107-017 Visual Cultures

Note

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Semester

Subject Description

This subject encompasses a study of popular forms of a variety of visual cultures including the cinema, television, art, photography, design, advertising and multi-media. The origins of some of these visual forms (for example, photography, television and the cinema) will be accounted for, but the course will especially concern itself with a focus on the various critical and interpretative methods which have dominated the analysis of visual cultures in the 20th century. These may include: questions of realism, avant-gardism and alternative approaches to mainstream forms, propaganda and ideology, issues of nationalism. Other broader issues to be raised will centre around visual cultures and their relationship with: commodification, spectatorship, ideology, form and style, fantasy and desire, authorship and sexuality.