions of design in the community of design stakeholders. The first two aims are fulfilled through a review and discussion of existing secondary sources. The third aim is fulfilled by primary research, in the form of an empirical interview study conducted with design stakeholder informants. The interview study embodies an interpretative phenomenological theoretical perspective, and employs qualitative research method. A theoretical sample of 31 interview informants was drawn from five design stakeholder groups: Business; Designers; Education; Promotion; Users. Conceptions of design within the collected interview data are investigated through a template analysis. An analysis of collected interview data is presented in the form of an holistic map or 'template' of the data organized by thematic discussion of 'design'. These empirical findings are presented and discussed narratively and graphically. A total of 41 interrelating 'conceptions of design' are identified. Empirical findings are synthesized with the response to aims (i) and (ii). This generates two main final research outcomes: firstly, a degree of informant scepticism and ambivalence is apparent towards the heightened political, cultural and economic profile for design; secondly, the democratization of design is seen as a worthy ideal, but one which is difficult to realize. In conclusion, a number of further implications of the project are also discussed.