BA (Hons) History of Art

This module provides a historical preface for the whole of your degree studies, which centre on modern and contemporary art and visual culture. How has the concept of modernity arisen, and how has its meaning varied and evolved in recent history, in terms of art, ideas, events and technological change? 


In what senses may the meaning and effect of a work depend on the way we see it, and what factors are in play, in terms of subjectivity, exhibition, aesthetic ideas, and concepts of realism?

How have space and time and their interaction come to play a central part in modern and contemporary visual practices? We consider the question under different headings: the photographic instant, memory, the present time of everyday experience, and imaginary dimensions of space and time.

Contemporary art has gone beyond the limits of traditional practice. How and why has this come about? How do we make sense of and evaluate these innovations in our field of study?

This module introduces key aspects of late twentieth-century philosophy and twenty-first-century theory that have had a significant impact on visual cultures and the varied role art practices have inherited from the ‘ruins’ of modernity.

The ‘contemporary’ is difficult to define. On the one hand, it refers to being ‘with time’ and, on the other hand, suggests an asynchrony – a challenge to a monotonous or linear history. Beginning with an introduction, which maps the transition from an historical perspective (the so-called crisis of modernity/modernism and notions of the ‘postmodern’), the module goes on to engage critically with those discursive formations which have become known as ‘globalization’ and ‘liquidity’ whilst at the same time investigating the objects, performances, and experiences of art and curatorial practices in light of the ‘contemporary’.

Animating Architecture explores significant movements in architecture and urban design from the mid-19^th Century to the present day. Students are invited to consider the history of modern and contemporary architecture as a complex political problematic; one that is ‘animated’ by the contingent and dynamic social processes which shape urban space. We begin by looking at the crystallisation of the theory of the ‘modern’ city in context of a wider project to choreograph the technological forces and social relations of industrialisation and global trade. Later we shall consider the way the project of modernisation and the experience of modernity was distorted and reshaped by regional pressures giving rise to new aesthetic forms and spatial practices. Considering these moments as reflections on, and representations of, a complex conjuncture of historical and geographical elements we will discuss how postwar debates on architectural modernism shed light on the increasingly spatial nature of politics, economics, and culture. Finally, we turn to the question of a general ‘crisis of architecture’ precipitated by the rise of neoliberalism and finance capital in the mid-1970s. Here we evaluate the contemporary role architectural space plays in diagnosing and representing the postmodern nature of globalisation. And we shall discuss what remains of the modern project in an era when the design and management of the spatial fabric is increasingly colonised, maintained and engineered by an emergent ‘global art’ of urban biopolitics.

Two paradigms that have emerged in recent decades for thinking through the multifarious facets of display are archive and spectacle. These two paradigms - and their complex intertwining - express the mechanism by which a thing is attributed a value and/or made visible through, perhaps inevitably, the exercise of power. At stake between archive and spectacle is thus the question of representation – representation as the experience of visibility or display, the practice of making something visible, particularly in the curatorial sense, and the condition that dictates the limits of what visibility constitutes.

This module stages an intense engagement with the concepts archive and spectacle and a reflection on how as theoretical constructs they may implicate and inform contemporary exhibitionary- and collections-based practices.

Film Fables explores documentary practice and language not as a genre but as varied instantiations of the political, as critique and proposition. With this approach we will explore documentary’s experimentations with actuality to produce versions of reality and the real, often through modes of fiction and fabulation. We will first address how historical moments of radical socio-political transformation have provoked new documentary forms and what understanding of change, revolution, the political voice, the address of the spectator/ citizen and cinematic pedagogy were created hereby. This is accompanied by thinking with and through documentary research practices such as observation, ethnography, conversation/ interview or militant/ intervention, leading to essayistic, performative, educational, militant or first person modalities.

Theorizations of the political and political fiction will be linked to singular formulations of political cinema through e.g. anti-colonial and feminist movements globally and we will ask how these impact our current thinking through the relation between cinema and our political being in the world. We will link historical markers to recent audio-visual practices, which respond critically to social, political and audio-visual forms of governmentality defining our contemporary moment. Examples will include diverse global perspectives and those circulating within and across art, cinema and activist context. 

Throughout the course we will explore documentary practices ourselves through small filmmaking exercises and a group fieldtrip.

Documentary Lives explores documentary practice and language not as a genre but as a relational way of life. The module links documentary to a series of discussions on ethics and what constitutes lives or what it means to be alive and be alive with others. With this approach the module accounts for the complicated relationship between the proposed urge to represent, to witness and give testimony of injured and impaired lives and the lack of a straight line between visual and political representation. We look at how documentability is challenged but also expanded through silence, refusal, the ephemeral, the sensual, affect, the imperceptible and when we think life beyond human lives. The module will present recent examples from South Asia and the Middle East which have approached the above conundrums of ‘representing conflict’ in diverse forms, through cinema, still images or online footage archives (e.g. Mozireen, Pad.ma).

One further crucial focus will be ‘observation as participation’, for which we will be drawing on recent anthropological debates proposing experimental and speculative approaches to documentary film research while at the same time stressing the researchers and filmmakers position of being implicated or part of whatever environment she looks at or rather observes in. Hereby we will address our own locations and relations within global scenarios of conflict and how this might engender a political living with others.

Throughout the module we will explore the above through small research and filmmaking exercises and a group fieldtrip.

This module introduces you to philosophical and conceptual reflection in relation to a number of artistic expressions such as literature, music, cinema, photography and painting. Several questions will be explored, including:

a) can a philosopher write about a specific art form in the way in which he can write about any other subject or about any other art form?
b) how does the relation to art and a specific art form change when it is determined conceptually?
c) how is philosophical reflection affected by the tendency of the arts to blur the demarcating lines that run between them?

Our reading list includes work by Jean-Luc Nancy, Theodor W Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

Terms such as sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual difference now frequent in visual culture, yet they stem from divergent theoretical trajectories. This module will reflect upon some of these past and future paths. While critically engaging the anthropological and sociological traditions that produced ‘gender’ as the central term of feminist inquiry (Rubin), the module delivers a stronger engagement with feminist theory influenced by continental philosophy (Kristeva, Irigaray) as well as material feminism with its renewed engagement with the life sciences (Haraway, Wilson, Aristarkhova). In light of queer theory’s critique of heteronormativity (Butler), the module asks after the past and future trajectories of key figures such as the maternal, paternal and the child. All aspects will be discussed in relation to a wide range of films, plays and artworks.

Cézanne promised Emile Bernard that he would tell him ‘the truth in painting’, adding that this was something he owed him. This promise of the truth (which Derrida adopted as the title for a book of essays on painting and aesthetics) seems to imply that painting has something akin to a philosophical or ethical dimension.  The course will be concerned with examining points at which painting and philosophy come into contact (often through later philosophical or theoretical reflection on earlier art).  Several broad themes will be seen to recur throughout our discussions, concerning spectatorship, optics, the theorising of practice, problems of explanation and interpretation, and the relationship between painting and language.

In the first part of the module, we will discuss a small number of painters working between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, approaching them largely through present-day critical and theoretical perspectives.  The second part will be concerned with twentieth century attempts to re-found painting and to redefine the terms both of practice and of the viewer’s engagement with the work.  Main topics here will include Cubist collage, 1920s abstraction, American abstract painting, and painting after the critical turn to semiotics.  Painters to be particularly considered during the course will include, among others, Velazquez, Chardin, Cézanne, Mondrian, Klee, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter. There will be scope for students to discuss work by painters of their own choice, in the context established by the module, in presentations and written work.

The module is divided into two parts. Part 1 looks at how different (especially post-structuralist and feminist) theorisations of the relationships between knowledge and power, as well as more recent critiques to the scientific protocols of truth production underpinning the modern project (for example, Latour, Daston), might offer the tools to reinvigorate new forms of objectivity and produce 'well-constructed facts'.

Part 2 examines different documentary practices that have strived to become tools of social and political struggle in times of conflict and global crisis by mobilising some of these tools, paying particular attention to the techniques and technologies used to collect, store, analyse and broadcast information. From radical cartographic practices to different forms of witnessing and testimony in the context of human rights reporting; from socialist avant-garde art practices to documentary photography; from critical forensic practices to environmental impact assessments; many practices have insisted on the political necessity to 'stage truth', treating the real as an effect to be produced rather than attempting to recuperate a lost authenticity.

For many years, visual cultures have explored the unstable life of truth production protocols in the visual, aural and spatial realms. This module builds upon that tradition to ask anew, in what has been ambiguously defined as the age of post-truth politics, how to create 'new zones of entanglement between the aesthetic and the ethic, between artifice and authenticity'.

This module draws from the specific research ethos and methodologies developed at the Centre for Research Architecture and the Turner Prize-nominated Forensic Architecture (FA) agency, which use spatial practices to investigate politics, media, ecology, and human rights, and engage with the urgent political conditions of our time.

The specific focus of the module will be selected amongst some of the ongoing investigations carried out at the Centre and at FA, looking at a growing number of social, political and military conflicts that unfold today. These forms of spatial and environmental violence, often occurring gradually and operating invisibly, pose epistemological and aesthetic challenges: they demand that we think simultaneously along historical, socio-political, and climatic lines, and across larger temporal and territorial scales.

The module will look at these threshold conditions (the relation between changing environmental conditions and racial exclusion, urban transformations, colonial histories, migration patterns, etc) through a spatial and visual lens.