This thesis explores the incidence and import of imagery surrounding the Highland Clearances in nineteenth-century Scottish painting. It recognises that the Clearances comprised a wide range of responses to the changing economic, agricultural, and social currents that shaped Highland landscape and life throughout the late-eighteenth and well into the nineteenth-century and consequently includes paintings that extend Clearance imagery beyond the most commonly reproduced works of the era. In the Introduction to the thesis, I present the subject of the Clearances and establish the common coincidence of landscape imagery, in both painting and travel writing, that extols the Highland landscape while simultaneously recognising the vast social, economic, and environmental changes effected by the resettlements, evictions, and emigrations of the Clearance era. Chapter II offers a concise outline of the major events of the Clearance era, from about1750 through the later decades of the nineteenth century, and complements the historical details with an investigation of the existing literature on both Clearance subjects and Scottish art history. Chapter III presents an initial foray into the theme of rural distress through the early-nineteenth-century paintings of Sir David Wilkie.  His works, like The Rent Day and Distraining for Rent, emerging against a backdrop of increasing countryside dispossession and, through their wide distribution as prints and within the theatre, served as emotive images depicting the plight of the rural poor, in both England and Scotland. In Chapter IV, I investigate the subject of rural labour in the paintings of the Clearance-era, arguing that a wider interpretation of the Clearance must include depictions of the changing types of employment that swept the Highlands throughout the nineteenth century. The theme of Highland emigration constitutes the main topic of Chapter V. Chapter VI explores landscape paintings and further reinforces the centrality of the Highland landscape in expressing the course and after-effects of the Clearances. The thesis closes with the conclusion that, due to the close linkage between the Clearances and the Highland landscape and to the simultaneous growth in the popularity of the area as a subject for artists, tourists, and writers, the visual imagery of the Clearance extends beyond the art of emigration and therefore also includes paintings of rural labour and landscape.  This marks an approach to nineteenth-century Scottish painting that validates the works’ significance amidst the wider scope of Victorian art and that establishes their import as depictions of the course of Clearance history within the Highland landscape.

This thesis continually encircles desirable objects and theories of desire in art history and queer theory, in order to understand and locate this procedure within art historical interpretation. This thesis works in the theoretical space between queer theory and the discipline of art history, using the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg tactically, to demonstrate that iconology falters here, as does any easy reliance on categories of sex, gender and sexuality to interpret their work. From the early 1990’s many art historians working in gay and lesbian studies attempted to employ deconstructive vocabularies in order to continue iconological investigations into the work of ‘late modernist’ art – including artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg – for very clear and laudable political reasons. I argue that this project mainly relied on essentialist and reductive assumptions concerning the sexed and gendered subject in order to explore the suppression of abnormal sexualities in relation to an artist’s work. I question that project here in the art historical texts I cite, and temper that analysis with deconstructive/queer theories of subjectivity. In this text I ask many questions that are central to my role as a queer art historian, questions that, in the ‘post modern moment’ of realisation revel in what Butler calls the “valorisation of unrealisability”. I do not look for a foundational justification for my project, which would be counter to my thesis, which argues that the a posteriori creates the a priori of ontology. I only hope to difference arguments that create reductive, totalising (as well as heterosexist and misogynistic) views of the art objects and the projects of art history, arguments that make the methodologies of art history into an inert mathematics.

This thesis examines the British art world in the period 1976-1981. The first section explores the crises in the artworld triggered by the International Monetary Fund Crisis of February 1976. Central to this analysis is the Labour and Conservative Party's ideological shift from culturalist paternalism to monetarist liberalism, the history and function of the Arts Council of Great Britain, the press scandals surrounding the Tate Gallery's purchase of Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII and the ICA's exhibition of COUM Transmission's Prostitution. The opportunist populist polemics of the 'crisis critics' (Richard Cork, Andrew Brighton, Peter Fuller and John Tagg) are then introduced alongside a discussion of the colossal changes in the British art press. This is followed by an analysis of Cork's defence of Conrad Atkison's work and of the Royal Oak murals. The second section looks at the postmodernism rejected by Cork and the populist crisis critics, namely, the scripto-visual work of John Hilliard, Victor Burgin, and John Stezaker. The influence of photoconceptualism on community artists and feminist artists is then examined. This is followed by an analysis of Art & Language's critique of 'Semio-Art'. This section concludes with an analysis of the 'new art history' in relation to the practices of Jo Spence and Terry Atkinson. The following section looks at 'conservative'/populist postmodernism as outlined in exhibitions such as The Human Clay (1976), Towards Another Picture (1978), Lives (1979) and Narrative Painting (1979). This includes extensive discussion of the work of David Shepherd, Peter Blake, Ron Kitaj, David Hockney, Steven Campbell, Women's Painting (Images of Men), and The School of London (The Hard Won Image). The final section opens with a lengthy examination of the agitational performances of COUM Transmissions, investigating their decision to abandon the publicly subsidised artworld in order to become the industrial band Throbbing Gristle. This is followed by an examination of British pro-Situationism, punk and new wave subcultures in the 1970s, relating them to the growth of the entrepreneurial art market of the early 1980s.

This practice-based research project aims to weave together the data generated through a dance making process, with a reflective, critical analysis of the data, to argue that incorporating meditation in the creative process can have a profound impact on a creative practice. dharmakaya, the dance work I choreographed for the purpose of this investigation, was developed in collaboration with four dancers, who were at the time, students studying on a BA (Hons) Dance Theatre programme. The process of creating the work involved a deep engagement with the principles and practices of meditation in order to consider critically the impact this had on my own creative practice and on dancers’ creative endeavours in the choreographic environment. Integral to this research project is consideration of the implications of this process for practice-based research and practices within the art form. The written thesis provides the analysis of the creative process of making dharmakaya. It seeks to understand if a creative environment can be established which incorporates the principles and practices gained from meditation to support and enhance dancers’ creative processes as co-creators of dance work. I discuss how my approach results in changes in how movement material is generated by the dancers, in the direction of the rehearsal process and in my engagement with the dancers. Importantly, the thesis makes clear how a method of analysis can be established which allows the results of the practice-based research to be sympathetically transformed into written form. As a whole the study contributes to the current field of research through the development of a dance making methodology that incorporates mindful meditation and enables the dancers’ verbal and embodied engagement. This methodology incorporates data collection and analysis in order to facilitate a critical reflection on the efficacy of the process. The thesis argues that adapting principles from meditation teachings offers a choreographer a means to engage dancers in a process of ‘letting go’, to stimulate their creativity and their capacity to generate material in the process of dance making: it offers them a language – an embodied language – with which to articulate and contribute ideas in verbal form. This practice-based research contributes to the continuing debates about training methods for contemporary dancers and choreographers, the leading/direction of creative dance making processes, and the different ways in which dancers engage with the preparation and performance of choreographed work.

This thesis examines the artistic patronage of Gil de Albornoz (d. 1367), Archbishop of Toledo (1338-1350), Cardinal priest of S. Clemente (1350-1366) and Cardinal bishop of Sabina (1356-1367). The first chapter delineates his early career in Spain until he left for Avignon in 1350. The analysis of documentary and archaeological evidence re-defines his input in the cathedral of Toledo, and the importance of his Augustinian foundation in Villaviciosa del Tajuña. The second chapter concentrates on the legations of Albornoz in Italy, and the fortified palaces and castles he commissioned along the Lands of St. Peter as he achieved success in his mission. This thesis focuses on a limited number of the most representative fortresses and palaces. The third chapter analyses Albornoz’s artistic patronage on a private basis, and concentrates on his burial chapel of St. Catherine in the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi and the Collegio di Spagna in Bologna. The fourth chapter dissects his will and the surviving objects in Toledo. Comparison with the testamentary donations of contemporary cardinals provides a parameter within which to measure his relevance as an artistic patron. Finally, the fifth chapter concentrates on the important sepulchre in the chapel of St. Ildefonso in the Cathedral of Toledo and its context.

The cultural industries have an increasingly important role to play in policies addressing the UK's present and future economic competitiveness. Researching how entrepreneurial activity leads to the creation and maintenance of cultural enterprises is central to understanding the value added by such organisations. The present research contributes to our understanding of these important issues. An ethnographic approach, which is defined here as a set of methods for conducting field work (e.g., participant observation and semi-structured interviews) and a methodology for textual representations of social activity, is adopted to explore design thinking in action. The study aims at developing existing analyses which claim that contemporary production is becoming more design intensive and therefore reliant upon individuals and organisations supplying knowledge about design. This heightened awareness about the value of design for business is defined as design reflexivity, although the term is not used to indicate an epochal shift in capitalist production. Instead, design thinking is represented as central to the modem institutionalisation of knowledge. By adopting the concept of identity work, the research addresses the importance of the role of the cultural entrepreneur to the contemporary organisation of work. Empirical material, comprised of interview transcripts and field notes, is examined to understand how research participants engaged with the role of owner-founder of a design business. By 'limiting' the research to individuals located in an inner-city area and the design sub-field of the cultural industries, the research presents localised interpretations of the typical process of cultural enterprise. The metaphor of architecture is adopted to describe the act of arranging the voices of research participants through the application of an analytical model comprised of three phases. This phased analysis is not over-privileged above the participants' accounts, but to organise empirical materials which show how research participants accounted for their engagement with contemporary role of the designer (articulation); the limitations and opportunities of place and time (emplacement) and the accumulation of economic wealth comprised of tangible and intangible property (entanglement). The research connects the research participant's entrepreneurial organisation of design reflexivity together with analyses of the centrality of reflexive knowledge to study one area of knowledge intensive contemporary production.

This thesis will survey the Black Arts Movement in America from the early 1960s to the 1970s. The Movement was characterised by a proliferation of poetry, exhibitions and plays. Rather than close textual analyses, the thesis will take a panoramic view of the Movement considering the movement's two main aims: the development of a canon of work and the establishment of black institutions. The main critical arguments occasioned by these literary developments contributed to the debate on the establishment of a Black Aesthetic through an essentialist approach to the creation and assessment of black art works. This survey considers the motivations behind the artists' essentialism, recognising their aim to challenge white criticism of black forms of cultural expression. Underpinning the Movement's critical discourse was the theme of blackness, a philosophy of racial consciousness that blended a rather crude biological determinism with the ideology of a unique black experience. Physical blackness, the racial identity shared by black-skinned people of all hues and shades, determined their social, economic and educational opportunities. It was from these shared factors that a philosophy of blackness was pursued and the thesis assesses the attempt by black writers and thinkers to develop a theory of black cultural expression for their creative and critical works. The impact of blackness and the Movement's success in achieving its aims are evaluated through an analysis of the debate on black aesthetics, the New Black Poetry Movement, dissent in the work of Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed and womanist essentialism in the poetry and fiction of black women writers. The thesis concludes by acknowledging the influence of the Black Arts Movement on future black writers particularly in the discourse of the "New Black Aesthetic".

The notion that we have entered a global age of human relations has been the driving force behind many of the most persuasive cultural inquiries published over the last few decades, including fictional ones, into the conditions of contemporary existence, perhaps the most prominent of these being Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000). In the era of mass migrations, proliferating media technologies and the deterritorialised movements of labour and capital, it has become increasingly necessary to speak of identity and citizenship in terms of 'flows', 'routes' and 'networks' that cut across the traditional boundaries of the nation-state. Though it is through various cultural productions that such transformations are at once performed, symbolised and comprehended, discussions about how these changes have impacted on modes of literary representation have largely been framed by the older discourses of postmodernism and postcolonialism, which anticipate present circumstances while arguably offering rather limited perspectives on them. This text-focused thesis explores in detail the narrative strategies and thematic concerns of three British writers who have risen to prominence since 1990 - Lawrence Norfolk, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell - whose work announces literary developments that may be attributed to the fluidity and multiplicity of millennial relations and the phenomenon of globalisation. Informed by broader debates about multinational capitalism, transnational culture, and the emergence of new cybernetic infrastructures, this research argues that recent novels such as Lempri6re's Dictionary (Lawrence Norfolk), Transmission (Hari Kunzru) and Ghostwritten (David Mitchell) demonstrate an aesthetic consciousness of new patterns of human Interaction and geo-historical interconnectedness that is substantially different from the conceptual coordinates mapped in the fictions of a previous generation. The work of these three important authors has yet to enter fully into the mainstream of critical discussion, and the present study represents the first sustained critical contextualisation of their fiction. Following an introductory chapter that, firstly, provides a wide-ranging analysis of globalisation understood as a constellation of multidimensional processes and, secondly, considers how these material transformations articulated themselves in the cultural context of Britain in the 1980s and '90's, this thesis engages in close readings of the selected authors' complex fictions over three extensive chapters.

Giulio Camillo (1480-1544) was a poet, a scientist and an image-maker. He saw the birth of printing in his home-town of Venice, the fruit of the Renaissance in Rome, Paris and Padua and he witnessed the seeds of the Reformation. Renowned throughout Europe, he was acquainted with, amongst others, Erasmus, Titian, King Francis 1st and Pope Julius II. Three months before he died, Camillo dictated the text of his most important and secret, work to his agent, Girolamo Muzio. Muzio's transcription of L'idea del Theatro was eventually published in Florence in 1550. Camillo's secret, revealed in L'idea, is about man's relationship to the heavens. Camillo envisaged a living, tangible network of relationships that holds the cosmos in being. Heavenly influences, in the form of 'celestial streams', rain down on the earth. Man is as much a part of the earth as he is made up of the stars. Rocks and stones, earth, flowers and trees are alive and sentient of their holy origin. The very skin and hair of man is receptive to the flows of heavenly love. But this is not all that is contained in L'idea del Theatro. For Camillo believed that it is the sun, and not the earth, which has pride of place in the universe. He knew that the sun is the centre. Camillo dictated L'idea del Theatro a matter of months after Copernicus's Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres. Unlike Copernicus, however, Camillo did not use mathematics to prove his theories. Instead, Giulio Camillo's conception of the universe is made of a vast array of images. The pantheon - or Theatre - of the earth and heavens is described, by Camillo, in terms of the visual sign. Arising out of a dialogue with contemporary conceptual art, the aim of this work is to look at the connection between language and the art of science in the sixteenth century that was able to produce such a man as Giulio Camillo. His ideas are explored through the lens of some of his contemporaries. His letters through Erasmus; his imagery through Francesco Colonna; and his science through Copernicus. Using Camillo's images as a guide, a Virtual Reality Model of the Theatre forms the final part of the work.

This thesis describes and examines curatorial approaches and models of institutional practice which have emerged as a response to transformations in contemporary art, particularly as engendered by new media art and socially engaged practices, as well as wider changes regarding the role and functioning of culture in contemporary society. Focusing on institutional and curatorial praxis at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool – the first purpose built gallery for presenting new media art in the UK – this study examines practicalities and challenges of new institutional and curatorial formats in the context of critical debates about the role and shape of art institutions, new models of artistic and curatorial practice, as well as wider socio-political and economic aspects of cultural management. The thesis is a result of collaborative research conducted at FACT, which included an intense period of practical involvement in FACT’s operations through the co-curating of Turning FACT Inside Out exhibition, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of the FACT building. Combining different methodological tools including curatorial practice, participant observation, interviews and case studies, this research gives behind the scenes insight into FACT’s programming, particularly the modes of production and curatorial practice. It demonstrates how curatorial and production approaches develop within a particular institutional framework and how this institutional framework, in turn, influences the practice of curators. The research examines both advantages and limitations of particular institutional and curatorial models of working while providing insight into different factors shaping institutional agendas as well as complexities and contingencies of cultural production and management.  The analysis of FACT’s curatorial practice described and examined different approaches with the most distinct ones being context-responsive, durational and collaborative curatorial ways of working. With regard to institutional practice, the findings indicate that FACT shares many similarities with institutional models developed within new media centers and the models of art institutions proposed by new institutionalism. The analysis indicates that those curatorial and institutional models and ways of working – although not without their challenges – provide suitable frameworks for supporting a wide range of artistic practices, emerging from socially engaged and new media art. The study also concludes that those models of working, as examined in the context of FACT, imply a shift in the role of the curator to that of the producer, with particular emphasis on delivery tasks and production of content rather than context. Findings also suggest that economic aspects will play a significant role in defining the future shape of art institutions, which will need to develop strategies towards sustainable business models including flexible employment structures and project-based models of working. These come with a danger of the institution being too delivery focused and loosing sight of its role as a knowledge producer. The flexible and cost effective employment structure may also lead to the dissipation of the institutional knowledge base while contributing to the already precarious labour conditions in the arts.