Cultural theory and visuality
Proposed to be offered next in 1996
8 or 12 points * 2 hours per week * Clayton
This subject addresses the relation between cultural and critical theory and the visual field. The range of visual products whose theorisation will be considered includes photography and film, painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, non-Western visual practices, and common objects. Discussion will take place on the historical positions and the theoretical construction of these products with reference to the discourses of modernism and modernity, postmodernism, the body, totalitarianism/post-totalitarianism, museology and institutions, and `the everyday'.
Preliminary reading
Barasch M Theories of art from Plato to Wincklemann New York UP, 1985
Barthes R The responsibility of forms: Critical essays on music, art and representation Hill and Wang, 1985
Bryson N Vision and painting: The logic of the gaze Macmillan, 1983
Bryson N (ed.) Calligram: Essays in the new art history from France Cambridge UP, 1988
Clark T J The absolute bourgeois: Artists and politics in France 1848-1851 Thames and Hudson, 1973
Gombrich E H Art and illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation Phaidon, 1977
Michelson A and others (eds) October: The first decade MIT, 1988
Preziosi D Rethinking art history: Meditations on a coy science Yale UP, 1989
Rees A L and Borzello F (eds) The new art history Camden, 1986