Interfaces of location and memory is a conceptual framework that invites an understanding of context-led arts practice that is responsive to the particularities of place, rather than a model of practice that is applied to a place. ‘Socially engaged’ and ‘relational’ practice are examples of contemporary arts field designations that suggest a modus operandi – an operative arts strategy. The presence of such concepts form the necessary conditions for investment in public art sector projects, biennales, community outreach and regeneration programmes. The problem here is that the role of the artist/artwork can be seen as promising to be transformational, but in reality this implied promise can compromise artistic integrity and foreclose a work’s potential. This research project proposes that a focus on operative strategies applied to a situation (as a prescribed or desired effect) is counter-productive to the context-led processes of responding to the relational complexities of a particular place. As such, Interfaces of location and memory calls for an integrative conceptual framework to make sense of the immersive, durational and relational processes involved. Practices and theoretical texts concerned with place and process within the fields of arts, geography and anthropology inform the development of the research and the fieldwork project – caravanserai – an arts residency based at a caravan site in Cornwall, UK. Expanding on Lippard’s educative proposal for ‘place ethical‘ arts practice (1997: 286-7) Interfaces of location and memory offers a contribution to existing knowledge in the field of contemporary public arts; as well as being of interest to disciplines beyond the arts, concerned with the understanding and future visioning of the places we inhabit.

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This study investigates the presence of ambivalence as a strategy of cultural politics from modern to contemporary art in Brazil. It focuses on the development of modern art leading to the work of Hélio Oiticica, whose approach to avant-garde practice in Brazil was concurrent with intense articulations between the forces of social change and re-evaluations of the legacy of Modernism. The thesis has a strong historiographical emphasis and is organised in three parts: Part one attempts to view the emergence of Modernism in Brazil beyond the prevailing interpretations that emphasise its inadequacy compared to canonical paradigms. Part two discusses the development of abstraction in Brazil, particularly that associated with the constructivist tradition and its relationship with the prevailing positivism of a nation that saw modernity as its inevitable destiny. Such a relationship, between art and ideology, implicitly questions the purported autonomous nature of modern art. Again, what emerged were definite regional distinctions, themselves based on seemingly universal theoretical propositions. The context of Hélio Oiticica's emergence as a constructivist-oriented artist is discussed in order to establish the theoretical foundation for his subsequent articulations between notions of avant-garde and Brazilian popular culture. Part three deals with Oiticica's theoretical and artistic proposals. It centres on the artist's transition from a position concerned primarily with the aesthetic questions of art, to one in which art became engaged on a social, ethical and ultimately political level. Oiticica's relationship with concurrent developments in theatre and later in music and cinema is given particular attention. The artist's questioning of the divides between such fields of specialisation, socio-cultural borders or categories of creative production is argued to have arisen out of Oiticica's lessons from Neoconcretism as well as his individual creative approach to relations of friendship. The latter integrated the wider concept of participation that eventually drove the work through the apparent equivocation between national culture and avant-garde practice. The study concludes with an analysis of the artist's posthumous dissemination and its relation with today's contemporary Brazilian art.

Between 1768 and 1780 Captain James Cook led three epic voyages from Britain into the Pacific Ocean, where he and his fellow explorers- artists, naturalists, philosophers and sailors, were to encounter societies and cultures of extraordinary diversity. These 18th Century South Pacific encounters were rich with performance, trade and exchange; but they would lead to the dramatic and violent transformation of the region through colonisation, settlement, exploitation and disease. Since those initial encounters, museums in Britain have become home to the images and artefacts produced and collected in the South Pacific; and they are now primary sites for the representation of the original voyages and their legacies. This representation most often takes the form of exhibitions and displays that in turn choreograph and produce new encounters with the past, in the present. Drawing on Alfred Gell's term 'technologies of enchantment' my practice reconceives the structures of exhibitions as 'technologies of encounter': exploring how they might be reconfigured to produce new kinds of encounter. Through reflexive practice I critically engage with museums as sites of encounters, whilst re-imagining the exhibition as a creative form. The research submission takes the form of an exhibition: an archive of materials from the practice, interwoven with a reflective dialogue in text. The thesis progresses through a series of exhibition encounters, each of which explores a different approach to technologies of encounter, from surrealist collage (Cannibal Dog Museum) and critical reflexivity (The Hidden Hand), to a conversational mode (Modernity's Candle and the Ways of the Pathless Deep).

The thesis discusses the causes of the failure of the early Victorian textile industries to produce fine designs, and analyses the responses of manufacturers, artisans and critics to the issues raised by the problem. In Part 1 the historical changes of 'key words' such as art craft, artisan and artist are surveyed. It is suggested that changes in technology and work organisation and the formation of new social classes were mainly responsible for changes in the use of language. Part 2 looks at the labour process: technological changes and their results in the production of design are traced back and aesthetic aspects of the machinery question are analysed. The division of labour, its consequences in the designing process, and the nature of work (child labour in particular) are examined. The workers' defence of their skills and their desire to regain lost skills are also emphasised in the first two Parts: Part 3 then analyses economic, social and cultural aspects of the artistic education that was provided as a remedy for declining artistic standards and workmanship. Industrial exhibitions are discussed in the context of the education of the public in 'taste', as well as of the commercial interests of the manufacturing sectors. Part 4 discusses the market, where the design had become a relatively important part of the value of commodities. Manufacturers' concern with piracy and the protection of design copyright are examined; the interests of pro- and anti-copyright campaigners are discussed in relation to the free trade movement. Finally, the responses of manufacturers and merchants towards 'fashion' in the market are analysed: it is argued that the arbiters of 'taste' were more likely to be manufacturers and merchants than designers, and that the former did indeed damage the reputation of British design and created a problem which became apparent when other industrial nations caught up with Britain in technological achievement.

The primary aim of this thesis is to focus attention on the bourgeois, 'un-named' collector. The driving force behind most museum and art gallery collections of the Victorian and Edwardian period. British museum and art gallery records of gifted collections, bequests and loans usually note their donors. However, with a few notable exceptions, little is known about the collectors, their activities and motivation in making such presentations. Using the interests and activities of the Quaker miller and collector Ernest Marsh (1843-1945) as a case study, this thesis explores how in the period 1890-1945 a collector came to be a key agent in the construction and manifestation of taste in British Applied Arts and to a lesser degree in the Fine Arts. Through primary visual and documentary evidence of the Marsh home, and reference to contemporary and later commentaries it considers the relative influences of husband and wife on decorating and furnishing the domestic interior, the evolution of taste, and, for Ernest Marsh, its impact upon his artistic interests within the public arena. By examination of private papers, metropolitan and provincial art gallery and museum archives it also considers evidence of the inter-relationships between donors and curators, and the mutual advantages and disadvantages accruing to both, particularly focussing on the processes in bringing about changes in individual and institutional collecting policy. Further, by review of records of, in particular, the Contemporary Art Society and the Greenslade archive, it examines the degree to which private benefactors and those in public or semi-public office, acting as fund-raisers and spenders exercise influence through patronage of particular practitioners, choice of works and initiating new designs.

This thesis begins with an examination of collective art practices in Cuba in relation to the wider collectivised society. This acts as a counterbalance for engaging with the strategy of artists’ groups in the United Kingdom and the differences between political thinking in Cuba and the West. Practice-based research in the form of curatorial activity has constantly responded to the theoretical underpinnings of this thesis. The multi-platform project 'Assembling' (2013-2015) understands the exhibition to be collaborative from the moment of inception. Through the circulation of material in a process of gathering, electing and making visible objects and ideas, 'Assembling' has brought together artists previously unknown to each other from Cuba and the United Kingdom to find and cluster around a shared sense of social imaginary, a shared issue of concern. A 'Typology of Association' runs throughout the thesis to trace thought on grouping found in political theory, art history, exhibitionary practice and sociology to produce a nuanced interpretation of how it is that we envisage ourselves in relation to group identifiers. Concomitantly, the main text of the thesis asks, ‘Does the “social” exist in and of itself at all?’. Although this is a wide-reaching question, it is key for understanding artists’ groups as the social becomes a composed (Latour, 2005) space in which elements can be actively distributed (Rancière, 2000) to form temporal assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) making the social 'a practice'. Rather than enquire for example, what is ‘community art’, this research removes an assumptive meaning and asks what is ‘community’ and how does art practice activate its composition? Shifting social space is understood in terms of consistency: solid, fluid (Berman, 1982; Bauman, 2010) and foam (Sloterdijk, 2007, 2011).

This thesis aims to conduct a study of battle jackets using painting as a recording and analytical tool. A battle jacket is a customised garment worn in heavy metal subcultures that features decorative patches, band insignia, studs and other embellishments. Battle jackets are significant in the expression of subcultural identity for those that wear them, and constitute a global phenomenon dating back at least to the 1970s. The art practice juxtaposes and re-contextualises cultural artefacts in order to explore the narratives and traditions that they are a part of. As such, the work is situated within the genre of contemporary still life and appropriative painting. The paintings presented with the written thesis document a series of jackets and creatively explore the jacket form and related imagery. The study uses a number of interrelated critical perspectives to explore the meaning and significance of the jackets. Intertextual approaches explore the relationship of the jackets to other cultural forms. David Muggleton’s ‘distinctive individuality’ and Sarah Thornton’s ‘subcultural capital’ are used to emphasise the importance of jacket making practices for expressions of personal and corporate subcultural identity. Italo Calvino’s use of postmodern semiotic structures gives a tool for placing battle jacket practice within a shifting network of meanings, whilst Richard Sennett’s‘material consciousness’ helps to understand the importance of DIY making practices used by fans. The project refers extensively to a series of interviews conducted with battle jacket makers between 2014 and 2016. Recent art historical studies of still life painting have used a materialist critique of historic works to demonstrate the uniqueness of painting as a method of analysis. The context for my practice involves historical references such as seventeenth century Dutch still life painting. The work of contemporary artists who are exploring the themes and imagery of extreme metal music is also reviewed.

This thesis investigates the socially imagined representation of two areas of the global South, through the lens of contemporary art. It traces the historicisation of urban Latin America and the Arab world along a timeline of critical lenses, questioning their construction as imagined sites. Re-occurring tropes from exhibition spaces acting as representations of the global South on a macro-level are contrasted with observations from a local level, in an ethnographic study of nineteen artist groups of four capital cities of Latin America and the Arab world. The research draws upon sociological methodologies of research, arts methodologies and historicisation to chart the scope and function of these groups against the backdrop of the global art-institution’s so-called geographic turn and it’s romanticisation of the precarious state as the new avant-garde. Moving away from the traditional cartography of art and social history, this thesis offers an expanded concept of collectivity and social engagement through art, and the artist group as unit of social analysis in urban space. Putting these ideas into dialogue, artist-led structures are presented as counter-point to collective exhibitions and to the collectivity of national identity and citizenship. An abundance of artist groups in the art scene of each city represents an informal infrastructure in which a mirror image of inner-workings of the city and art world become visible through this zone of discourses in conflict. This unorthodox exploration of art, region, and collective expression launches into the possibility of new constellations of meaning, tools to recapture the particulars of everyday experience in the unfolding of large narratives. Examining the place of collective art practices in the socio-political history of the city, this intervention into current theory around the role of art from the global South traces the currents and counter-currents of the art-institution and its structures of representation re-enacted in places of display and public discourse -- the museum, the news, the gallery, the biennial,the street and the independent art space.

This thesis explores the interaction of word and image through an intellectual framework which engages with artistic practice. By providing an overviev of interarts debates, it is suggested that notions such as the 'sister arts' have tended historically to privilege word over image. This privileging which has circumscribed word / image relationships is addressed by the Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Lessuig who differentiates between the arts in terms of medium specificity. In problematising the ways in which interarts debates have posited word/image in a dualistic relationship, this thesis exposes the difficulties in establishing an adequate critical discourse for dealing with the conjunction of words and images. A broadly poststructuralist critical framework is introduced in order to challenge the ideologies and ingrained assumptions that have dominated imcrarts debates. This study will attempt to put into practice a deconstruction of binary relations, by questioning the stability and the authority of language. It will also address the notion of an 'imperialism of language' in fixing the meaning of the visual image. Drawing upon the work of Barthes, Derrida and Lyotard, this thesis will attempt to find ways of reconfiguring the dialectical relationship between word/image wherein the two are seen to be engaging in dynarruc interactions. It will be suggested that the overcoming of word/image antagonism since the 1960s has begun to shape interactions of theory and practice in the art world itself where the influence of poststructuralist theory can be seen in artistic practices such as Concepwal art. Key issues that will be addressed include representation and meaning, the notion of textuality, framing, and the 'eruption of language into the aesthetic field'. The intellectual framework is enhanced through a detailed analysis of selected contemporary artists whose work is based on the creative juxtaposition of word and image. These case studies, which focus on Barbara Kruger, Susan Hiller and artists' books, integrate word and image, theory and practice, in order to consider issues such as a feminine aesthetic, peinture fiminine, a critique of representation, and the interaction of form and content. The case studies will be examined within the context of postmodern artistic practices. Overall, this thesis engages with the complexities of developing: a suitable framework for visual analysis, one in which word and image are in a dynamic relationship. This study will suggest that many of the issues directly conceming word and image interaction are played out in the work of contemporary artists, and that it is the challenge of theory to attempt to engage with artistic practice.