Texte remanié de: Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät I--Fribourg, Suisse--Universität, 1992. / Bibliogr. p. 351-369. Index.

Diss.--Institut für klassische Archäologie--Wien--Universität, 1984. / Bibliogr. p. 225-237. Index.

Diss.--München--Universität, 1993. / Résumé en anglais et en français. Bibliogr. p. 175-208.

Diss. : Kunstgeschichte--Zürich--ca 1977. / Bibliogr. p. 179-194.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Fakultät für Orientalistik und Altertumswissenschaften--Heidelberg--Rupert-Karls-Universität, 1994. / Date d'après la notice du catalogage à la source. Notes bibliogr.

Depuis les années 1960, l'art contemporain démontre un intérêt accru pour la maison. Cette préoccupation est particulièrement visible au sein d’œuvres qui semblent issues d’un croisement entre sculpture et architecture et qui prennent la forme variée de constructions monumentales et miniatures, d’environnements, d’installations, de cabanes et autres abris, d'interventions sur des bâtiments. etc. De telles œuvres interrogent la condition actuelle de l'habiter et révèlent l’hybridité qui caractérise toute une partie de la sculpture postmoderne. Sur la base d'un vaste ensemble de productions représentatives - telles que les "Demeures" d’Etienne-Martin, les "Igloos" de Mario Merz, la maison de Jean-Pierre Raynaud, les découpes de Gordon Matta-Clark, les "Nids " de Nils-Udo, les "Cabanes" éclatées de Daniel Buren ou les "Cellules" d'Absalon --, il s'agit dans cette étude à la fois thématique et typologique d’explorer les manifestations de la maison dans la sculpture contemporaine, pour élaborer ainsi une histoire de la « sculpture-architecture ». Quatre orientations sont à cette fin définies : premièrement, la maison « intérieure », comprise comme une image de l’identité et découverte au travers d’une « sculpture intimiste ; deuxièmement, la maison minimale et mobile, fondée sur le modèle du corps et examinée à partir d’une sculpture « habitable » ou une forme de « microarchitecture » : troisièmement, l'abri originel ou la maison dans la nature, associé à une sculpture primitiviste et paysagère : et quatrièmement, la maison « déconstruite», considérée comme un modèle architectural, social et culturel, et analysée au regard d'une sculpture essentiellement publique et critique. / Since the 1960s, contemporary art shows an increased interest in the house. This preoccupation is particularly, visible in works which seem to result from a crossing between sculpture and architecture, and which take the varied form of monumental and miniature constructions, environments, installations, huts or other shelters, interventions on buildings, etc. These works question the current inhabiting conditions and reveal the hybridity that characterizes a large part of postmodern sculpture. Based on a wide range of representative productions - such as Etienne-Martin's "Demeures", Mario Merz's "Igloos", Jean-Pierre Raynaud's hous,. Gordon Matta-Clark's cuts, Nils-Udo's "Nids", Daniel Buren's "Cabanes éclatées" or Absalon's "Cellules" -, , the aim of this study both thematic and typological is to explore the various manifestations of the house in contemporary sculpture, so to develop a history of "sculpture-architecture". Four orientations are defined to this purpose : first, the "inner" house, understood as an image or identity and discovered through an animist sculpture; second, the minimal and mobile house, founded on the model of the body and examined from an "inhabitable" sculpture or a form of "microarchitecture"; thirdly, the original shelter or house in nature, associated with a primitivism and landscaped sculpture; and fourthly, the "deconstructed" house, considered as an architectural, social and cultural model, and studied from the point of view of an essentially critical and public sculpture.

This research arises out of my situated experience and the subsequent indeterminate positioning of my practice in-between the traditional disciplinary fields of textiles and fine art. Through a body of studio enquiry and accompanying theoretical and reflective commentary, the research questions whether a practice and knowledge base that is historically grounded in the interrogation of medium specific conventions can continue to be viable within a post medium/ postmodern contemporary art context. Implicit within this are two further considerations concerning the relationship between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic contexts and the tensions between subjective and material agency that arise in negotiating these positions. Through a sculptural and installational practice I propose a constellatory opening up of textile in conjunction with other materials, in terms of material agency and ‘productive indeterminacy’, where boundaries become blurred, meaning is unable to settle and fundamental categorical divisions between subject and object are destabilised. The processual inter-relational model of ‘attachment/detachment’ is offered as a conceptual framework and overarching practice methodology that maintains these productive tensions and opens up a complexity through which the medium specific can be mapped in a fluid and fragmentary way. Three interdisciplinary concepts; ‘camouflage’ (Neal Leach/architecture), mimetic comportment (Theodor Adorno/philosophy) and ‘complicity’ (Johanna Drucker/contemporary art) provide theoretical models which allow for assimilation and differentiation and embodied adaptive behaviour. Drawing particular reference from Adorno’s notion of mimetic comportment, the research involves a mode of behaviour that actively opens up to alterity and returns authority to the indeterminacy of the aesthetic encounter in a way that overturns the centrality of the subject. This is manifest through a range of practice strategies - ‘thingness’, ‘staging’ and the confluence of ‘sensuous immediacy and corporeal containment’ - which forge connections where distinctions remain mutable and mobilise a productive tension between subjective attachment and detachment. The research takes the ‘affective turn’, and increasing interest in the agency of material across the arts, humanities and social sciences over the course of the last decade, as contexts which mark a shift away from concerns with signification and which focus instead on the corporeal intensities of material/matter. Acknowledging the critical currency afforded to textile in terms of signifying agency, the project is notable in placing an emphasis on materially embodied experience that privileges aesthetic artifice, complicit formalism and an ambiguous abstract sculptural language over more overt strategies of representation. The research offers a reinscription of medium specificity in terms of material agency, where contrary to modernist conceptions of self-contained aesthetic autonomy there is a simultaneous concern with the distinct material properties of the medium and what they do in the social world. The research reveals that it is the ontological condition of textile as simultaneously social and material that has paradoxically accounted for its historical cultural ambivalence and its cultural significance. Moreover, it demonstrates that it is the interweaving of the sensuous and semantic so effectively mobilised through textile that gives rise to its affective indeterminacy. This affords it agential capacity as a transformative sensuous mode of knowledge production and artistic medium where boundaries between subject and object are destabilised and aesthetic considerations can be continuous with an engagement with social, historical and cultural contexts.

Researching early medieval stone sculpture has long been enabled and constrained by approaches devised and subsequently honed over the last century focusing on form and ornamentation. These approaches largely prioritise the physical appearance of sculptural fragments, often distancing them from the physical and cognitive contexts in which they operated from their creation to the present. This thesis brings together popular strands of research from other areas of archaeology - landscape, biography, materiality and monumentality - to explore how early medieval stone sculpture operated in place and time, from their construction through processes of use and reuse. The study recognises that sculpture did not function independent of physical location or the socio-political context with which it was connected and that many sculptures have life-histories which can be charted through individual monuments, assemblages of sculpture, and regional patterns. Using a tenth-/eleventh-century assemblage from Cheshire, the biographies of the county’s early medieval monuments and architectural fragments are explored in relation to their physical location and the local historical frameworks with which they are connected. Through this original and distinctive approach, Cheshire's corpus of early medieval stone sculpture is both revisited and reinterpreted to emphasis the power of place and the biographies of stone sculpture.

This practice-based research project is about the location of the self within aesthetic experience: how can a response to an object put forward for aesthetic appraisal lead to an awareness of the physical and embodied cognitive self The study centres on sculpture and our experience of it. It begins by considering how an aesthetic experience can act as a framing mechanism though which an awareness of the physical and cognitive self can be realised. By drawing upon several established philosophical and scientific ideas surrounding aesthetic experience, and through actual fine art practice, making sculptural objects which knowingly seek to trigger certain responses, the study will examine possible constituent factors within the experiential moment. In terms of theoretical and scientific contributions to the issue, the study considers the possible roles of proprioception and affordance, mirror neurons and embodied consciousness. The studio works involved have the characteristics, broadly, of skeletal mechanical devices, in metal, wood and other materials, stripped down to a functional minimum. The final phase of the project involves a motion capture experiment which sought to support the practical and theoretical work undertaken with a detailed account of viewer movement and body position in relation to the sculptural object, and thus offer analytical data regarding certain aspects of the aesthetic experience. The data collected has then been used as the basis for new studio work to further examine the relation between viewer and object.

This project explores the representation of the Holocaust in three museums: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; the Imperial War Museum in London; and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, Poland. It uses the so-called Auschwitz Album, a collection of photographs taken in Birkenau in May 1944, as a case-study. Employing the concept of mythology in the Barthesian sense of a ‘language in which we speak’, it examines the ways in which the Holocaust is more and more a prism through which other things are viewed; a language in which other things are spoken of. Chapters 1 and 2 lay the groundwork for the results of fieldwork described in chapters 3-5. Chapter 1 is concerned with the photographs themselves. Describing the structure and content of the collection, it demonstrates the degree to which the interpretation of photographs is complicated by what the viewer brings to them. While photographs might appear to transmit information, this chapter suggests that they are better understood as reflective objects. Chapter 2 interrogates the assumptions of five “classic” accounts of the Holocaust by Raul Hilberg, Helmut Krausnick, Lucy Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert and Saul Friedländer, in light of a proposed ‘Holocaust metanarrative’. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 engage with the particular museums on their own terms, posing questions about how they interact with the societies they are found in. Each museum, these chapters argue, raises a set of questions about the host nation’s relationship with the past. Chapter 6 looks at the specific display strategies employed by the museums to display the Auschwitz Album, considers how this relates to the broader institutional and national agendas as explored in Chapters 3-5. An epilogue takes the basic conclusion of this section – that all memory is local, and that debate about meaning is likely to be the continuing legacy – and asks if there is an alternative language in which to speak of the Holocaust.