VSA4030

Theory of art history and criticism

Annette Van den Bosch

10 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 in their writing of history and criticism.

Synopsis This subject is organised in four equivalent sections: discourses in art history includes the social history of art, the problem of style in art history, feminist discourses, history of modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernism, speaking positions in cultural studies; 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; 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 intertextual analysis; current critical perspectives includes primitivism and bricoleurs, postcolonial mimicry and ambivalence, history memory and modernism, difference, desire and the body, gender transgressions, Australian regional exchanges, Aboriginal and Asian.

Assessment Critical text analysis (1500 words): 20%
* Seminar paper (2500 words): 35%
* Essay (3500 words): 45%

Preliminary reading

Wolff J The social production of art NYUP, 1984

Prescribed texts

Bourdieu P Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984
Cramer S (ed.) Postmodernism: A consideration of the appropriation of Aboriginal imagery Forum papers, Institute of modern art, 1989
Dougherty T (ed.) Postmodernism: A reader Columbia U P, 1993
Frascina F and Harris J (eds) Art in modern culture: An anthology of critical texts Phaidon, 1992
Grosz E Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism Allen and Unwin, 1994
Nead L The female nude: Art, obscenity and sexuality Routledge, 1992
Turner C (ed.) Tradition and change: Contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific UQP, 1993