VISU3121: Special Subject: Art, Nature, Ecology (20 credits)

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• VISU3xxx: Special Subject: Art, Nature, Ecology (40 credits)

• To introduce and critically engage with artworks, art-making processes, and theories of art, nature, landscape, and ecology across cultures.
• To explore the specific material, communicative, and representational qualities of art-making processes and media as modes of grappling with the relations between culture and nature from early modernity through the present epoch of the Anthropocene.
• To develop students' interdisciplinary research skills in researching visual art.

• The module will be structured around a set of framing questions/topics that will be consistent (and developed over time) each year in which the module is taught, and a set of specific case studies that will vary from year to year according to staff availability and interests.
• Framing questions/topics include:
• How what in English is referred to as nature has been conceptualised in diverse cultural and historical contexts.
• How art and art media have been conceptualised in opposition to nature in Western art history and theory; how artworks have been conceptualised in relation to concepts of organisms, or bodies of work as constituting ecosystems (e.g. by Kant, Paul Klee, Merleau-Ponty, or Henri Focillon); how art-making processes have been understood to be part of larger ecological processes (e.g. how ideas of nature as process (ziran) and breath (qi) inform Chinese landscape painting).
• Culturally-specific ideas of landscape and their circulation, and the idea of landscape as a medium.
• How thinking about landscape ecologies has been informed by ideas of form in art-making
• Case studies might include:
• Questions of form and depiction in specific landscape formations (e.g. island and river and mountain geographies; borderlands and no-mans lands).
• Land art; installation art as environments; ecologically-focused landscape architecture (e.g. the SCAPE group).
• Abstraction and form as ways of thinking ecosystems (e.g. Paul Klees notebooks; ecologist Richard Formans influential analysis of landscapes as mosaics of Bauhaus concepts of points, lines, and planes).
• The mediation and negotiation of the disparate timescales of cultural, geological, and planetary histories through the making of artworks and films.
• Photography as an assemblage of animal, vegetable, and mineral materials, and conceptualisations and practices of photography an interaction human and natural agencies (such as energy in the form of light).
• Mexican muralism (Frida Kahlo and other muralists engagement with the question of "nature" during a process of rapid industrialisation, often mobilising indigenous forms of conceptualising that relation).
• Latin American documentary films that engage with the themes of monoculture and extractivism.
• Spaces of display such as Naoshima Art Islands in Japan.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• By the end of this module, students are expected to possess:
• An understanding of the practices of and theoretical reflection on the relations between art, nature, and ecology in the light of wider historical, philosophical, technological, scientific, and artistic developments.
• Knowledge of interdisciplinary 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 eco-art and visual culture.
• Undertake independent interdisciplinary research projects

Subject-specific Skills:

• By the end of this module, students are expected to possess:
• The ability to interpret 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, nature, and ecology.

Key Skills:

• By the end of this module, students will develop:
• 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 pursue a guided programme or self-directed study, leading to the production of an extended piece of written work.

• This module will run in Term 1 if offered concurrently with the 40-credit version of the module, or in either Term 1 or Term 2 if the 40-credit version is not being offered in a given year.
• Weekly seminars (2 hours) will facilitate sustained discussion of the key topics, developing students grasp of theoretical material as well as practising visual and performance analysis on a weekly basis. Seminar will be interactive; students will develop their communication skills and skills in critical reasoning.
• Small-group tutorials (1 x 1 hour) will allow students to explore and develop their research questions and plans, responding to questions from the group and giving and receiving peer feedback.
• The assessment will allow students to develop their skills in academic writing, as well as demonstrating other skills and knowledge that the module seeks to develop.

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