Module Information
Course Delivery
Assessment
| Assessment Type | Assessment length / details | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| Semester Assessment | Essay (3000 words) | 60% |
| Semester Assessment | Written Exhibition Report (1000 words) | 40% |
| Supplementary Assessment | Essay (3000 words, Students must take elements of assessments equivalent to those that lead to failure of the module) | 60% |
| Supplementary Assessment | Written Exhibition Report (1000 words) | 40% |
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this module students should be able to:
1. Understand the historical development of abstraction from 17th century to the present day, including specific case studies and examples.
2. Understand a broad range of interrelationships between various abstract practices, methodologies, and ideologies, and of some of the fundamental theoretical and historical apparatus required to comprehend them.
3. Comprehend and articulate the issues and practicalities related to textual critiques of, and manifestos on, abstraction.
4. Comprehend the emergence and pursuit of abstraction within the contrary environments of religion and materialism.
5. Articulate visual responses to abstract art in a concise, reasoned, and informed manner.
6. Articulate an understanding of the rationale or thesis governing the curation of an exhibition or display context of abstract art.
Brief description
This module examines the growth of abstraction in Europe and Russia since 1913 within the framework of Modernism, and its transplantation in America after the Armory Show. It addresses abstraction to other forms of cultural expression, and to the philosophical and political climate of the period. In particular, the lectures will discuss the bifurcation of art culture around the 1950s, consequent to the development of Pop Art on the one hand and various modes of subjectivist and empirical forms of abstraction on the other, and the abstraction of abstraction itself to the condition of art-as-idea in the late 1970s. Finally, the module will map and explain the re-emergence of abstraction (as a practice and historical/theoretical concern) at the close of the Postmodern period -- in which figurative and neo-conceptual art had been predominant -- and to question whether abstraction is a spent force or able to chart new territories.
Content
1 Lecture: The Delimitation of Subject: Austerity and Simplicity in the Calvinist Netherlands
2 Lecture: Towards Contentless Form: From Whistler and Late Monet to Cezanne
3 Lecture: Sight and Vision: Cubism and Orphism
4 Lecture: Communism and Transcendentalism: the Russian Avant-garde and Malevich
5 Lecture: New Religion; New Form: Theosophy, Kandinsky, and Mondrian
B. The Rise of American Modernism
6 Lecture: Modernism, Abstraction, and Theory: Preliminary Considerations
7 Lecture: Modernism and History: Political Interpretations of Abstraction
During the Cold War Years
8 Workshop: Writing the Module Essay and Exhibition Report
9 Lecture: Modernism and Tradition: Form as Content
10 Lecture: Modernism in America: the Roots of Abstraction from the Armory Show to the Late 1930s
11 Lecture: Action as Content: Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism
12 Lecture: The Existential Sublime: Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman
13 Lecture: Bridging the Divide: Pop Art v Abstraction
14 Lecture: The Seduction of Reduction: From Post-Painterly Abstraction to Minimalism
15 Lecture: Abstraction to Idea: Conceptualism and the Dematerialisation of Form
16 Seminar: Section B – Consolidation & Essay Preparation
C. Abstraction and Landscape: USA and UK Perspectives
17 Lecture: Landscape and Abstraction: Richard Diebenkorn's 'Ocean Park' Series
D. Postmodernism and Recent Abstraction
18 Lecture: Beyond the Crisis in Late Modernism: Abstraction v Figuration
19 Lecture: 'Off the Wall': Neo-Minimalist and New-Conceptualist Sculptural Abstractions
20 Lecture: The New-Modernism: Abstract Painting Since 1970s
Module Skills
| Skills Type | Skills details |
|---|---|
| Application of Number | n/a |
| Communication | In the context of group workshops. |
| Improving own Learning and Performance | Through response to one-to-one guidance on essay development. |
| Information Technology | Through word-processing and the configuration of illustrations therein. |
| Personal Development and Career planning | n/a |
| Problem solving | n/a |
| Research skills | Through investigation in gallery context and in library access in preparation for the essay. |
| Subject Specific Skills | Notational and observational skill development in gallery context. |
| Team work | In the context of group workshops. |
Notes
This module is at CQFW Level 5