111-433 You Beaut Country: Australian Art and Design in the 1950s

Note

Available as 111-333 at 3rd-year level.

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Subject Description

As the period of modernisation in Australia, the 1950s saw new economic, cultural and geo-political experiences conflicting with existing, relatively stable nationalist mythologies. These conflicts are also evident within the visual arts, be they debates on international abstraction versus local figuration, modernist architecture as utopia or cultural imperialism, or representations of figures of threat and instability such as migrants, aborigines, and new spaces like the suburbs. The subject aims to reopen the case of the 1950s, staging it as a decade of both complacency and panic, of mythology and demonology, of progress and nostalgia. Interdisciplinary methodologies will be used to explore the formation or reconfiguration of national identity in a decade of dramatic social and cultural change. The subject will consider aspects of design (the Holden, the domestic interior), material culture (the growth of consumer society), technology (the introduction of television), and art history (the relation of local culture to international modernism). Topics covered in lectures and tutorials will include: the demonising of the suburb; the revival of frontier mythology in landscape; the play of regional identity and global capital in the Holden; discourses of modernisation in architecture and interior design.

Assessment

Written work which may comprise class papers, essays or take-home examinations totalling 5000 words for 3rd year and 6000 words for 4th year.

Prescribed Texts

• Burn, I. et. al, The Necessity of Australian Art. Sydney, 1988.
• Lees, S. & Senyard, J, The 1950s. South Yarra, 1987.
• Powerhouse Museum, The Australian Dream. Sydney 1993.
• Willis, A-M, Illusions of Identity, The Art of Nations. Sydney, 1993.
• Willis, A-M, The Art of Nations. Sydney, 1993.