Third Year (Final Honours)

The course will examine aspects of Pop Art and other related art movements from the later 1950s to the early 1970s. The primary focus will be on British and American Pop Art, but attention will also be given to developments in other sites (e.g. France, South America, Asia). Prescribed materials will include both texts and numerous images. Prescribed texts will include the writings of artists and critics and period discussions of issues ranging from the mass media to the -55- Vietnam War. Topics will include the relationship between art and mass culture; the avant-garde’s relationship with and/or contestation of the art market; art’s engagement with race, gender, and sexual orientation and the important role played by female, BME and queer artists; and the impact of May 1968 and the Vietnam War on art.

This course is designed not only to present a survey of Chinese art but also to provide students with a chance to learn how to read social programs of Chinese history represented in visual language. In order to do this, the course asks students to think of questions, such as “Why does a particular artifact look the way it does?” “Who made it and who obtained it?” “Where was it displayed and for what purpose?” “Who decided what was acceptable and who, if anyone, challenged established styles of production?” Rather than seeing artwork as a passive indicator of changing artistic norms and paradigms, students will learn to interpret images and art critical writing as vehicles through which diverse social groups negotiate competing values and social norms. The issues of power, class, taste, gender, political debate, social criticism, and public opinions throughout Chinese history will be discussed in the class in order to let students understand that art and society are not two separate entities, but they are related to each other in many ways.

For centuries, art and visual culture have worked together with economic, scientific, political and religious factors to shape and re-shape what we call ‘race’. While scholars continue to debate the precise origin point and geographical location for the invention of racial difference, this course takes a less comprehensive view. Focusing on the Anglo-American world, we will look at a series of interconnected episodes in this complex history, exploring art’s often underappreciated role in bringing forth, nourishing and sustaining hierarchies based on skin colour and ancestry.

Art & the Anthropocene: Imagining, Taming and Transforming the Environment, ca. 1000-1450 

The Special Subject considers the range of ways that medieval people inhabited, thought about, and shaped their environments through close study of texts and images made between ca. 1000-1450. Focusing primarily on a ‘global’, connected, Europe, the paper interrogates the complex roles that ideologies, beliefs and institutions played in shaping medieval people’s attitudes towards the world in which they lived. Their ideas and practices drew on the legacies of ancient Eurasian empires, and would have lasting influence, becoming deeply embedded in European settler-colonialism, the legitimization of extractive and exploitative behaviors, the production of modern ecological crises and the inspiration of environmental movements. Although generally overlooked by those interested in the causes of today’s planetary situation, the millennium between the fall of Rome and the invasion of the Americas was the laboratory for distinctively European attitudes to the environment and its governance.

The course examines how art, criticism and theory intersected with politics and power during the Cold War. It traces cultural agendas shaped from above between 1945-67, including debates over abstraction and realism, competing cultural hegemonies across the Iron Curtain, and artists’ roles in decolonisation and post war alliances such as Pan Africanism and the Non Aligned Movement. From 1968-89, the course turns to cultural and political contestation from below, examining alternative and experimental art forms that critiqued institutions, subverted censorship and challenged political dogmas, with a focus on Eastern Europe and Latin America. Throughout, we reflect on how forces such as individualism, collectivism, nationalism, imperialism and technological development shaped the modern world and continue to define it today.