This PHD project has been based on 100% studio practice; the original title for the research programme was Between Reality and Fiction and aimed at exploring the construction of reality and truth in our society, a society strictly controlled by the mass media. Whilst developing the first project within this body of research - Isolation (an attempt to contrast a real life experience of a visit to a prison with existing institutional information obtained through second and third hand sources - readings, media, films ...), a range of other more pertinent concepts arose, causing a shift from those initial ideas to ones incorporating control, displacement and space, understanding this, not only as a physical entity, but also as a socio-political construction. Based on the different projects that form the basis of my research, I explored the concept of control and how that is exercised on individuals in free/democratic societies- from spatial control (access/no access), economical, cultural (oneself/others), medical/technological, or media control (the creation of public opinion). This research attempts to question/reflect public awareness of these control measures, in order to assess their limitations, whilst investigating any existing gaps in the system which could potentially subvert it. What has been particularly relevant has been the exploration of issues relating to space, understood not only as a physical entity, but also as a socio-political construction, how space is organised, divided and controlled in an era of globalisation, and whether, or why access to certain ‘spaces’ is either severely restricted or completely denied. Work developed during the PhD has consisted of: Practical studio research (mainly installations, video and photography), site specific visits/trips relevant to particular themes within the project (HMP Winchester, Strait of Gibraltar, Canary Islands, container depots, airports ...); related readings; compilation of explicit news reportage; and the construction of an extensive archive that includes all printed and digital matter tracking the entire research process and its methodology. Personal experience has also been a main factor, influencing the development of specific research: temporary/precarious housing, part-time jobs, or in general, the situation of living abroad with all that that implies in the way of physical and cultural displacement.

The project has engaged critically and reflectively in a series of investigations through Deleuzean theory and fine art practice. It has explored the functions of the diagram in relation to direct images of time, identifying novel perspectives on these aspects of Deleuzean theory through interconnections and a reciprocally transformative engagement with art practice. The research offers fresh insight into the complicated temporal shifts that become apparent through practice by layering visual and discursive elements. The work is concerned with the interrelation and transformation of different temporalities across surfaces and screens, and is situated in the intersections between text, film and drawing. <- Text functions in, about and as practice, and theory feeds and folds through processes of making. The interactions between analogue and digital, and the superposition and overlaying of the surfaces of drawings with projection are of particular importance. Digital film projections are traced and drawn, and the resulting layered surfaces are filmed again, repeatedly marked over and superimposed. The research addresses how these complex interrelationships might be understood as time images, and how different functions of the diagram can be seen to activate or make possible these direct perceptions of time. The diagram, in a Deleuzean sense, is characterised by a continual splitting that is simultaneously a divergence. Coming apart just as it runs together, the diagram is a marking out or working through that is provisional, temporal and engages with what is yet to be. The time image is identified as an instance in film where the virtual, or pure past and possibility, is perceived in the present. A stable, interwoven structure is developed through Bergson's theories of perception, recognition and memory, and this acts as a surface across, on and within which the main body of the text takes place. This is separated into three parts and each section proposes the interrelationship of a different diagrammatic function and a particular imaging of time. These are seen to arise through: slips, or loose, errant linkages; splits, or simultaneous bifurcations between

My area of research is the peplum, a cycle of mythological action films produced in Italy from 1957 to 1965, and its influence on both contemporaneous and subsequent filmic depictions of mythical heroes. I argue that this genre is a significant cinematic form which has been marginalised in the fields of film and cultural studies. My thesis reassesses the peplum in terms of its representations of heroic masculinity and the ways in which these relate to wider debates on masculinity. Critics such as Richard Whitehall (1963), Gianni Rondolino (1979) and Richard Dyer (1996, 1997) have noted that the cycle began with Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, Pietro Francisci, 1958), which established the peplum ground rules. Taking this film as my starting point, I trace the evolution of the genre through a series of case studies, including Romolo e Remo (Duel of the Titans, Sergio Corbucci, 1961), which offers contrasting forms of heroic masculinity, and counter representations of Herculean masculinity in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), an American production made partly in response to the success of the peplum, and Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1961). I also discuss later reconfigurations of the peplum hero in the American-financed Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), which draw on the iconography and aesthetics of the peplum to markedly different effect. Previous peplum scholarship has characterised the genre as endorsing the value of white male physical strength in the context of a reactionary patriarchal status quo. I argue that the depiction of masculinity in these films is more varied, problematic and contradictory than this over-generalised reading would suggest. It is my contention that the peplum’s diverse representations of masculinity offer a notable contribution to ongoing debates on maleness as centred on and expressed by the body—within film studies, academia and the wider culture—that has been largely unexplored and unappreciated. My re-evaluation of the peplum also underlines the cultural value of Italian and indeed European genre cinema, fields still overshadowed in film studies by the dominant Hollywood models.

This thesis asks: how have recent changes in body politics impacted on the themes and ideas explored in contemporary body-based performance? What aesthetic and formal strategies do artists use to attempt to challenge sedimented norms, hegemonies, and power structures related to gender and the body? Contributing to an emerging field of contemporary research which takes a queer, transfeminist methodological approach to disrupting conventional ways of seeing and thinking sex, gender, and other constructions of the body, this study centers on contemporary practices which utilise the performing body as a ground for negotiating social prescriptions, and nurturing new, alternative forms of embodiment. This thesis undertakes the first detailed academic study of the performance practice of three under-researched artists: Mouse, Cassils, and boychild. Via close analysis of these case study examples it theorises specific deployments of the transgressive body in performance and argues that these bodies challenge assumptions of normative subjectivity through different strategies of queer intervention and subversion. Mouse exploits the disruptive potentiality in abject, grotesque, and parodic strategies; Cassils manipulates the binary structure of the heterosexual hegemony by queering the material form of her/his own body; and boychild’s queer, black embodiment extends beyond sci-fi inspired, cyborgian aesthetics, toward a plotting of posthuman, afrofuturist politics. Whilst each case study artist poses a challenge to bodily (hetero)normativity, each works in a different style or form to the next, using different aesthetics and appropriating from a range of ‘low’ or popular (sub)cultures. Consequently, the analyses in this study are formulated using a methodology which interweaves transdisciplinary ‘high’ theory approaches with non-academic literature on popular and/or subcultural forms. This thesis therefore makes contributions to knowledge primarily within the fields of body art and performance studies, but also within (trans)gender and (trans)feminist studies, queer theory, critical race theory and cultural studies.

Bildlärares och elevers förståelse av subjektiva upplevelser i olika bildmässiga sammanhang utifrån kultur och värderingar, är essentiell för kommunikation och utveckling i ett mångkulturellt klassrum. För att undvika missförstånd kan lärare med hjälp av kulturkompetens och ett interkulturellt perspektiv lättare uppfatta en sådan situation. Skolverkets studier visar dock att två tredjedelar av elever i högstadiet inte har kunskap om analys och tolkning av bilder. Resultatet i studien visar att intresset för interkulturell lärar- och elevkompetens inom bildämnet växer utanför Sverige, där forskningsresultat visar exempel på framgångsrik undervisning. Interkulturell kommunikation har även fått uppmärksamhet inom svensk utbildning, men bilddidaktisk forskning i ämnet är begränsad. Svenska läroplaner nämner inte interkulturalitet i bildämnet överhuvudtaget. Denna systematiska litteraturstudie fokuserar på betydelsen och vikten av bildlärares och elevers förståelse för varandras upplevelser i bildämnets olika bildsammanhang. Studien utgår därför från en kvalitativ ansats. Syftets och frågeställningarnas grundkonstruktion vilar på aktuell, vetenskapligt förankrad, bilddidaktisk forskning . Frågeställningarna behandlar användningen av bildämnet som ett verktyg för interkulturellt lärande, bildlärares interkulturella kompetens samt behovet av interkulturell kommunikation i bildämnet.

Fokus för denna studie är inre motivation ur ett bilddidaktiskt perspektiv i relation till elever som är inlåsta. Metoden som använts är en systematisk litteraturstudie med en kvalitativ ansats som syftar till att beskriva och förklara det som studeras. Frågeställningarna och analysen har sin grund i tre grundläggande behov som kan påverka elevens motivation. Dessa behov är tillhörighet, autonomi och synen på den egna förmågan. Behoven behandlas i relation till de förutsättningar som inlåsta elever har i sin skolgång. Som ett underliggande led i analysen undersöks även potentiella metoder inom det bildterapeutiska fältet, som skulle kunna anpassas och användas i bildundervisning. Resultatet visar tydliga indikationer på att alla de tre behoven, och därmed även motivationen, kan stärkas genom medvetna bilddidaktiska val och förhållningssätt. Resultaten tyder även på att det finns bildterapeutiska metoder som kan ha fördelaktiga effekter på motivationen, i synnerhet för elever med social problematik.

This dissertation takes as its point of departure, the claim that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This difference is initially argued to be an 'uncommon sense'; one which does not emerge from a ground, origin, or operate within a dialectic of essence/appearance, but which consists of an economy of acoustic surfaces/timings/spatialities: diffuse, interpenetrative, and unclassifiable: a 'sensual' logic, not a logic based on identity, or metaphysics. Traditional philosophies of language tend to flatten out and simplify the space/time /material relations of language, in favour of a stable, timeless, fixed identity, which makes logical thought possible, through fixed, linear, disciplinary forms. They claim that language is able to unambiguously locate concepts, concretely, in time and space, unproblematically supporting thought. In contrast, it is the original contribution of the thesis to extend and complicate categories of logic, to include doubt, paradox, infinity and 'unstable' forms of understanding, as evidence of difference as the primary quality of language: a "mimetologic" as Lacoue-Labarthe has termed it, or what Adorno calls an anti-system, or Negative Dialectic. The 'difference' which paradox, in its ability to be this/not this, embodies, shows us the limits of representational thinking; as it strains against that limit, while simultaneously (and paradoxically), retrieving the intensity of thought. Part I draws on the key historical debates within philosophy, as they concern language, logic, and an account of sense. Part II shows that in the search for what Wittgenstein has called "the subliming of our account of logic", wherein signs equal facts in a relatively simple, way, aporias are inevitable, becoming viral in any system, such logical paradoxes and antinomies undermining any stable, determinable, ground for language. In Part III an 'acoustic' logic is posed as an alternative to logics based on visual paradigms, which cannot capture the dynamics of paradox and art, or account for their non-identical 'surfaces'. Part IV points towards art, literature, and performance in which the mimetological surfaces of language form [Un]disciplined gestures, constituting a praxis of [Un]common sense, whose logic is acoustic. Finally, communication itself is seen to be comprised of acoustic, paradoxical, mimetological surface(s), and an acoustic logic is offered as an a-representational, sensual form of understanding.

A presente dissertação tem como foco as relações entre público e arte, propostas por instituições culturais. O estudo parte do pressuposto de que, sobretudo a partir da década de 1960, um dispositivo pedagógico da arte é organizado, no sentido de responder a uma urgência histórica do nosso tempo, qual seja: a de criar estratégias de acessibilidade à arte. Nesse contexto, o principal objetivo do trabalho consiste em compreender as formas pelas quais esse dispositivo “ensina-nos” modos de nos relacionarmos com as artes visuais hoje. Como corpus de análise, optou-se por privilegiar um espaço específico de enunciação, a saber: quatro materiais didáticos produzidos por instituições culturais, destinados a professores e alunos, cuja temática é a obra do artista gaúcho Iberê Camargo. Com base no pensamento de Michel Foucault (em especial, os conceitos de saber, poder e subjetividade), buscou-se identificar nesses materiais: a) a maneira como a arte aparece objetivada pelos regimes de saber do dispositivo; b) como esses regimes são fixados e quais relações de poder estão em jogo; c) e, por fim, o modo como os materiais orientam a forma pela qual o sujeito deveria aproximar-se das artes visuais. As análises desenvolvidas possibilitaram apontar que os museus, ao se definirem como instituições educativas, legitimam o atravessamento de certos discursos pedagógicos em sua estrutura, dentre os quais destaquei: o construtivismo piagetiano, o “movimento interdisciplinar” e a educação libertadora de Paulo Freire. Essa dinâmica de organização dos saberes, por sua vez, talvez explique o porquê de o público ser convidado, nas atividades pedagógicas, a trazer referências pessoais e, a partir delas, estabelecer relações com formas de existência do artista e seu processo criativo. / The present dissertation has as focus the relations between the general public and the art, which are proposed by cultural institutions. The study parts from the presupposition that, mainly from the sixties, a pedagogical dispositif of art is organized in order to respond to a historic urgency of our time, namely: to create strategies to the art accessibility. In this context, the main objective of this study is to understand the ways in which this device "teaches us" ways of relating to the visual arts today. As a corpus analysis, it was chosen to focus on a specific space of enunciation: four teaching materials produced by cultural institutions, for teachers and students, whose theme is the gaucho artist's work Iberê Camargo. Based on the thought of Michel Foucault (especially the concepts of knowledge, power and subjectivity), the attempt was to identify in these materials: a) how art appears objectified by the knowledge systems from the dispositif, b) how these systems are fixed and which power relations are at stake, c) and, finally, how the materials guide the way in which the subject should approach the visual arts. By the developed analysis, it was possible to identify that the museums, when defining themselves as educational institutions, legitimate the crossing of certain pedagogical discourses in their structure, among which it was highlighted: Piaget's constructivism, the "interdisciplinary movement" and liberating education of Paulo Freire. This dynamic of knowledge organization, in turn, may explain why the public is invited, in educational activities, to bring personal references, and from them, establish relationships with forms of existence of the artist and his creative process.

This thesis presents a conceptual knot, namely of how to sustain the intentionally temporary. Part of the original contribution of this thesis lies in exploring what it means for an artwork to be temporary, tracing the historical context from the twentieth century onwards, thereby establishing the category of temporary artworks, and providing thoughts on how to care for temporary artworks so that they might be known and experienced by future audiences. On the basis of this research, a practical proposal is developed for what a retrospective of temporary artworks might look like. Temporary artworks should be considered as a category unto their own because of the specific set of constraints which set them apart: they are physical works of art which exist for an intentionally limited amount of time, and are created only once. These specific constraints problematize the engagement of future audiences due to the works’ very limited and singular existence as a physical work. In order to address the issue of how to (re)visit impermanence, I develop the claim that what is passed on from a temporary artwork is contingent on the stakeholders, including the primary audience, who are posited as a group of unintentional archivists holding stock in a type of living archive. After their material unmaking, temporary artworks can be experienced through the notion that ‘the artwork is not present’, a riff on artist Marina Abramović’s retrospective work The Artist is Present (2010). A retrospective of temporary artworks would consist of memories and documents contextualizing their fragmentary nature, highlighting what Severin Fowles discusses as ‘the carnality of absence’. A clarification of what is missing assists in sustaining what I develop and describe as ‘the performance of loss’, a critical part of temporary artworks. Stewarding a temporary artwork into the future thus depends on letting the material object go, and contextualizing its presence, loss, and absence for future audiences.

Det självständiga bildämnet? – En bilddidaktisk litteraturstudie om bildämnets möjligheter att vara ett autonomt ämne i skolan: syftar till att undersöka, skapa kunskap om samt diskutera bildämnets plats, roll och funktion inom skolans värld. Vidare att öka förståelsen för bildämnets betydelse för elevers lärande och utveckling. Föreliggande studie har haft fokus mot gymnasieskolan och undersökningen är genomförd genom en systematisk litteraturstudie med en kvalitativ innehållsanalys som analysverktyg. Resultatanalysen är uppdelad efter frågeställningarna; Vilka argument lyfts fram för att legitimera bildämnet i skolan? Vilken betydelse har bildämnet för elevers lärande och utveckling? Vilka eventuella konsekvenser finns när bildämnet marginaliseras? Forskningen belyser flera argument för att legitimera bildämnet - exempelvis genom det mediespecifika argumentet, livsvärldsargumentet, demokrati- och yttrandefrihets-argumentet, tillväxtargumentet samt om bildämnet som kommunikatör vilket syftar till att konsten har en inverkan på kommunikation, ekonomi och teknik. Forskningen redogör för, gällande elevers lärande och utveckling, att bildundervisning har förmåga att konstruera betydelse och utveckla för ett öppet och kritiskt tänkande. Forskningen pekar mot att behövs nya perspektiv i bildundervisningen, annars riskerar undervisningen och estetiken att bli kraftlös och irrelevant. / <p>Bild</p>