VAM4020

Theory of art history and criticism

Annette Van den Bosch

12 points -3 hours per week -Second semester -Clayton

Objectives For students to read and interpret current theoretical texts and methodological debates in art history and theory in relation to their own practice. Through participation in the subjects students should develop a theoretical and methodological position from which to write thesis and research essays. By examination of relevant texts and debates students can conceptualise the relationship inherent in the work of art as an aesthetic form, and its distribution as a commodity. Students will extend their capacity for visual analysis by locating their interpretation in theoretical argument and debate. Students will learn current theoretical and political perspectives on sexuality, identity, and post-coloniality, to assume nothing in their writing of history and criticism.

Synopsis This subject is organised in four equivalent sections: (a) Discourses in art history includes the social history of art, feminist discourses, history of modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernism and the end of history. (b) Aesthetics and commodities considers theories of aesthetic value, meaning and symbolic value, interpretation and consumption of art, and the distribution and exchange value of works of art. (c) Forms of visual analysis includes realism and materialism, subjectivity and sexuality, psychoanalytic theories of art and difference, signs and signifying systems in mass media, semiotics and inter-textual analysis. (d) Current critical perspectives, includes primitivism and bricoleurs, post-colonial mimicry and ambivalence, history, memory and modernism, difference, desire and the body, gender transgressions; Australian regional exchanges, Aboriginal and Asian art.

Assessment Seminar paper (3000 words): 35% -Essay (4500 words): 45% -Critical text analysis (1500 words): 20%

Prescribed texts

Bourdieu P Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984
Broude N and Garrard M (eds) The expanding discourse, feminism and art history Icon, Harper Collins, 1992
Heller A and Feher J (eds) Reconstructing aesthetics: Writing of the Budapest school Basil Blackwell, 1991
Hiller S (ed.) The myth of primitivism, perspectives on art Routledge, 1991
Hutcheon L The politics of postmodernism Routledge, 1989
Irigaray L Je, tu, nous: Towards a culture of difference Alison Martin, 1992
Wallis B Art after modernism: Re-thinking representation New Museum of Contemporary Art Godine, 1992
Wolff J The social production of art Macmillan, 1981

Back to the 1999 Arts Handbook