Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Delaware, 1982. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-203).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1984. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-286).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Art History." Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-278).

Thesis (doctoral)--Humanistiska fakulteten, Lunds universitet, 1991. / Summary in German. Added t.p. with thesis statement and abstract in English inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 357-366).

Thesis (doctoral)--Humanistiska fakulteten, Lunds universitet, 1991. / Summary in German. Added t.p. with thesis statement and abstract in English inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 357-366).

Societies in Southern Africa remain largely gift economies, their art conceived as an infrastructure within everyday life, and yet art from the region continues to be read within the values of mimetic art where art is conceived as part of the superstructure of restricted Western economic and social thinking. My research on how the problematic of the gift and Bataille’s theory of the gift, the ‘general economy’, animates various aspects of my art praxis has set out to correct this discrepancy. It includes a re-examination of the general economy of the modern African society, which Achille Mbembe has described as the ‘postcolony’, and how it has impacted on the development of my work as an artist. My research is reflexive and practice-led. The specific praxis considered has included a body of work – published novels, films, installations, multimedia artwork and personal experiences – stretching back to 2000, when I made my first conceptual work of art, as a professional artist in Malawi. The problematic of the gift within my work has been explored alongside contemporary African art with a focus on Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art, and contemporary art at large with a focus on Situationist theory and praxis. I grew up in Malawi, a Chewa, and my research identifies the aesthetic sensibility in my art praxis as being directly influenced by the Nyau gift giving tradition which manifests in Chewa everyday life through play and a robust masquerading tradition, Gule Wamkulu, now a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This thesis compares aspects of the animastic and all-encompassing Chewa Nyau philosophy to Situationism as rooted in Dada and Surrealism. In light of the recent marginalisation of Gule Wamkulu in modern Chewa society, my research identifies the contemporary artist after Situationism as the new creative elite, Gule, akin to Gule Wamkulu in the heyday of Chewa prestation society. In my praxis, Nyau philosophy identifies the ‘cinema of attractions’ (manifest in the Malawi of my childoood as ‘Nyau Cinema’), the internet and the internet bureau, as new bwalo, arenas, to orchestrate play and invariably gift giving within the liminal spaces of modern spectacular cultures and commercial networks in what Negri and Hardt have described as the age of Empire. My thesis is presented as a ‘general writing’, a form of gift giving described by Derrida, and is communicated through an intellectual panegyric with an extensive appendix documenting the nature of my art and research as praxis. The appendix includes a detourned Facebook timeline (2011-16) and legal documents from a Venetian court regarding my installation Sanguinetti Breakout Area at the Venice Biennale 2015. The panegyric is what has united the theoretical and practice components of my research into one on-going inquiry into the problematic of the gift within everyday life.

Evoking his early personal experiences, computer art pioneer Paul Brown wrote in the mid-1990s that to work with computers was akin to a ‘kiss of death’. According to him, as a result of sheer prejudice, the majority of people in the art world did not acknowledge such artworks as interesting, valid or important. Although recurrent in the literature concerned with such art, Brown’s claims must be confronted with the relative success of artistic practices interchangeably labelled as computer, new media, cybernetic, electronic or simply digital art. However, as attested by this proliferation of labels as well as by the development of numerous dedicated awards, degrees, galleries, museums, awards and publications, the success of such practices cannot be explained by artistic merit alone. Since many in the art world do not accept these artworks, as Brown and others suggest, how can we explain the works’ success in securing and developing their own space over the course of fifty years? This thesis investigates the emergence, development and institutionalisation of the field termed here as ‘art, science and technology’ (AST) between 1965 and the mid-1970s in Europe and North America. Also recognised by the aforementioned labels (among others), AST is an umbrella term that arguably designates the artistic practices interested in the adoption, theorisation and dissemination of post-war technologies and, particularly, information technology. Yet, despite this shared interest, here I argue that it is the particular institutional arrangement of AST that best distinguishes it from other artistic practices. A direct consequence of its rejection, AST’s emergence as a separate field is here explained via a revision of its initial social and cultural contexts. Arising from the technophile cultural climate of the long 1950s, and alongside the massive investments in technology made by Western governments in the same period, early AST developed not within traditional artistic spaces but within industries and universities. In the late 1960s, however, with the rise of economic, political and social uncertainties alongside escalating international conflicts, it became increasingly difficult to justify an art produced with the tools and support of the military– industrial complex. If on the one hand artists such as Brown understood these new artworks as central to art and its history, a normative development of a new technological era, on the other hand opponents located at the centre of contemporary art lambasted these new artworks for their supposedly scientific, commercial and aesthetic pretensions. Differently from previous attempts aimed at justifying the artistic worthiness of art produced with post-war technology, this thesis presents the history of such practices from the point of view of its own struggle – that is, its fight for survival. Ultimately, here I explain and describe how AST became detached from art while claiming its status. This is an effort not interested in the merits of these practices per se but, instead, concerned with AST’s development as an autonomous and prosperous field.

Recognising art’s crucial function for reproducing economic and sexual differences, feminist political interventions - alongside a range of ‘new’ critical perspectives including Marxism, psychoanalysis and poststructuralism - have wrought historic changes upon the production, circulation and consumption of art. This is widely acknowledged in art historical scholarship. However, understanding that ‘art history’ (as a historically conditioned discipline) is concurrently reproductive of these ideological and material inequalities, feminist scholars have significantly and continually sought to intervene at the point of production – the writing of art’s history – to expose its social role and remake the fundamental terms of the discipline. This is a truth less widely acknowledged or, at least, less well-understood within contemporary scholarship. This thesis, therefore, seeks to examine the discipline of art history in Anglo- American contexts to assess the impact that feminist models of scholarship have had upon its knowledges and practices. This is attained through extensive literature overviews, archival research and, to a lesser extent, email interviews with key contributors to the discourse. Ultimately, this examination endeavours to address the production and regulation of feminist knowledge across a number of expanded (and interconnected) institutional sites. Case studies track the impact of feminist strategies upon the authoring of art history in the classroom, within scholarly professional organisations, academic publishing, the museum sector, and upon art-making itself. The research evaluates the mutable power structures of the discipline, how feminist interventions have had success in rethinking the limits of institutional knowledge, and how it may be possible to articulate critique under twenty-first-century conditions of institutional complicity and the hegemonic recuperation (or indeed ‘disciplining’) of radical practices. To date – and despite its prominence within much feminist writing - the importance of art historiography for the feminist political project has not been properly examined; the aim of this thesis is therefore to redress this omission and provide a timely and comprehensive critical reading of feminist knowledge production since around 1970.

This thesis studies the changes in the nature of critical writing on contemporary art, in the context of the British art world across a period from 1968 to around 1976. It examines the major shifts in the relationship between the artistic production of the period and the forms of writing that addressed it, through those publications that sought to articulate a public discourse on art in a period where divergent accounts regarding the criteria of artistic value, and the terms of critical discourse, came increasingly into conflict. This thesis takes as its main subject a number of publication venues for art-critical writing of the time, and their responses to the rapidly changing scene of artistic production. It examines the forms of writing that attended emerging artistic practice and the theoretical and critical assumptions on which that writing depended, highlighting those moments where critical discourse was provoked to reflect self-consciously of the relation between discourse and artistic practice. By tracing the repercussions of the cultural and political revolts of the late 1960s, it examines how the orthodoxies of art criticism came to be challenged, in the first instance, by the growing influence of radical artistic practices which incorporated a discursive function, and by leftist social critiques of art. It explores how, in the first half of the 1970s, radical and political artistic practice was promoted by a number of young critics, and sanctioned by its presentation in public art venues. Examining the history of magazines such as Studio International and a number of smaller specialist and non-specialist magazines such as the feminist Spare Rib and the left-wing independent press, it attends to how debates over the cultural and social agency of art began to draw on continental theoretical influences that put into greater question the role of subjective experience and the nature of the human subject. It examines how this shift in the relation between practice and discourse manifested itself in the editorial and critical attitudes of publications both from within the field of artistic culture, and from a wider context of publications embedded in the radical political and social currents of the early 1970s. It gives particular attention to the careers of a number of prominent critics, while situating the later reaction against alternative artistic practices in the context of the politically conservative turn of the end of the decade.

The town of Coloma, Montana was settled in the early 1890s as the home of several gold mining companies and their associated employees. Like so many boom towns, the residents had all but abandoned Coloma by 1916. This initial boom phase for Coloma transpired during a critical point in the emergence of modern capitalism, specifically in changing corporate managerial practices. A multi-company open town, Coloma lacked many of the typical characteristics of a paternalistic community, such as scrip and strictly segregated housing. Instead of outright domineering and controlling managerial practices, companies at Coloma manipulated and coerced their work forces through the control of the food provisioning system. This study demonstrates that companies at Coloma dominated the purchase, distribution, and consumption of food through the establishment of a centralized store and company-associated boardinghouses. Companies also offered meals as a type of labor mobilization feast to entice and retain labor populations. to explore the varying degrees of manipulation, this study employs the concept of the system of provision to organize a multi-scalar analysis that addresses the importation, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food products at Coloma. Through the lens of food distribution, this study examines archaeological materials and historical documents to show the extent to which Coloma's companies employed manipulative managerial practices.