107-416 The Visual Culture of Colonial Australia

Formerly available as 107-151. Students who have completed 107-151 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth-year honours in art history.

This subject guides students towards an understanding of the visual culture of colonial Australia. It engages with the key concepts of vision that are central to recent art history and theory. Visual concepts will be related to a wide range of cultural productions from the early days of white Australian exploration and settlement to the art of the 'Plein Air' movement. The pictorial archive to be studied includes landscape imagery, portraits, botanical and topographical studies, maps, cartoons and photographs. The subject considers the construction of vision first through the aesthetic doctrine known as the association of ideas and its relationship to the aesthetic categories known as the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque. Students will engage with themes relevant to immigration and early settlement such as nostalgia, memory and alienation. They will also engage with issues of race, class and gender by exploring themes and subjects such as the convict/bushrangers and Tasmanian Aborigines, urban development, the middle classes and patronage of the arts. The colonial pictorial archive will also be scrutinised in order to see through colonial fashion to the forging of gender difference and identity in the emerging world of modern commercialism.

A class paper and essay totalling 5000 words.

A subject reader will be available.