2018 Theses Doctoral

Picturing the System: Counter-Institutional Practices in British Art of the 1970s

Campbell, Thomas Ian

This dissertation examines a range of politicized artistic practices in Great Britain during the 1970s, a decade marked by economic decline and social fragmentation. The artists I primarily focus on in the pages that follow—William Furlong, Stephen Willats, Mary Kelly, and Conrad Atkinson—all appeared on Audio Arts, a “spoken magazine” distributed on audiocassette that was founded by Furlong in 1973. During the 1970s, Furlong, Willats, Kelly and Atkinson renegotiated their relationship to art institutions, expanded the role of the artist in society, and conceived of art as a form of political praxis, and this dissertation explores the strategies these artists devised to connect to publics outside the elite, bourgeois audience of art.