TAD3107

New baroque visualities : late twentieth century visual culture 3A

6 points - 3 hours lecture/tutorials per week - First semester - Caulfield and distance - Prerequisites: Two second-year level TAD subjects - Prohibited combinations: TAD3117 - Elective

Objectives On successful completion of this subject, students should identify the salient features of the 'baroque' in both its specific historical sense and the wider metaphoric sense; recognise and express with appropriate language the opulence of its visual styles, its rhetorical tropes and forms; understand the historical source material of certain aspects of, and trends in, contemporary artistic practice and discourse and consider reasons for their current prestige; be prepared to enter into the discourses of art history which inform contemporary art practice and theory; through understanding that artists draw from a number of traditions - and position themselves in relation to these - consider the potential of such sources today.

Synopsis Students are required to attend one additional class per week (internal students), to carry out additional reading and submit one additional assignment for this subject. By exploring the visual work of local and international contemporary artists across a range of mediums and visual practices, such as photography, film, painting and drawing, sculpture, fashion design, this subject examines how the baroque aesthetic and sensibility has manifest in some aspects of late twentieth-century postmodernist artistic practice (what Deleuze defines as modern neo-baroque). Cultural and historical definitions of the term 'baroque' are analysed as well as contemporary theoretical re-readings and comparisons with mannerist and baroque art, sculpture and architecture are made in terms of how they may throw light onto our understanding of contemporary art (and vice versa). Common identifying features such as spectacle, theatricality and play, performance, illusion, rhetorical form, painterliness, figuration, sensuousness, as well as universal themes of life and death, the apocalyptic, the sublime and the mystical, the sacred and profane, the realm of the emotions and senses, human psychology, the erotic and the body are analysed. Postmodern critical practices and stylistic tropes: appropriation, homage, pastiche, parody, irony and allegory, are also examined, addressing issues of originality and the 'authorial' voice of the artist.

Assessment Tutorial paper or short essay: 30% - Gallery report: 30% - Essay: 40%

Recommended texts

Deleuze G The fold: Leibniz and the baroque Athlone Press, 1993
Jencks C Post-modernism: The new classicism in art and architecture Academy Editions, 1987
Jencks C (ed.) The Post-modern reader Academy Editions/St Martins, 1992
Martin J R Baroque Harper and Row, c1977
Wölfflin H Principles of art history Dover, 1950 or Renaissance and baroque Collins, 1964

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