107-433 You Beaut Country: Australia in the '50s

Formerly available as 107-061. Students who have completed 107-061 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Usually 37.5 points of art history at second/third year, see Prerequisites or admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth-year honours in art history.

This subject focuses on art and design in Australia in the 1950s. This period 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 migrants, Aborigines, and new spaces like the suburbs. The subject aims to re-open the case of the 1950s, as a decade of both complacency and panic, of mythology and demonology, of progress and nostalgia. Students will use interdisciplinary methodologies as a way of exploring the formation or reconfiguration of national identity in a decade of dramatic social and cultural change.