Despite the ‘post-media condition’ of contemporary practice, some materials continue to be more equal than others. Cloth has a problematic history in Western art, frequently dismissed for its perceived inability to convey meaning beyond its own materiality, or a narrow idea of identity. The following thesis reconsiders this perspective and argues that it arose from the concurrence of heterogeneous post-war groups such as Post-Minimalism, and Fiber and Tapestry Movements, and the plethora of textile-based work they created. I review the accompanying critical responses to demonstrate how they sought to differentiate the use of fabric within these movements through the entrenchment of boundaries between valourised ‘art’ and denigrated ‘craft’. The thesis analyses how these categories were further complicated by mismatched lexicons of textile terminology. While fibre movements referred overtly and directly to fabric, the coinciding art theory primarily described its functions and affectations. We talk about the ‘softness’ of Oldenburg’s sculptures, not the cloth that makes them. This research argues that while there has been increasing scholarship surrounding these suppressed ‘craft’ textile practices, there is little exploration of the parallel and distinct material history of fabric within Western canonical Fine Art. The project addresses this asymmetry by focusing on the unspoken instances of cloth in mainstream twentieth century sculptural work and identifying the particular ways that artists have used this material. Artists have long employed the quotidian and shifting nature of textiles to convey ideas of instability, an impulse that can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp's 1913 work 3 Standard Stoppages. In order to critically interrogate the existing histories of textiles in twentieth century sculptural practices, the historical narratives presented in a number of exhibitions and catalogues are investigated. These accounts are considered in relation to three case studies that examine instances of structural, spatial and temporal instability in which cloth disrupts and untethers notions of fixed forms and static spaces. Investigating these narratives highlights historical cloth omissions, allowing for an understanding of how amnesiatic textile gaps affect practitioners today. My own cloth-based sculptural practice gives me a material authority and alternative perspective with which to question these received art historical narratives, and that in turn allows me to re-contextualise my decision to consistently work with this medium. My research-led practice centres on fabric objects that reference architectural forms; pieces that explore and exploit the unstable nature of cloth through their unfixed nature, and that I constantly reposition, resisting a final placement. By documenting these movements through photography and video, different temporalities are suggested, and a series of works that fluctuate between stasis and fluidity, order and chaos, are created. Accompanying these works are passages in the dissertation that reflectively a ddress the process of making and contending with the legacy of cloth. This project argues that fabric has been under-recognised but widely used in sculptural practices for over a century. Through explicitly articulating this narrative, a richer historical context for works that use fabric can be ascertained, and the insufficient complement of textile language in contemporary artistic discourse can be redressed.

This practice-led PhD aims to answer the question: how can processual/improvisation, spatial and plurilingual poetics be used to adapt text from other sources in order to create new effective forms? T=Y=W=Y=S=O=G=I=O=N is a discursive long sequence that aims to answer this question through variously translating, transforming, appropriating and adapting text drawn from the Welsh medieval cycle of stories the Mabinogi. In addition, this thesis uses specifically the Oxford Jesus College MS. 111, (The Red Book of Hergest) as its source. The creative work is broken into three sections which deal with these separate motifs. ‘The Red Book of Hergest Ward’ uses spatial and multilingual motifs to explore the word Hergest. ‘Cych’ explores spatial and improvisatory motifs. Finally, ‘Branwen’ deals with improvisation and adaptation. While the creative work seeks to explore the three critical strands of the thesis it also obeys its own aesthetic logic, and in so doing omits and includes different thematic motifs beyond the remit of the three critical chapters. The critical part of the thesis explores the individual thematic strands separately, answering more specific questions that address aspects of the creative work. The foundation of these chapters are close-read examples of authors who use the relevant approaches in their work. Finally, I discuss writers who show hybridity in their work incorporating more than one of these (critical) strands in their writing, David Jones as an example of a writer who uses all three strands. Comparisons with my own work are drawn throughout this thesis. Audio recordings of performed work from the creative portfolio accompanies this thesis, recorded by and with improvised accompaniment from Dario Lozano-Thornton.

Translatability and translation, the possibility and act of conveying some thing between people, objects, languages, cultures, times, spaces and media, have become increasingly important elements of creative practice and works of art. My research explores this proposition. To contextualise this concept of translation as an artistic and critical method mediating the relationship of the seeable to the sayable I retrace an under-mined vein of translation that grew from the Enlightenment, the Early (Jena) Romantic response to it and its subsequent development through Walter Benjamin to other modern theorists. I suggest that this tradition of translation has developed into a creative method that assumes a pre-existent given from which it evolves in order to destabilise, re-appropriate and make-new. The thesis argues that art has come to occupy the space of translation and proposes that an interpretative mode is ultimately antithetical to a form of thought engaged with in the creative process. This relies on the understanding of a qualitative distinction between acts of translation as presentational and of interpretation as representational. The distinction is not clear-cut since these two forms of mediation operate on a continuum. The probable root of “interpret” in English is “between prices” and derives from trade. This etymology stresses the transactional, hermeneutic role of the interpreter as a responsive agent that negotiates between distinct value systems to ensure equivalence during the process of exchange. While Interpretation operates primarily within the symbolic aspect of language translation retains a relationship to metaphor, which acknowledges that during transfer something becomes something that it literally is not. It must therefore also account for Aporia, or what fails to cross over and for a-signifying, singular aspects that affect or alter the symbolic during this process. In contrast to interpretation, translation’s relation to subjectivity, its resistance to schematisation and reduction to the accurate, objective and rational transfer of information provides a prophylaxis of doubt and generates heterogeneity. The thesis triangulates my practices as artist, translator and critic using translation to destabilise and re-calibrate the relationship of theory to practice. In relation to theory, rather than use this to explain, interpret, or categorize art, it advocates the translational practice of placing in parallel so that lines of thought may be drawn from one to the other, responding to and setting up points of intersection, divergence and congruence to encourage a non-hierarchical associative-dissociative dismantling. Translation informs the research method, structure and content of the thesis, which occupies an inter-theoretical, inter-disciplinary or matrixial space. As such, it is edified through a process that derives from and displays the translational method and diverse sources that constitute it. Four case studies bring together practices employing a translational method from different periods, cultures, creative practices and theoretical sources: Bernard Leach and Ezra Pound’s modernist projects; Jorge Luis Borges’ theory of translation and Briony Fer’s re-presentation of Eva Hesse’s studio work; the Brazilian poets Haroldo and Agosto De Campos’ theory of Cannibalistic translation and painter Adriana Varejao’s work with tiles; and ceramicist Alison Britton in light of Donald Winnicott’s concept of transitional spaces.

This project argues that deceptions are worth studying as creative acts. The resulting discoveries are applied to discourses within contemporary narrative illustration. Almost all complex deceptions are texts composed of visual and verbal elements. This research is interested in those deceptions that appear in print and particularly those that involve the creation of a fictional author through a sustained text meant to be considered real by a particular audience. The deceptions concerning this research are not momentary; they exist as specially created artefacts and documents and are sustained over a substantial period of time. These deceptions are not necessarily created by artists or authors, they may be created by any person who utilises a particular methodology: the appropriation and collage of visual and narrative fragments to create the illusion of a seamless whole. The images in these deceptions respond to the Internet and fragmentary, circular or real time narrative in a way that mainstream illustration, as yet, does not. The research methodology is empirical; evidence of the deceptions’ dissemination and repetition is collected. These are the texts; the illustrated fictions analysed by the thesis. The taxonomy organises them according to their aesthetic characteristics, avoiding psychological speculation and focusing on their substance. The concept of ‘fake literature’ within literary theory and the increasing use of strategies amongst artists that question discredited notions of authenticity are also considered. Certain philosophical theories about the nature of language are used to clarify the discussion.

This practice-led research examines the paradox of seamlessness in fashion, drawing on the similarities found between the process of making garments, the process of their embodiment and process of research. Integrating practical and theoretical methods, it suggests that the process of making and using garments can be a transitional experience, as well as a device that creates ambiguity of subjectivity, which in turn promotes the subject’s reflexive re-adjustment. This analysis informed and was informed by making a series of seamless woven garments which reveal their own construction, showing themselves to be forms in process, representing the ambiguity of modern subjects. Inconsistency and contradiction are intrinsic to fashion: it is both matter and meaning, both cover and display, both imitation and differentiation, but it is always difficult to locate clear demarcation. As a garment-maker, I metaphorically placed this ambiguity at the material level of seams, openings and edges of garments, from which emerged the research question: What is the meaning and function of the seam and seamlessness? My investigation through making garments via hand-woven seaming methods, and my search for an adequate theoretical rendering of the reflections arising from the making, led me beyond the discipline of fashion, to the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology and art, literary and cultural theory, from which a series of perspectives are derived. Articulated in this thesis and the accompanying exhibition are thus the process and result of my explorations through making, writing, and theory. The making process involving contact with material is a displacing experience that generates a reflexive value. This demonstrates the ability of garments to test and reset the essential boundary of corporeal subjectivity through the experience of both illusion and reality. Dressing practice is thus the making of the self via repeated reality testing. The poetic function of making thus enables us to generate an authentic knowledge from the experience of oscillating between disparate states. Therefore, together, the seam and seamlessness represent the subject-in-process, and fashion as a particular way of being in this transitional passage. The estranging effect of my hand-woven seams demonstrate this poetic function of making. In the same way, the thesis reveals the seams between practice and theory, and between diverse references, but also their mutually informing relationship.

This thesis is based on a journey of practice undertaken by emerging theatre company, Massive Owl between 2012 and 2016. The thesis has been written by company member, Jenny Duffy but is reflective of the broader experience of the company as a whole. It exposes and discusses key trends, tactics, strategies and constraints of this journey, generating a unique contextual account of the experience and work of an emerging company working in the field of contemporary performance today. Through this the thesis responds to an identified gap in literature within the field of contemporary performance that examines the work of emerging artists. It analyses select frameworks currently available to and prolifically used by emerging artists including: Arts Council England’s funding programme, Grants for the Arts and ‘Scratch’ and Work-in-Progress events, from the perspective of an emerging company. Through examining the role of the arts within recent cultural policy and surrounding agendas of this policy, the thesis critiques the predominant instrumental and economic rationale for arts funding in relation to the neoliberal capitalist context and the impact this has on emerging artists’ development and their work. The thesis concludes with a call to arms from within the unstable and rapidly changing political climate of 2017, to value artists on their own merits and to not make claims for art within frameworks that place constraint on its wider role and value.

In different countries participation in the arts has become a significant theme of government policies which foster the instrumentalisation of culture; Yúdice (2003), Belfiore and Bennett (2010), Eagleton (2014). Increasingly it is claimed that the arts have positive effects on social, political and economic well-being. The emphasis on people changing the arts ― common in the political discourses of 1970s ― has been substituted by arguments about the power of the arts to transform people’s lives. This study tests these claims comparatively. The main questions asked are: what are the differences between instrumentalism from above or below in the political order; and how do the world of the arts and letters and the world of politics speak to each other today? Through extended interviews, life stories and discourse analysis, based on fieldwork in Britain and Venezuela, the study demonstrates the complex moral interdependency between European notions of aesthetic virtue and political or civic virtues. The political structuring of these virtuous relations is shown to be morally tenuous. It is argued they express the institutionalised but inadequate compensations associated with the ‘good-faith economy’ (Bourdieu 1977). Politically these relations are problematic; among other things they discursively separate the mind from the body which means that time and other basic needs tend to be neglected. It is argued that this complex relationship between aesthetic and political virtue is a significant factor in Statecraft, and in unmaking the militant role of the organised working class. It is suggested that these dynamics are a contributory factor in the ascendancy of the political far-right internationally. To counter the influence of the good-faith economy this study proposes greater public participation in the funding processes which support the arts.

The goal of this thesis is to look at the emergence of the thematic contemporary art exhibition in Italy through an analysis of the influence of Fascism and the commercial sector in the three exhibitions composing the Cycle of Vitality, organised between 1959 and 1961 at the Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume (CIAC), opened at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1951. The cycle falls within the fields of both curatorial studies and the history of modern and contemporary exhibitions, two disciplines that have been developed since the 1990s. This inquiry contributes to them by clarifying further their specific fields of investigation, or in presenting alternative genealogies by casting light on overlooked antecedents; and by addressing the curator as a distinct cultural producer, the institution as a medium for social change and the history of exhibitions. The exhibitions analysed belong to the genealogy that resulted from the shift in the display language of international inter-war avant-garde experiments in exhibition design as manipulated by Fascism and commerce in the 1930s. Modernist architects were engaged in turning the exhibition into a medium for social change, and a mass-medium to bring a sense of the future into the present: It was from this premise that the model of the thematic exhibition emerged. Its further development in post-war Italy paralleled the questioning of the fine art museum’s entanglement with the discipline of art history, enacted by those architects trained in the 1930s. The Cycle of Vitality paired the two models in the thematic contemporary art exhibitions – Vitalità nell’arte (1959); Dalla natura all’arte (1960) and Arte e contemplazione (1961) – organised by curators avant-la-lettre Paolo Marinotti and Willem Sandberg. Crucial to the analysis of the Cycle of Vitality is the questioning of the relationship between contemporary curators, museums and the discipline of art history, as a consequence of Italian exhibition culture between 1932 and 1961. Within this historical framework, these exhibitions were influenced by the original profile of the CIAC, a cultural centre sponsored by the SNIA Viscosa, a company manufacturing man-made fibres. The CIAC allowed for the development of exhibitions that were intended to reshape the social body rather than to present the results of art historical research as was traditionally the role of museum or fine art exhibitions. In the 1950s, modernist Italian architects played a strategic role in rethinking the museum, a tendency further fostered by curators avant-la-lettre who, as cultural producers, turned the institution into their medium rather than considering it a function of the discipline of art history.

The history of design criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century in the US and the UK is punctuated with self-reflective interruptions during which design critics were acutely self-conscious about their purpose, role in society, relationship to their publics and use of critical techniques and formats. This thesis examines a selection of such moments and considers the extent to which they disrupted, and even redirected, the ways in which design criticism was practiced, produced, and consumed. The chapter focuses are as follows: a selection of articles published in the design magazines of the mid-late 1950s and early 1960s which forcibly activated a new set of values with which to engage with expendable, mass produced product design; a protest at the International Design Conference at Aspen in 1970 which posed a challenge to the established conference lecture format and to a lack of political engagement on the part of the liberal design establishment; a set of articles by cultural critics that critiqued the prevailing celebratory commentary on style and lifestyle in 1980s London; an independent exhibition that offered an alternative view of contemporary design in contrast to government-endorsed design exhibitions in 1990s London, with an additional focus on an intensification of thought about the designed object as a potentially viable critical format; and, lastly, a debate between the authors of a US design blog and an established British design critic writing in Print magazine that drew attention to a rift between the energetic amateur impulses of blogging culture and the editorial values of traditional print media. Three main problematics are used to provide continuity throughout the discrete time periods of this thesis, as well as points of comparison between the critical works examined: criticism’s contesting conceptions of its instrumentality, purpose and methods; criticism’s idealized perceptions of, and actual engagement with, its publics; and, finally, criticism’s adoption of a literary sensibility and narrative qualities in an attempt to transcend the limitations of design’s promotional and market-based concerns. In identifying five moments of historical discontinuity in the practice of design criticism, therefore, this thesis assembles a time-lapse portrait of the intellectual, stylistic and material constitution of design criticism between the early 1950s and the early 2000s, and in doing so, aims to contribute meaningfully to a growing historiography of design criticism.

No description available.