This project explicitly addresses the persistent question of the monochrome. I want to develop several figures of thought such as inscription, erasure and trace in order to examine new ways in which this question might find fresh trajectories of formulation. Historically, the monochrome has attracted discussions related to the autonomy of painting, the circularity of process, chromatic purity, repetition, limits, transcendence, the beyond of representation. The project does not aim to formulate the question of the identity of contemporary abstraction but instead explore the questions related to abstraction’s temporality. The monochrome appears to resist a pure art historical discourse because of the way that it has always been close to a speculative drive within philosophical aesthetics. In this regard I wish to test this relationship between ways of mediating the visual in terms of language and the schemas assumed by the modulation of the ‘seeable’ into the ‘sayable’. Jacques Derrida is an important figure for my research in terms of his thinking about the trace and the play of absence and presence. These concepts will be engaged with alongside accounts of the monochrome in contemporary art history. This intellectual project is anchored by the relationship to my own studio practice, which involves an overlapping of elements that are added and dismantled until a definitive form is achieved. The physical nature of the materials is, thus, central to the activity. Materials are added and removed; the latter process is frequently the more important. The surface is worked through a restrained process of making, trading one factor against another until a resolution becomes possible. By working with increased physicality, plus highly calibrated or austere means, the ambition is then to engage the viewer as a total sentient being as opposed to a receiver of images. The work thus resists the conventions that govern the presentation of image-based paintings and this implies the possibility that the work creates other schemas of both place and temporality.

The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object. This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time. Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry. 4 The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.

The thesis formulates a theory of Gypsy visuality based on the identification of key elements within Gypsy visual arts, crafts and décor. This is achieved through the analysis of Romany artefacts using the combined theories of anthropologist Alfred Gell (1945-1997) and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). The research highlights the social significance of Gypsy visual culture and argues its potential impact upon Romany/non-Romany social relations. Findings in relation to Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus: Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus has limited potential for application in its current form due to the lack of a method with which to analyse artefacts themselves. The links between Gell’s theory of the Art Nexus and Peirce’s Semeiotic theory have been strengthened during this research. Combining Gell’s theory with elements from Peirce’s Semeiotic theory increases the potential application of both methods by offering both social and semeiotic interpretations of the artefact. This combined method generates findings that offer a more precise account of the distribution of social agency via the artefact than Gell’s original theory allows. A combined Gellian and Peircean method of analysing artefacts makes Gell’s notion of agency more widely available for application by artists. Implications in relation to Gypsy visuality: By using a combined Gellian and Peircean analysis I have established some significant recurrent elements that constitute Gypsy visuality for the first time. These elements include; flashiness, allure, enchantment, entrapment, ornament, diversion, discordance, contingency, functionality, performance, community, family, home, traditional skills, wildlife, countryside and gender. The constituent elements of Gypsy visuality both reflect and inform Gypsy culture. This new understanding of Gypsy visuality offers a new understanding of the social relations that surround Gypsy culture. Gypsy visuality both reflects and informs the behaviour of Gypsy communities and in so doing articulates a set of relations that characterise Gypsy social agency. Implications in relation to art practice: Using painting as method to research Gypsy visuality in its constituent elements has generated new interpretations of Gypsy visuality. These are; Western art practices, glamour, interruption, disorientation and reflection. These new interpretations allow new access to the meanings inherent in Gypsy visuality and therefore new access to the meanings inherent in Gypsy culture.

This research project asks how a consideration of Greek herm sculpture can be put to use in exploring prosthetic conditions of painting. This question is addressed through a series of essays and a body of studio-based art work, undertaken at the RCA from 2010 to 2015. The written submission contains a series of interconnected essays, through which prosthetic conditions of painting are explored via Greek herm sculpture, in order to reassess the work of contemporary and historical painter’s practices. The first chapter looks to a history of herm sculpture, focusing on the roles it has performed around the age of Alcibiades, of Athens 4 B.C. This assessment is aided by Michel Foucault’s notion of askesis and Pierre Hadot’s work on spiritual exercises. They enable a shift, from understanding the herm as a physical object to the historical roles it has performed in Greek culture — as a desecrated object, boundary-marker, object of ritual and, via its connection to hermes, a means of interpretation, bodily passage and transition. I address a collection of essays ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’, by Italo Calvino, and his connection to The Workshop for Potential Literature (Oulipo), in order to understand the use of literary restraints as exercises which offer a preliminary guide to how the herm can be used in this project. Through Foucault, Hadot and Calvino, the herm transitions from object to an askesis — undertaking tasks that perform in essays and paintings. The subsequent essays focus on the work of Lynda Benglis, Orlan, Caravaggio, François Boucher and Imi Knoebel, addressed through contemporary thinkers that undertake considerations of the prosthetic. The intersection of material culture studies, feminist theory, disabilities studies and poststructuralism, offer a view to the prosthetic that creates a platform for a reconsideration of these artists’ work. The herm becomes a silent guide in this project, understanding the prosthetic as imbedded in ideas of the relational — sensitive to the way in which body and paint, silicone and skin can adjoin, supplant, intersect, enhance and compensate, between subjects and objects. By inserting the prosthetic into narratives that question the relationships between bodies, objects and surfaces in these artist’s work — and in asking what they can produce — this project explores and articulates prosthetic conditions of painting.

‘Uncompanionable’ is the word Leo Steinberg used to describe the female figures in Pablo Picasso’s paintings of the early forties. This project demonstrates a series of attempts to imagine acts of companionship in an area of tension between art history and fine art, which it constructs anew. The object I’ve most tried to companion is the reproduction of a small portrait picture, Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), which developed from work surrounding his celebrated political mural, Guernica. The effort of companionship makes a fool of me and I take my fool as methodology, understood as a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done. A key principle of my fool is a logic of encounter in which what’s conscientiously sought gives way to something else that emerges, repeats, insists; it is to this level of experience that my project addresses itself. For my fool’s procedures, I turn to a number of others, including Picasso’s lover in 1937, the photographer and painter Dora Maar (of whom Weeping Woman is a portrait) who made her own enigmatic companion to Weeping Woman, a half-painted copy known as Woman in a Red Hat; and psychoanalysis, whose own development might be seen as a sustained effort to companion the seemingly uncompanionable in the human subject. I’ve engaged with the PhD as an educational site through which to expose and reconstitute previous moments in my education as an artist and art historian. Reaching back to my childhood bedroom, the project opens to a reproduction of Weeping Woman in one of two art books I owned in my pre- to early teens, around 1986 to 1992. The other book is a monograph on Dürer, open at plate 38, Melencolia I (1514). Rather than becoming involved in this image’s details, my fool turns from it towards the field of melancholy, ultimately coming to the art historical literature of the eighties and early nineties that derogated melancholy as a pathological attitude to the end of painting, and which informed the discourse of art history to which I was exposed as an undergraduate student. My fool speculates as to whether painting’s sickness might have been misdiagnosed and the search for a cure misguided; following psychoanalytic insights, a slightly different problem for painting is proposed, one that Dora Maar’s copy of Picasso’s Weeping Woman is seen as a response to. The bedroom setting, two images, and several historical moments, cross the painting Weeping Woman with what is experienced as uncompanionable in me. This is a kind of pleasure, felt as both strange and intimate, which I take in this and other modernist paintings, and which my work continues to circle. Given this pleasure troubles as much as supports the working ‘I’, the project adopts the first person as the preferred pronoun of my fool and bearer of its principal problems. Here, by way of the lacunary autobiographical subject, art history and fine art find their interaction, not in fusional plenitude but in restive exchanges that precipitate a series of blind fields.

A half of a brick is still a brick. Half a brick is a block. A building block, it is a thing of construction. Repeated, it makes a wall. Unnoticed, it is a stumbling block. It is mobile. When lobbed, it brings the construction down. This research draws on legacies of minimalism, as exemplified in processes of isolation and the repetition of a singular unit – but it is not reductive. Literal theatricality is embraced and ramped up in the drafting of stage directions, and lighting and effects plots embedded as a part of picture making. As with theatrical scripts, a looped feedback of proposition and account is employed and items are expelled and accumulate around the questions: ‘What is the record?’ ‘What is the thing?’ Within this recursive process motifs appear. Each form, whether it be half a brick, a choral ode, a riddle, a monogram or a rolled butterfly collar, expands on the materiality and mechanisms of the thing itself. The approach is to creep up on it: a form of research by stealth.

That painting is understood as being visual cannot really be contested. Even when Duchamp introduced his disavowal of painting and the schema of the chessboard to indicate an anti-retinal strategy, the implication of visual imaginary was still in place. Indeed the link between knowing and seeing is not only at the root of metaphysical (the desire to know is the desire to see -Aristotle) thinking itself, but persists even within the disavowal of it within Late Modernity. Currently, its presence does still persist and continues to fuel its relevance. This research develops as a speculation on the relation between an ontological understanding of the image and the ornamental. In contrast to the usual understanding of ornament, the ornamental is elaborated as a force and process for the proliferation of forms out of forms. The arabesque is the structuring principle of this research and the figure it presents. The revelatory force of the arabesque lies not in giving a schema of visual revelation, but it is touching upon a force that transforms and changes, the very 'plasticity' (C. Malabou) inherent in every being and image. Through the recollection of the arabesque, the ornamental is invoked as a principle of drift and thrift in becoming. As a double, paradoxical device the arabesque enables a play between oblique and transparent things, between what can be said or known and what cannot be said, what remains unknown - and whatever lies in between. As a figure of thought, it sets out a play of plastic and graphic imminence. Characteristic for the Islamic culture, the arabesque is more a mode or an idea than a form or pattern, and it was formative for this culture from its very early ways of manifestation. The idea of the arabesque is in and for itself, a 'motor of thought' (C. Malabou). The tension between representation and presentation, between symbolic, iconographic or legible meaning and a-signifying, pre-linguistic or ornamental meaning is at the heart of understanding the image, which is a mode of being that is encountered in different ways. Through the ornamental as a force of mediation (O. Grabar) this understanding is infiltrated with an ethical dimension. The route taken is one of conceptual risk, of invention and the fantastic. Method itself is addressed as something to be found - and not as something already given or pre-established. This research in painting inflects painting from within, from its relation to presence and the image. Caught in this by its inflammatory auto-affection, painting explodes and de-forms, it trans-forms itself - it consciously receives and, simultaneously, gives form. The research itself is manifested as a concatenation of heterogeneous elements that belong to different registers such as written texts, show installation, and different technologies.

Between 1890 and 1948, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870–1954) a philosopher, Sanskritist, Persianist and father of India’s greatest modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil, produced a remarkable body of photographic self-portraits. The photographs, usually very small were always of himself in aristocratic-bourgeois settings, which ranged from Paris, Budapest, Simla and Lahore. These images prove to be the starting point for my own research into self-portraiture and a re-appraisal of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’. Central to my re-figuring of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is a refutation of the Kantian ideal of the self-identical, self-sufficient, immune and transcendental subject. I intend to map out how the term has been re-claimed and recalibrated by myriad postcolonial academics and scholars in contemporary critical and cultural theory. My own participation in the on-going re-evaluation of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is done through the detailed study of the lives and works of my three case studies: Sher-Gil, the painter Bhupen Khakhar (1934- 2003), and photographer Raghubir Singh (1942–1999). In my discussion of their respective oeuvres, place and location are foregrounded, taking into account physical movement, but more crucially modes of affiliation and belonging. In my research, a rethinking of ‘cosmopolitanism’ rests on the assertion that a ‘cosmopolitan self’ evolves from correspondences between disparate parties and places. Community, friendship, networks of affiliation and interpersonal exchange are critical to study and acknowledge. The other fundamental concern of this thesis is an emphasis on emotion, and emotional connections to spaces. Geography can and should be read as being populated by emotions, and the narratives of lives can be told through the emotional connections to certain places and spaces. With this research I do not wish to establish a definition or a model of a South Asian cosmopolitan or cosmopolitanism, which is a dangerous and limiting gesture. With the aid of Sher-Gil, Khakhar and Singh I hope to make apparent that for a cosmopolitan sensibility to be formed, physical travel, affluence, and privilege are not necessities. Neither is relinquishing an attachment to place or, inversely, claiming multiple attachments to places, but rather advocating for a recognition of the connection between space and emotion, and how the affects produced from these lived conditions and experiences are manifested, materialised and should be appreciated. Another aspect of this research project is an engagement with a mode of heuristic inquiry, where there is an emphasis on the researcher’s internal frame of reference, the researchers present. Thus, the temporal frame of the thesis produced by my selection of case studies, spans from India’s transition as a colony to an independent nation, but continuing on consciously to my own locatedness, at a moment when it is emerging as a global capitalist power led by a Hindu nationalist government. All of which prompts a continued consideration of the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. It begs the question, how has and can one continue to arbitrate between local attachments and the world at large?