111-104 High Modern To Postmodern: the Visual Arts, 1918-1994

Note

No student may receive credit for both this subject and 111-104 Modern and Postmodern Visual Art, Part B: Modernism into Postmodernism.

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Subject Description

This subject complements 111-103 Brave New Worlds: Modernity and the Visual Arts 1850-1918. A central motif will be the fragmentation of artistic culture after World War 1. A series of case studies will introduce the various options pursued by artists; the elevation of art to autonomous status or its entrenchment in everyday life; the celebration of material culture or withdrawal into spiritualism; increasing scepticism towards such modernist terms as progress, individualism, originality; the exploration of the new realities of mass media and consumer culture. The subject will trace European and Australian art between the wars, then consider the growing cultural dominance of the United States, before turning to the regional pluralism of contemporary art. Lecture and tutorial topics include: Art and Social Intervention; Anti-Art and the Critique of Cultural Institutions; Reactionary Modernism; Photography and Mass Culture; Psychoanalysis and Subjectivity; Regional Cultures; The Critique of Modernism and the Development of Postmodernism; The Development of Multiple, National, Sexual, Ethnic and Gender Identities in Postcolonial Culture.

Assessment

Exercises and/or essays and/or visual test totalling not more than 4000 words.

Prescribed Texts

• Kaplan P E and S Manso (eds), Major European Art Movements 1900-1945. Dutton 1977.
• Harrison, C & Wood, P. (eds.), Art in Theory. 1900-1990, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.
• Harrison, C. et. al, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The early twentieth century. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993.
• Johnson E, American Artists on Art. Harper and Row 1982.