VISU2051: Global Histories of Art and Media

• VISU1012: Introduction to Visual Culture Studies or permission of convenor

• None

• None

• The proposed module maps an introduction to the histories and material and formal practices of art, performance, and visual culture centred in and circulating across East Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, the Islamic world, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Northern and Western Africa. Rather than attempt an impossible survey, the module will be structured around some key episodes of global histories of art, images, and media, moments of transformation and circulation. The module rejects obsolete models of art history in which Europe is the centre of the world, and instead embraces a larger world of which Europe is a part, informed by and informing ideas and practices outside the West. The module will situate histories of art within broader questions of image-making and performance practices and the materiality of media, and in the process introduce students to how the fields of art history and of visual culture have extensively transformed and enriched each other, theoretically and methodologically, over the past several decades.

• The module will be arranged around a series of strands that trace how a given topic is transformed across cultures, histories and/or geographies. Organised in a rough chronology, the themes and approaches of the strands will overlap and build on each other over the course of the module. Specific contents within each strand will vary from year to year according to teaching staff availability.
• Strands may include the following:
• Strand A: Inventions of Circulatable Media
• Strand B: Pictorial Spaces: Landscape and Abstraction
• Strand C: Travels of Perspective
• Strand D: Media of Cultural Contact
• Strand E: Modernism, Colonialism, and Global Spaces: Collage and Surrealism
• Strand F: Worlds and Histories of Postwar & Contemporary Art

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• An understanding of key artworks, practices, media, and movements and how they are expressive of and emergent from artists various engagements and struggles with their local and global worlds through materials and practices of making, as well as of circulations across cultures and histories.
• An understanding of the practices of and theoretical reflection on the relations among art-making, media, and cultural histories in the light of wider historical, philosophical, technological, and scientific developments.
• Knowledge of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural methodologies appropriate to the critical analysis of individual artworks and groups of artworks in a variety of media.
• Enhanced knowledge of the specialised language required to talk and write about art, media, and visual culture.

Subject-specific Skills:

• The ability to analyse art works in terms of their formal, material, and aesthetic properties.
• The ability to critically evaluate and apply a range of methodologies in order to perform the above analyses.
• The ability to critically analyse the theoretical discourses of the interrelationships of art, media, historical contexts, and cultural geographies.

Key Skills:

• Critical and analytical thinking
• Enhanced range and fluency of expression.
• The ability to formulate arguments coherently and to present them in written and oral form.
• The ability to identify an appropriate set of research questions and to undertake independent research projects

• The module will be taught be means of lectures, and seminars in which the issues raised in lectures are subjected to more in-depth discussion. Weekly reading in preparation for lectures and seminars will foster the acquisition of the relevant subject-specific knowledge. Seminars will aid acquisition of the relevant critical tools, and oral presentations by students will help them develop skills in organising arguments and presenting them fluently.
• Summative assessments are designed to test students' subject-specific knowledge and their ability to synthesise and use their subject-specific skills in order to evaluate this knowledge:
• A short essay analysing 2-3 images in relation to the ideas, texts explored in class and reading assignments (2100 words)
• A formative short essay in which students are asked to connect artworks to their historical and material contexts and conditions, as a practice for takeaway examination.
• A takeaway examination consisting of three topics (800 words each) which students will have one week to write. The topics will be designed so that students will choose a number of artworks from the course of the module, analyse each in terms of its materials and technique, style, and formal characteristics, theme or subject matter, and the global and local historical and cultural contexts in which it was created, and at the same time connect together the various strands or topics explored over the course of Terms 1 & 2.

In-class presentations and student-led group discussions on specific artworks, media, and critical texts. A formative short essay in which students are asked to connect artworks to their historical and material contexts and conditions, as a practice for the second summative assessment.

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