Academic literature on the topic '130199 Arts not elsewhere classified'

AbstractField investigations at Dugway Proving Ground in western Utah have produced new data on the chronology and human occupation of late Pleistocene and early Holocene lakes, rivers, and wetlands in the Lake Bonneville basin. We have classified paleo-river channels of these ages as “gravel channels” and “sand channels.” Gravel channels are straight to curved, digitate, and have abrupt bulbous ends. They are composed of fine gravel and coarse sand, and are topographically inverted (i.e., they stand higher than the surrounding mudflats). Sand channels are younger and sand filled, with well-developed meander-scroll morphology that is truncated by deflated mudflat surfaces. Gravel channels were formed by a river that originated as overflow from the Sevier basin along the Old River Bed during the late regressive phases of Lake Bonneville (after 12,500 and prior to 11,000 14C yr B.P.). Dated samples from sand channels and associated fluvial overbank and wetland deposits range in age from 11,000 to 8800 14C yr B.P., and are probably related to continued Sevier-basin overflow and to groundwater discharge. Paleoarchaic foragers occupied numerous sites on gravel-channel landforms and adjacent to sand channels in the extensive early Holocene wetland habitats. Reworking of tools and limited toolstone diversity is consistent with theoretical models suggesting Paleoarchaic foragers in the Old River Bed delta were less mobile than elsewhere in the Great Basin.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. The Case of Mary Dean: Sex, Poisoning and Gender Relations in Australia. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queensland University of Technology, 2004. –––. “‘Based on a True Story’: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives”. TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs 13.2 (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au >.Calloway, Nicholas, and Doris Bry, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe in the West. New York: Knopf, 1989.Castro, Jan G. The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishing, Random House, 1985.Davis, Christine S., and Carolyn Ellis. “Autoethnographic Introspection in Ethnographic Fiction: A Method of Inquiry.” In Pranee Liamputtong and Jean Rumbold, eds. Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research. New York: Nova Science, 2008. 99–117.Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Bluebell, PA: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

Since the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, most of the urban fabric of the former East Germany has been altered beyond recognition or completely dismantled. However, during the four decades of the German Democratic Republic, public spaces and the works of visual arts within them were the subject of intense critical discussion, and formed the basis for the development of theories on the socialist character of art and architecture, which evolved from the late 1960s as Komplexe Umweltgestaltung "Complex Environmental Design". This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by making visible and elucidating the cultural-political significance of that urban visual culture, dematerialised and dispersed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It examines the political, social and artistic function of murals, paintings, sculptures, applied arts, form design, and visual communication within East German architecture and public spaces, and seeks to complexify the commonly understood historical narrative which traces a rupture from the doctrine of an extravagant Socialist Realism to a form of impoverished Modernism. This change is better understood as a gradual and halting evolution, in which art as a medium for projecting the ideal of socialism was displaced by an understanding of design as a means of sustaining the experience of it. Furthermore, the narratives, formal and material qualities of some of the works examined – overlooked even in contemporary re-appraisals of East German art history – rather than being marginal to Socialist Realism, actually opened up spaces for its development. The thesis centres on forms of public art during and after the transition to the industrial mass production of architecture in the mid 1950s. The early phase in the 1950s is illustrated through the two first industrial cities, Eisenhüttenstadt and Hoyerswerda, built to serve iron and coal production respectively. The "scientific and technological revolution", proclaimed by SED first secretary Walter Ulbricht in the 1960s, was to accelerate the process of modernity, in the understandings of the function of urban planning and the role of design for planning, architecture and consumer culture. This change saw a move towards functionalist-oriented planning for Halle Neustadt (from 1964), the centre of new chemical and synthetics production, and a radical move to modernity in the re-construction of city centres up until 1969. This radical change exposed the conception of architecture as an art (Baukunst) favoured by traditionalists in the Bauakademie in particular, to challenges by modernisers who held that art should be considered as primarily functional and thus separate from art. Complex Environmental Design, as this work will demonstrate, gradually replaced the Socialist Realist ideal of Baukunst and the "synthesis" between art and architecture, and became established by the mid 1970s as an interdisciplinary practice in which all visual art forms – architecture, fine arts, crafts, form design, graphic design and landscape design – were to be integrated within the complex planning of the built environment. I shall argue that this inclusion of all artistic disciplines in the design of the built environment formed a compromise between competing ideas between "synthesis" or the separation of art and architecture. Halle Neustadt was key in the conceptual transition to complex environmental design. The thesis goes on to look at how the artistic conception of the 1973 World Festival Games took up a form of complex environmental design, which functioned as both a new form of monumentality, as well as opening up a space for more democractic forms of public art. Methodologically, the research seeks to understand the influence of key actors in the field who were not resistant to the cultural political framework but sought to mediate change within it. Interviews with architects, critics, artists and designers, including architectural critic Bruno Flierl, architect, Sigbert Fliegel, artists Willi Neubert and Manfred Vollmert, designers, Rolf Walter, Lutz Brandt and Axel Bertram together with analyses of their work, and how their ideas were represented by themselves and others, particularly in professional fora, form the basis for an examination their influence. By looking at historical moments in different loci, it becomes apparent that what I term "clusters of influence" formed which pushed forward conceptual transitions. Key sources are the professional journals in which art and architecture were discussed (Deutsche Architektur, Bildende Kunst, Form und Zweck, Farbe und Raum and Neue Werbung) as well as some news and features aimed at the general public such as Neues Deutschland, Neue Berliner Illustrierte and Für Dich. Archival research has focused on the seminars and congresses organised by the professional institutions, the Verband der Bildende Künstler (Artists Union) and the Deutsche Bauakademie (German Building Academy) as well as the records of the local SED in Halle and a number of offices for architectural art which were established across the GDR in the late 1960s. The search for socialist character both in content and form which had an impact on the visual arts of the built environment in the GDR was informed by shifting definitions of the concepts of "function" and "beauty", in which historical legacies, in particular, the Bauhaus, were critically appropriated in a way which served the sometimes involuntary and sometimes intentional interplay between artistic disciplines. The research reveals how these concepts and legacies were drawn together, and plays particular attention to the way in which colour and ornament emerged as central in serving the need for the constituent parts of the urban landscape to be socialist, functional and beautiful.

The written aspect of this practice-based thesis ‘collates’ a one-day event exploring the question, ‘What is dialogic art?’ into a textual account. The practical aspect threads through this account, with reference to its dissemination elsewhere made frequently. The event ‘documented’ here is a ‘barcamp’, a kind of ‘unconference’ that combines presentations with responsive discussion. This barcamp brings together practitioners of art, activism, education, philosophy, sociology, sociolinguistics, literary theory and criticism, and others to explore dialogic art through a dialogue that moves amongst their respective points of view. The barcamp’s collation tracks the contributors’ discursive struggle to co-author dialogic art as a dialogue-based approach to contemporary art practice. ‘The dialogic’ that qualifies this art accretes through the barcamp as an artistic disposition preoccupied with the constitutive agency of dialogue, understood here in an expanded sense. This disposition explores the myriad relations that preoccupy authorship qua authorship. These include the material and conceptual thresholds organising creative agents and their cultural production: participation and collaboration, process and outcome, the author and the authored. The epistemological foundation of this barcamp can be defined as dialogic because it understands knowledge as arising from social relations and enacted through intersubjective exchange. Similarly, the ontological basis for this project issues from a post-structuralist sense of subjectivity as simultaneously dispersed and multiple, distributed amongst authors. These philosophical perspectives underpin the theory of subjectivity evolved through dialogic art. This theory recommends the art’s authors as ‘responsive subjects’—artist-agents who are themselves reciprocally authored through their artistic practice. This reciprocal authorship explodes the twin myths of the independent artistauthor and the discrete artwork without abandoning the facticity of their historical existence. Always contingent, dialogic artworks and their artist-agents are presented in this project as polyphonic portraits of heterogeneous becoming achieved through dialogic exchange.

"Physics is a function of size ..." The aim of the research is to create a new interactive communication system by 're-cabling' fabrics for releasing fragrances in 21st century fashion design. A new development, taking inspiration from biology, conjures up Multi-Sensorial Fabrics - based around the sense of smell. Using the theory that 'Smell Is Nanotechnology' and that biology works by nano-machines, biological actions can be miniaturised (such as 'sensing' in the animal world) to create an integrated system called 'The Wellness Collection'. Fragrances (and eventually medication, monitoring devices and digital information) will be actively 'pulsed' electronically through a cabling device system which will 'mimic' the human senses and in particular the scent glands in our bodies and be literally incorporated into the fabric structure. Technology with therefore be integrated in fabrics and carried in invisible clothing. The system also acts as a new vehicle for designer perfumes, reducing the application of alcohol on skin and microencapsulation. Traditional textile design concerns passive issues relating to colour and texture (and performance purposes to a certain degree). However, this research concentrates on a more active approach to textile design, introducing the living active garment as a second skin. The aim is to combine a number of contrasting areas from the Arts and Sciences. For example : - Perfumery. Fashion Designs. Textile & Fibre Technologies. Space Age Clothing. Biosensing Techniques. 'Micro Tube' Technology. Fluid Control. 'Smart intelligence'. Human Biology & Psychology. Human Skin, Circulation & Nervous Systems. Medical Textiles. Controlled Drug Delivery Systems. Alternative Therapies. Nanotechnology. Although some might consider this project to be high risk, it is a general fact that creative and 'novel' research originates from multi disciplinary fields. Emphasis on this important fact must be acknowledged throughout the thought process of the following project which is documented as a thorough ‘library’ of valuable research information. The Science Fashion approach may therefore seem very futuristic, but as technology itself reduces in size such an approach becomes increasingly realistic.

This is a practice based Ph.D. in Fine Arts. The subject of the research deals with strategies of doubling as a means to explore the relation between what technology promises and the fantasy of the viewer/user. The visual material that constitutes my research attempts to raise, in various interrelated ways, a set of core questions regarding the nature of surface as receptacle of images and to take into account the filiation that new media partake of, namely that computer-aided art is seen as a subset of fine art. Indeed, the first line of enquiry is to address what constitutes the 'picture plane' of a computer screen. Interrogating the nature of the digital Image and Its relations to the viewer/user, my question is "how does computer-aided art (animation, video and interactive installation) address the connection between surface and image, particularly when digital manipulation is used to consistently postpone a totalising view of the image?" This includes the analysis of how static and dynamic states of the image are generated in (digital) art, or where the phenomenon of doubling raises questions about what kind of visual economy operates with respect to art that uses advanced technologies. I critically analyse these aspects occurring in work by artists, whose practice deals with certain modes of addressing the totalising view of an image, an image that appears virtually complete. As a practising artist, in terms of the media I choose to work with, doubling is enabled by providing a certain degree of Interactivity with the computer screen, giving the viewer the illusion of control over the production of the image. However, the illusory nature of this control is revealed by the systematic Incompleteness of the image being 'painted' on the screen. Apart from provoking and frustrating the desire for totalising visuality, the deliberate incompleteness of the images holds open questions of scale, animation, and the relationship of image to surface. Given the nature of the medium in which the moving images were created, the pieces share the potential for continuing the loop in which they play ad infinitum. But, as the cyclicity of the loops makes manifest, nearly all of them are also predicated on an ontological duality whereby the same object, the same entity, can transform into something phenomenally other through the permeable interplay between emergent and receding aspects inherent within it. So integral to image-forming I find this doubling that I have extended the theme to my own public Identity, by sometimes functioning under an alias, the name of Sissu Tarka.

This research is an exploration of the development and influence of place-specificity within the field of new genre public art. Over the last several years the term place-specificity and its variance, place-specific has occurred frequently in art reviews and exhibition catalogues particularly in relation to installations, permanent public art works, and public interventions. While place-specificity is now a recognised term in the current lexicon of public art discussion, within many texts the phrase place-specific is often indiscriminately interchanged with site-specific, implying that the two terms are synonymous. While the relationships between site, space, and place are actively explored within fields such as geography,cultural studies and architecture, distinctions between site-specificity and place-specificity have rarely been critically addressed in discussions of public art. Based on both theory and curatorial practice, this thesis explores a range of perspectives on the role of place within socially engaged public art practice. The study examines the difference between site and place and how place influences our perceptions of specific locations through memory, history and experience. The thesis explores place as a subject, an artistic influence, and a social and cultural signifier. Also examined is how artists use place as a means of connecting to specific locations and audiences, as well as a way of exploring their personal histories and memories. Utilising a combination of approaches, this study incorporates naturalistic enquiry, conversation as a method, a think-tank, interviews, and video documentation to uncover how a group of public art practitioners reflect on place-specificity within their work, how they utilise place, and are influenced by place. The research reflects on the potential of place-specific public art to celebrate unique cultural differences, inspire international collaboration, and provide a forum for local distinctiveness in the face of globalization The study also serves as one model for practice-based research utilising curatorship as a practice. This study identifies further areas for potential research within various aspects of art and design as well as other disciplines. The thesis is accompanied by a suite of DVD's which document the curatorial practice and address place-specific themes that emerged from the research.

Broadly speaking, this research involves a philosophical and socio-political investigation of creative force entailed in the realm of art. It focuses on how to assess the elusive aspect of power that is engaged with the notion of `we'; and explores what the notion contributes to art-making. The written thesis consists of four chapters, each of which is concerned with the notion of `we' in different ways. Firstly, a matter of ethics that is involved in the notion of `we' will be looked at using Derrida's reading on Levinas's idea of the Face of the Other; Deleuze's image of thought; Deleuze's becoming; Derrida's hospitality and responsibility. Secondly, the ways in which curators and artists-as-curators engage with the authoritarian voice entailed within the curatorial practice will be discussed by looking at some works of display and exhibition making. Thirdly, artwork made by artists such as Cildo Meireles and Jeremy Deller will be evaluated from the point of view that the artist does not necessarily play the role of the author who controls the meaning of their own work. In the light of this, how artists establish their different artistic strategies will be assessed. In the fourth section, some of the texts which I have produced during the research period and which are accompanied with visual images of my works will be presented to demonstrate the mutual interdependence of my writing and making. Throughout the research period, studio-oriented work, collaborative works including co-curation and co-organizing events, artist's talks, and writing as art have been developed and realized with a particular emphasis on looking at the ways and kinds of communication that are possible through works of art. This includes my final show at Chelsea College of Art & Design (19-21 May 2006); the solo shows 100 Books Which I Didn't Buy at Unit 2 (2005, London) and from the middle through the middle at Changing Room (2002, Scotland); co-curation of the video screening SCRAMBLE at Brunei Theatre (2002, London) and CCA (2003, Glasgow); the symposium Interrupting Connections: performative Interventions at West Space (London, 2003).

This thesis, Nibbling at clouds: the visual artist encounters adventitious blindness, examines how visual artists who have come to lose all or most of their eyesight in later life continue to engage with their art practice. This relates directly to my own conditio, where vision has deteriorated in recent years to a point where my visual acuity stands at a tenth of normal vision, and as a consequence I am registered blind. The condition and art practices are in many ways inseparable, as behavioural changes in response to the deterioration of vision are largely unavoidable due to powerful physical, social and psychological influences. The research draws on the personal experience of the author as well as an analysis of phenomena experienced by the adventitiously blind artists interviewed: Sargy Mann, Keith Salmon, Sally Booth and Jane Phillips. There are several pressing factors which impact on artistic practice following the loss of eyesight. These include mental health issues, physical rehabilitation, subject or modal choices in the studio, declaring one's condition (or not) particularly in terms of exhibition and more broadly, regarding the contemporary social understanding of blindness, particularly in the field of visual arts. Because of my subjective experienc of loss of vision, part of the thesis takes the form of a self-interview serving as a 'narrative washing line'. The self-interview acts as a continuous narrative throughout the document, and is punctuated by several 'volumes' addressing the above-mentioned disparate and more formal factors. Exploring the extent of my own 'making' capabilities, the research process involved working with methods and materials which were new to me including film, photography and bronze sculpture. Because of the lack of literature in the field, my use of other artists' testimonies has been emphatic. Methodologically the artwork draws on literary work, including Joyce and Borges, in conjunction with personal experience to provide the option for multiple possible readings. My resulting artworks and works by the artists interviewed are documented and discussed throughout the body of the text in the context of blindness as contributing force in making and articulating the artists' ideas, rather than being only a detrimental influence. The work's primary contribution to knowledge is through providing an account of how a visual artist renegotiated his beliefs, emotions and goals following the breakdown in self and environment caused by the onset of adventitious blindness. It also points to the value of various practices of reflective examination in the process.

The thesis explores the uneven distribution of power between and of the black/white female dichotomy and, while using them as a strategic tool within the visual work, questions the implications of skin colour in constructions of femininity within visual representations. Historically as a marker of skin colour, white women and those with a lighter skin complexion have taken the role of the feminine, in comparison to the black woman and those with darker skin tones, who traditionally occupy a space of the nonfeminine. Within the thesis, this privileging of lighter and white skin, based on white aesthetics and beauty value judgments, has been named as colourism. The body of practice based work, produced as an intrinsic part of the thesis, will attempt to develop and explore this issue and develop a particularly black aesthetic response to the cultural construct of the ‘feminine’. Through researching contextual material made up of other artist’s images and films, that challenge traditions of the gaze, the thesis develops visual strategies to help re-position black, and thereby white, women’s place in visual representations, and further questions gender and identity. In approaching these questions, the thesis draws from various discourses, such as cultural studies, feminist film theory, visual cultures and fine art practice and theory. The thesis argues for new ways of constructing visual pleasures within looking relations, which go beyond the visual, which call for a conscious process of breaking away from a representational language based on the phallocentric. The presented image-making strategies aim to destroy the normative understandings of visual pleasure, using colour and the belief in the power of the erotic (Audre Lorde 1984), to enable new ways of thinking through black and white women’s positions within these debates. This thesis uses the processes of personal image-making practice within a body of original artworks using video and photography, to direct towards the 3 theoretical fields in which this research is positioned. It uses a practice leading the theory methodology.

This research problematises the contemporary phenomenon of alternative arts education after art’s ‘Educational Turn’, encompassed by evidence of a critical discourse between 2006 and 2016. The thesis addresses the questions: what are the alternatives to models of the alternative art school having emerged through the Educational Turn? And, how might dialogic engagement with organisations outside of the Turn propose something other for the future of alternative arts education? Contemporary art’s capacity to instrumentalise education, through its reimagining by artists and the co-option of ‘the alternative’ by arts institutions, must be countered by considering organisational models that sit outside of the Educational Turn. The field is contextualised by a ‘crisis in education’ in the UK, contributing to an abundant manifestation of ‘alternative’ art schools. An often-overlooked plurality exists to ‘the alternative’ that, in its co-option by contemporary art, is rendered homogenised. Existing discourse considers artistic, self-organised and curatorial practices, framed by institutional and infrastructural critique, but neglects to step outside of the Turn to imagine other models for alternative arts education. ‘Knowledge mobility’, ‘the dialogic’ and ‘(trans)formation’ form a framework for the thesis, functioning according to a methodology of critique and proposition. The research derives ‘knowledge mobility’ to critique the Turn’s instrumentalisation of education, by examining existing discourse and practice that problematise the paradoxes of the Turn and frame knowledge as a form of social organisation. The research aligns ‘the dialogic’ from Mikhail Bakhtin and Paulo Freire, with Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes’ ‘intertextuality’ and Maurice Blanchot’s ‘infinite conversation’. The function of ‘the dialogic’ is twofold: as a structural metaphor and conversational research practice. Four dialogues with organisations operating outside of the remit of the Turn consider the productive and transformative capacities of models not framed as alternative art schools. These are with: Leeds Creative Timebank, IF Project, THECUBE and Syllabus programme. Negotiating critical and applied interpretations of ‘knowledge mobility’, findings from these are reconciled with the research through a process of ‘(trans)formation’, resulting in the proposition of speculative principles to contribute to the field of alternative arts education. The research has been produced as part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Creative Exchange knowledge exchange hub, providing the context for stepping outside of the domain of contemporary art. The value of this approach for the field of alternative arts education is in its capacity to have drawn together thinking from each organisation. This research makes its contribution to the field of alternative arts education by working dialogically with organisations where the practice of knowledge is central, establishing a connection between organisations outside of the Turn, which would otherwise be excluded from its discourse, with contemporary art. The research formulates and puts into practice methods of critique, conversation and proposition: producing a critical vocabulary, lens and through deriving speculative propositions towards a possible future for alternative arts education.