Brief description

Module Title   Current Issues in Art History and Visual Culture:

Academic Year 2002

Course Co-ordinator Moira Vincentelli

Other Staff   John Harvey, Simon Pierse, Chris Webster, Julian Ruddock, Robert Meyrick

Semester   1 & 2 (thin module)

Assessment 4 Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) tests 50%
Essay (2500 words)   25%
Exhibition review exercise (2000 words)   25%

Lectures   22
Workshops 2
Tutorials 2

Brief description
The course is delivered through one lecture a week in four 5-week sections based on themes that span World Art and make links between the past and very recent work.   
The module is initiated by a lecture introducing the problem of periods and style categorisation in art history. These issues will be followed up in the four main themes: the Artist, the Body, Landscape and Environment and the Art of the ‘Other’. Each lecture will focus on a specific issue and each of the four sections will cover a range of historical periods coming up to contemporary art. Each block will be tested at the end of the 5-lecture section by a Computer test.

Learning Outcomes

Short Bibliography
Iwona Blazwick & Simon Wilson, Tate Modern: the Handbook, London, Tate Publishing, 2000
Pam Meecham & Julie Sheldon, Modern Art: A Critical Introduction, London, Routledge, 2000
Hugh Honour & Fleming A World History of Art, London, Macmillan, 1982
Eric Fernie Art History and its Methods, a critical anthology, London, Phaidon, 1995
Schneider Adams, Laurie Methodologies of Art, an Introduction Boulder& Oxford, Westview Press, 1996
Louisa Buck & Philip Dodd, Relative Values, London, BBC Books, 1991
John Berger Ways of Seeing, London, BBC Books, 1972
Giorgio Vasari (ed. Bull) Lives of the Artists, London Penguin Books, 1965
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, London, Thames and Hudson, 1990
Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, London, Phaidon, 1998
Philip W Martin & Robin Jarvis, Reviewing Romanticism, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1992
Fred Licht, Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper In Art, London, J. Murray, 1980
Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination, New York, Fawcett Columbine, 1991
Matthew Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, and the Romantic Landscape: A Study of the Traditions of the Picturesque and the Sublime, Columbia S C, Camden House, 1987
Malcolm Andrews. Landscape and Western Art. Oxford University Press, 1999
Susan Hiller (ed) The Myth of Primitivism, Perspectives on Art, London, Routledge, 1991

Aims

• Provide the foundation for all art history modules in the degree scheme and offer a framework of theoretical and historical context for course in studio studies.
• Introduce the basic principles of art hsitroy and visual culture through a syllabus that deals with the general issues through case study and specific subjects.
• Consider how the notion of art and artist has been constructed through specific practices, throguh institutions such as academies of art, and through writing about art.
• Develop an awareness of other models of visual culture outside that of western art traditions.
• Develop a critical understanding of the way periodisation and classificaiton are used in the study of art
• Develop an awareness of different styles of writing on art including popular art history, academic writing and art criticism in newspapers and journals of contemporary art.

Reading Lists