Provisional Course Descriptions, 2013-14
| FIRST-YEAR COURSES |
HART1001 History of Art and its Objects (The Core Course) [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Mechthild Fend (Autumn) Stephanie Schwartz (Spring)
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms on Fridays 14.00-17.00.
This is an obligatory introductory course for all History of Art students and is not normally available to students from outside the department. The course is an introduction to a range of skills required to study the History of Art, including the first-hand study of works of art. It is designed to familiarise students with some current debates in the subject, and introduce them to a variety of theoretical positions of which they need to be aware in the course of their degree.
Student Contact Hours: 40, in 20 weekly 1-hour lectures and 20 1-hour seminars.
Duration of Course: 20+ weeks, beginning in first week of Autumn term.
Student Workload: Reading and other preparation for weekly classes, three pieces of written work and an oral presentation (notes submitted).
Means of Assessment: 3 assessed essays (2000 words each) and 1 oral/presentation task (each element 25% of the overall mark).
Prerequisites: Students should normally be in the first year of a Single or Combined Honours degree in History of Art.
HART1306 History of European Art (1): Classical to Early Renaissance [0.5 cu] (Autumn)
HART1305 History of European Art (2): High Renaissance to the Present Day [0.5 cu] (Spring)
Course tutors: Alison Wright (Autumn) and Rose Marie San Juan (Spring)
Timetabled: HART1306 Autumn Term; HART1305 Spring Term; Wednesdays, 09.00-11.00.
These are obligatory introductory courses for all History of Art students but they are also available to students from outside the department. In ten lectures each term students are introduced to the dominant narrative of art history as an historical development ('the canon'), and are encouraged to look at that model critically. The subject matter of the lecture series ranges from classical to contemporary art. Space is also given to categories outside the conventional canon.
Student Contact Hours: Lectures and question time: 20 hours for each course.
Duration of Course: 10+ weeks, the first course begins in first week of Autumn term, the second in the first week of the Spring term.
Student Workload: Attendance at all lectures, reading in support of lectures, 1 1500-2000 word essay for each course, slides tests (as below).
Means of Assessment: 100% by unseen examination in Summer Term.
Prerequisites: Students should normally be in the first year of a Single or Combined Honours degree in History of Art.
HART1304 Thematic Seminar (1): Art and Architecture pre 1700 [0.5 cu]
Overall course tutor: Maria Loh
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: Thursdays 11.00-13.00, or at other time by arrangement.
This course is designed specifically for students on the first-year Single Honours History of Art, or History of Art with Material Studies, or any of the Combined Honours with History of Art programmes. It comprises a number of historical and topical seminar options which may be taught in either of the two terms. These options are designed to provide students with smaller group teaching and direct engagement with art objects in museums, galleries and historical sites. Students take one out of the several options on offer during the academic year, and may also take one from HART1307. The course is taught as a mixture of informal lectures, seminars and/or gallery visits, accompanied by weekly reading projects and group discussion of key issues.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Workload: Attendance at all classes, back-up reading, 2 essays (c. 1500-2000 words).
Means of Assessment: Two essays, one
1500-2000 words weighted at 40% submitted before Reading Week, the other c.
2500-3000 words weighted at 60% submitted by the end of term.
Prerequisites: Appropriate background in history or art history.
HART1307 Thematic Seminar (2): Art and Architecture after 1700 [0.5 cu]
Overall Course tutor: Maria Loh
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring Terms: Thursdays 11.00-13.00, or at other time by arrangement.
This course is designed specifically for students on the first-year
Single Honours History of Art, or History of Art with Material Studies,
or any of the Combined Honours with History of Art programmes. It comprises a number of historical and topical seminar options which may be taught in either of the two terms. These options are designed to provide students with smaller group teaching and direct engagement with art objects in museums, galleries and historical sites. Students take one out of several options on offer during the academic year, and may also take one from HART1304. The course is taught as a mixture of informal lectures, seminars and/or gallery visits, accompanied by weekly reading projects and group discussion of key issues.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Workload: Attendance at all classes, back-up reading, 2 essays (c. 1500-2000 words).
Means of Assessment: Two essays, one
1500-2000 words weighted at 40% submitted before Reading Week, the other c.
2500-3000 words weighted at 60% submitted by the end of term.
Prerequisites: Appropriate background in history or art history.
HART1302 Methods and Materials I [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Emma Richardson
Timetabled: Spring Term; Tuesdays 11.00-13.00
This course will present an overview of the major classes of materials found within museum collections, and address their application as artists materials.Discussion will be given to the types of physical properties that different materials exhibit, so that the student might begin to understand why an artist may have used a certain material.
The class will be taken on two site visits, the first to The British Museum to initiate a dialogue regarding the many materials present in collections, and to start to think of how each material may have been applied. The second site visit will be to an artist’s studio, placing the student within the artist’s environment. This course will provide the student with the theoretical and practical aspects of artist’s techniques and equipment, and giving an insight into the artist’s studio.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks, beginning in 1st week of Autumn term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Attendance at all classes, prescribed and back-up reading, practical work, one short written task, possibly one short presentation, and one assessed essay (c. 2000 words).
Means of Assessment: 40% by course-essay, 60% by unseen exam (2 hours).
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 1st-year HAMS students.
HART1303 Science for Art Historians [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Emma Richardson
Timetabled: Autumn Term; Tuesdays 11.00-13.00
The
course will lay a scientific foundation for understanding the relationship
between the composition of artefacts, physical properties, and application. The
first part of the course will cover topics such as the periodic table,
solubility, pH, and colour chemistry. Whilst the emphasis of the later part of
the course will be on organic polymers, we will begin with a review of basic
organic and inorganic chemistry, setting up a deeper understanding of the
issues surrounding materials, such as deterioration mechanisms.
Duration of course: 10 weeks, beginning in the first week of the Spring term.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Attendance at all classes, prescribed and back-up reading, lab work, essay (c.2000 words)
Means of Assessment: 20% written-up lab work, 20% essay, 60% by unseen exam (2 hours).
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 1st-year HAMS students.
|
SECOND-YEAR COURSES (All courses are half-unit courses taught in one term. Note that the courses are arranged with the autumn term options followed by the spring term options) |
AUTUMN TERM COURSES
HART2001 History of the Category Art [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Sarah James and Charles Ford
Timetabled: Autumn Term; Tuesdays 09.00-11.00.
This
course aims to familiarise students with the way in which the concept
of art has evolved in the European world, especially since the
Renaissance. It examines the emergence of Aesthetics as a distinct
branch of philosophy in the eighteenth century, and subsequent
developments, especially in relation to the role of the category Art in
Modernism. It is based on the study of texts in Seminars.
Duration of course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20 hours, a mixture of lectures and text-based discussion classes.
Student Workload: Attendance at all classes, prescribed and back-up reading, possibly one class-presentation and one essay (c.2000-2500 words).
Means of Assessment: tba.
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 2nd-year History of Art students. Other closely similar experience might be acceptable.
HART2217 Practice, Theory and History of Conservation [0.5 cu]
Course
tutor: Petra Lange-Berndt
Timetabled: Autumn Term; Mondays
11.00–13.00.
This course is designed specifically for HAMS students. It comprises field trips to the V&A, The National Gallery, Tate Modern, and Whitechapel Gallery with the consideration of the intellectual framework within which contemporary conservation practices need to be established: It focuses on the history of the profession, on related institutions, and on issues of materiality and replication since the long nineteenth century. Which politics are attached to conservation? How could ephemeral artworks be preserved? And do we really need to embalm everything? How about the punk slogan "search and destroy"?
Duration
of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student
Workload: Details to follow.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should
have completed a first-year Art History programme or have equivalent
relevant experience.
HART2010 GATEWAY COURSE: The Chapel in Italy, c. 1300 - c. 1500: Form, Function and Decoration [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Alison Wright
Timetabled: Autumn term; Mondays 14.00–16.00.
Short Description: This course considers the types, uses and decoration of chapels of the 14th and 15th centuries looking particularly at their ideological implications and the role of the church and of private and civic patrons in the development of various formal and iconographic patterns. From the Arena Chapel to the Sistine, it involves analysis of several of the major sites seen as definitive in the development of the art of the Early Renaissance.
Duration of Course:
10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student
Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery visits, one essay
(c.2000-2500 words) and contribution to class discussion.
Means of Assessment: 50% by essay (c.2000-2500 words), 50% by unseen
2 hour examination.
Prerequisites: Students should have
completed a first-year Art History programme or have equivalent relevant
experience.
HART2101 Selected Themes in Medieval Art and Architecture (1) The Reception of Netherlandish Painting in the Mediterranean, c. 1430 - c.1500 [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Susan Jones
Timetabled: Autumn Term; Tuesdays 16.00-18.00
This course examines Netherlandish painting in an international context, using this as a model to question the nineteenth-century conception of the period as ‘the Renaissance’. The first section provides an introduction to European circuits of trade and travel and the movements of people and objects around Europe. Students will learn about the various kinds and levels of contact between Northern painters and Southern patrons, merchants, middlemen and artists and consider the role of foreign merchants in the production, purveying, export and giving of paintings and other objects. They will also consider the implications of the mobility of objects and of artists themselves for the transmission of ideas and designs. Turning to the physical object, in Part II, students will examine the imitation, modification and transformation of Netherlandish paintings by Southern European painters, and the degree to which the use of oil as a binding medium was relevant to the paintings’ reception and appreciation. Students will debate what methodological problems are involved in determining whether particular Southern European painters had first-hand knowledge of Netherlandish oil technique. The final section of the course examines selected paintings in context. It considers ways in which Netherlandish paintings exported to the South were perceived and praised, displayed, copied and interpreted and how they may have co-existed in their new localities with arts from other places, made in other formats and media. We will also ask whether Southern European ideas about Netherlandish painting changed during the period between around 1430 and around 1500.
Duration of Course:
10 weeks.
Student contact hours: 20+ hours.
Student
Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery visits,
one essay
(c.2000-2500 words) and contribution to class discussion.
Means of
assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites:
Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme
or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2229 Gender and Representation in France 1750 - 1850 [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Mechthild Fend
Timetabled: Autumn Term; Tuesdays 14.00-16.00
The time span covered by this course - the
hundred years between the last decades of the ancien regime and the end of the
July Monarchy - constitute not only an era of tremendous political change
(epitomised by the French Revolution) but also a period of a new proliferation
of images and one during which the notion and function of art was in
flux. This course explores in particular how the visual arts engage with
shifting notions of gender and sexuality at the time, and how they take part in
the shaping of new ideals of masculinity and femininity. It considers
furthermore the gendering of social categories such as public and private
space, or artistic categories such as the Rococo style, or the nude as a genre.
Looking at art practices from the Rococo to Romanticism the course will focus
on works by artists such as Boucher, Greuze, David, Girodet, Ingres, Gericault,
and Delacroix.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery
visits, one essay (c.2000-2500 words) and a (probably collaborative)
class presentation.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art
History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2227 Architecture and Modernity: Europe, 1900 - 1945 [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Paul Fox
Timetabled: Autumn Term; Fridays 11.00-13.00
This course will explore early twentieth-century European architecture in the context of the rapidly changing political, social and economic conditions of the period. Artnouveau, industrial design, Expressionism, the architecture of the Dutch and Soviet avant-gardes will be considered, as will the work of the ‘masters’ (Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier) and their followers. The goal will be to consider the built environment in terms of the technological, commercial and institutional conditions of design practice in cultures stratified by divisions of class, gender and nationality.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery
visits, one essay (c.2000-2500 words) and a (probably collaborative)
class presentation.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art
History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2215 Image/Object [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Briony Fer
Timetabled: Autumn Term; Wednesdays 11.00-13.00
This course examines developments in modern art during the twentieth century. It will focus on definitions of ‘modernity’ and debates on ‘modern’ art. Movements include Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, Early European Abstraction, Post-War American Abstraction, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance and contemporary art will be covered.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours (10 two-hour classes, and 3 perambulations around London).
Student Workload: Prescribed
and back-up reading, private gallery visits, one essay (c.2000-2500
words) and a (probably collaborative) class presentation.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2231 Aesthetics and Politics: Art Since the 1960s [0.5 cu]
Course Tutor: tba
Timetabled: Autumn Term: Tuesdays 11.00–13.00.
Short description:
This course will focus on major international developments in
avant-garde practice from the 1960s to contemporary art, paying
particular attention to artists' critical examination of mass culture
and spectacle, public space and experimental social relations. We will
consider how artists have explored innovative ways of approaching
media, distribution forms, and modes of audience address. In addition,
we will examine recent historical and critical approaches to
understanding these practices, as well as theoretical developments
formulated during this period.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student
Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and
back-up reading, private gallery visits, one essay (c.2000-2500 words)
and a (probably collaborative) class presentation.
Means of
Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites:
Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme or
have equivalent relevant academic experience.
SPRING TERM COURSES
HART2002 Methodologies of Art History [0.5 cu]
Course tutors: Stephanie Schwartz and Robert Mills
Timetabled: Spring Term: Tuesdays 09.00–11.00.
This
text-based course introduces students to a variety of different
methodologies and approaches current in the discipline. Through
lectures, seminars and weekly reading tasks students learn to identify
and evaluate different kinds of art historical writing. Topics
addressed normally include: formalist positions in modernist criticism,
iconography, the social history of art, theories of ideology,
semiotics, discourse theory, psycho-analytic approaches, issues of
gender, sexuality and subjectivity, post-colonial theory and race and
ethnicity.
Duration of course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20 hours, a mixture of lectures and text-based discussion classes.
Student Workload: Attendance at all classes, prescribed and back-up reading, one essay (c.2000-2500 words).
Means of Assessment: tba.
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 2nd-year History of Art students. Other closely similar experience might be acceptable.
HART2005 Methodologies of Making [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Petra Lange-Berndt
Timetabled: Spring Term; Wednesday 11.00-13.00
This text-based course introduces the "experimental system" (Rheinberger) of art production, curating, or care and conservation: theories connected to the producers, spaces of making and doing, tools, materiality, things, economics, installation, or the workings of art institutions, e g the fields that determine what could be called the practices of art history. The first part of each session will introduce a close reading of the texts under consideration, combined with group discussion. The second part will apply these theories to one exemplary case study of art production, curating, or conservation across the centuries. How is theory performed? How is it entangled with practice? How to theorise practice or to develop a practial aesthetic?
Duration of course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Attendance at all classes, prescribed and back-up reading, possibly one short presentation (written up), one essay (c.2000–2500 words).
Means of Assessment: tba.
Prerequisites: Normally only offered to 2nd-year History of Art students. Other closely similar experience might be acceptable.
HART2238 (HAMS only) Methods and Materials II [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Emma Richardson
Timetabled: Spring Term; Thursdays 11.00-13.00
This course will expand on, and extend, the materials and methodologies
covered during the first year’s course, presenting an overview of the
major classes of materials found within museum collections, and
addressing their application as artist’s materials. In this second
course, focus will be given to the more obscure materials found in works
of art, for example wax, synthetic resins, and foam. Discussion will be
given to the types of physical properties that different materials
exhibit, so that the student might begin to understand why an artist may
have used a certain material.
This course will provide the student with the theoretical and practical
aspects of artist’s techniques and application, and highlight some of
the issues surrounding their preservation and conservation.
Duration of Course:
10 weeks.
Student contact hours: 20+ hours in 10 weekly 2-hour classes, plus supervised lab/project work.
Student
Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, preparation for classes, independent project work.
Means of
assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites:
Students should have completed the first-year Art History programme
or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2011 GATEWAY COURSE: Modernity through the Lens: the European Avant-Garde, Utopia, Technology & Mass Culture [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Sarah James
Timetabled: Spring Term; Mondays 14.00-16.00
This course will examine the relationship
between the European Avant-Garde, technology and mass culture, by situating
artistic production in the context of photography, mechanical reproduction,
cinema, advertising, consumerism, and life in the modern metropolis. We will
explore the emergence of utopian politics in relation to the transformation of
painting by both new technologies, and mass culture more generally. We will
begin by looking at the shifting and volatile relationship between photography
and painting at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth, and go on to examine the ways in which artists drew on technologies,
mass media and popular culture to celebrate modernity and problematise
traditional approaches to artistic production, subjective experience, gender
norms, and culture more generally. We will end by looking at the horrific
deformation of the avant-garde’s utopian dreams with the rise of mass politics
and the ways in which both Stalinism and Nazism built on and transformed the
avant-garde’s vision of technology and mass culture.
Duration of Course:
10 weeks.
Student contact hours: 20+ hours.
Student
Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery visits,
one essay
(c.2000-2500 words) and contribution to class discussion.
Means of
assessment: 50% by essay (c.2000-2500 words), 50% by unseen 2 hour examination.
Prerequisites:
Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme
or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2102 Selected Themes in Medieval Art and Architecture (2) The Manipulated Medieval Body [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Jack Hartnell
Timetabled: Spring Term; Thursdays 14.00-16.00
Born, bathed, dressed, bred, cut, bruised, ripped, split, buried – the human body and its changing actions and reactions offer historians a gateway onto understanding the cultures of the past. This special subject option will examine the wide and varied outputs of medieval art through this contemporary theoretical lens, building up a body of medieval artistic practice piece by bodily piece. Each week attention will turn to a different element of the medieval body – head, hands, skin, bone, blood – and introduce the ways in which the aesthetics and techniques of the medieval craftsman evoked, idolised, and distorted their forms. Stemming from this bodily framework, we will examine recent readings of medieval art as a craft designed to deliberately manipulate the emotions and sensations of the viewer. In tracing these notions of tactility and sentiment, we will find that medieval art objects of different types – sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, panel paintings, reliquaries, tombs – can be bound together into a fascinating narrative of arresting communication with viewers both past and present.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload:
Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery visits, one essay
(c.2000-2500 words) and a (probably collaborative) class presentation.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2208 Making, Exchanging and Evaluating Art in Europe c. 1500 - c. 1700 [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Charles Ford
Timetabled: Spring Term; Mondays 11.00-13.00
The course explores the material culture of making, distributing and exchanging works of art, and the intellectual cultures informing the definition of artists’ careers and the evaluation of their products. We will have classes covering: art writers and 'art theory'; artists' training (workshop and academy); biographies and careers (ideal and typical); books, prints and printmaking; the marketing of art; Palladio and the career of the professional architect; Caravaggio and contemporary reputation.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours (10 two-hour classes, including a Gallery Visit).
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery
visits, one essay (c.2000-2500 words) and a (probably collaborative)
class presentation.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art
History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2202 London and Paris, c. 1700 - c. 1850 [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Sue Walker
Timetabled: Spring Term; Tuesdays 14.00-16.00
The course deals with the development of London and Paris as sites of visual fascination through their architecture, sculpture and the emergence of the public art exhibition alongside alternative sites of urban spectacle including: the theatrical performances, public executions, military parades and spaces of consumption.
The course will consider mediation of London and Paris through literature, costume, print culture and cartography. Material will be viewed through the conceptual frameworks of the spectacle, "modernity", the city as politically contested space, the official urban plan and its "underworlds", the commodity fetish and the translation of alternative sensory approaches to the city (scent/ touch/ sound) to its visual image.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours (10 two-hour classes, and 3
perambulations around London).
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery
visits, one essay (c.2000-2500 words) and a (probably collaborative)
class presentation.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art
History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2222 Art/Event [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Cadence Kinsey
Timetabled: Spring Term; Tuesdays 11.00-13.00
This
course
traces the emergence of art works with an ‘event structure’, from Dada and Futurist theatre to Relational Aesthetics, with an
emphasis on subversive practices intended to critique the structures of art
production and display and/or everyday life. Against the object-based character
of formalist aesthetics, and using non-traditional techniques and technologies,
the ‘event’ challenges the borders of art and non-art. The ‘event’ is not
theatre or performance either, so what is it? We will explore art historical
(S. C. Foster, H Rosenberg) and political and philosophical (Sartre, Badiou)
concepts of the event alongside its practical iterations through Action
Painting, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, Body Art and contemporary practices.
Duration of Course:
10 weeks.
Student contact hours: 20+ hours.
Student
Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery visits,
one essay
(c.2000-2500 words) and contribution to class discussion.
Means of
assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites:
Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme
or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2236 American Geographies: Figuring the West, 1848 - 1914 [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Stephanie Schwartz
Timetabled: Spring Term; Tuesdays 14.00-16.00
The “West” has long occupied a privileged place in U.S. geopolitics. Since the first decades of the nineteenth century, this region has heralded both the success and demise of the American experiment. American Geographies explores the ways in which American visual culture (painting, photography, film, and city planning) pictured, produced, critiqued and mythologized the processes of American expansion. Engaging the scholarly literature on American landscape and geography, this course seeks not only to illuminate the centrality of material culture to the strategies of empire, it encourages students to examine why it is that America’s geography has remained conveniently open-ended and ill defined.
Duration of Course: 10 weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery
visits, one essay (c.2000-2500 words) and a (probably collaborative)
class presentation.
Means of Assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Students should have completed a first-year Art
History programme or have equivalent relevant experience.
HART2108 Selected Themes in Art and Architecture 1850 to the present (2) Gender, Sexuality and the Avant-Garde [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Stina Barchan
Timetabled: Spring Term; Fridays 11.00-13.00
The course aim to give the student a cultural and historical understanding of the avant-garde, and how it has radicalised our understanding of painting, sculpture, photography and film. With a critical approach, we will use canonical literature on the avant-garde in order to investigate not only its ideals but also its limitations and repressions. Major emphasis will be put on paternal authority, sexual transgressions, and the role of women both as subject matter and as artists in their own right. We will focus on Dada and Surrealism, but will also consider female artists working in contemporary craft and fashion. The course aim to equip the students with a set of critical skills in visual analysis through which to develop meaningful interpretations of the art works under discussion.
Duration of Course:
10 weeks.
Student contact hours: 20+ hours.
Student
Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, private gallery visits,
one essay
(c.2000-2500 words) and contribution to class discussion.
Means of
assessment: 2000-2,500 word essay weighted at 45%; oral component 10%
and 2 hour exam in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites:
Students should have completed a first-year Art History programme
or have equivalent relevant experience.
|
FINAL/THIRD-YEAR COURSES (Note that the Special Subject courses are arranged in 'historical' order; the essay options are set out first. All Special Subject courses are of one unit and are taught over both terms.) |
FINAL YEAR ESSAY OPTIONS
HART3904 Undergraduate report [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Fred Schwartz
A 10,000 word essay to be handed in at the beginning of the Summer term. Students define a research project with the help and approval of the Department and receive guidance while undertaking the research and writing the essay.
HART3906 Independent Study Essay in History of Art [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Fred Schwartz
A 5,000 word essay to be handed in at the beginning of the Summer term. This half-unit is designed to enable students to present an essay for assessment in connection with their own private studies or with a period of time spent auditing and contributing to a third-stage Special Subject course.
HART3907 History of Art and Material Studies Project Paper [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Fred Schwartz
A 10,000 word essay to be handed in at the beginning of the Summer term. Students define a History of Art and Material Studies research project with the help and approval of the Department and receive guidance while undertaking the research and writing the essay.
HART3230 Art/Work/Spaces [0.5 cu]
Course tutor: Petra Lange-Berndt
Timetabled: By arrangement between tutor, participating institutions and students.
This
is a half-unit work/experience placement in the art trade, a museum or
gallery, or a conservation studio. Available only to HAMS students.
Duration of Course: 10 + weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 20+ hours.
Student Workload: Students carry out a work/experience placement and write up an essay on a topic relating to that experience.
Means of Assessment: 5000 word essay
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year HAMS course.
FINAL YEAR SPECIAL SUBJECT COURSES
HART3238 Place, space and imagination: reviewing the Renaissance city c. 1420-1520 [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Alison Wright
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Thursdays 11.00-13.00.
In this course we will take Henri Lefebvre’s ideas concerning the ‘production of space’ (space as social practice, the representation of space and representational space) as a point of departure for examining and questioning practices of building, display, representation and mapping in Italy in the 15th and early 16th century. Bearing in mind the religious, political and social uses of places and place-specific images in Italian courts and cities we will look at:
- spaces of representation from the street and the piazza to the princely study, their class and ideological implications and evidence for how they were produced, viewed and experienced
- the production of sacred space in relation to practices such as burial, procession, ‘sacred representations’, enshrinement and the performance of the miraculous
- the gendering of space, enclosure, the domestic interior and spaces of the imagination
- hierophany and the space of the visionary in painting/ relief sculpture
- perspective construction in relation to practices of surveying, to theories of vision and application to picture making as well as cognitive, and philosophical implications
- early map-making and the circulation of ways of conceptualizing space and place in print media.
- locality and the character of place comparing Venice and Florence in terms of urban and social fabric, literary descriptions, city views and as they are imagined in narrative and domestic art.
The course draws on a rich literature that allows us to study monumental spaces and the works of well known artists, as well as less familiar places and practices, from a range of approaches - from historical anthropology, sociology and ideological criticism to theories of vision, materiality and reception.
Duration of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
HART3223 Love and Death in Italian Art c. 1500-1700 [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Maria Loh
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Tuesdays 11.00-13.00.
The art of painting was invented by a lovesick teenage girl. In the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, we hear how, in a bout of advanced melancholia, the daughter of Butades, the potter of Corinth, traced her lover’s shadow upon a wall by the lonely light of a candle as he slept. In this manner, she crafted a memento that enabled her to keep him beneath her eyes and close to her heart knowing well that he would eventually be gone. Art and desire were bound from the start by the twin brothers Eros (Love) and Thanatos (Death). This course will explore the co-presence of Eros and Thanatos in early modern Italian art and literature. One of the key issues in this course is the blurring, transgression, and redefinition of these boundaries. Lectures will explore issues related to spectatorship, containment, portraiture and necromancy, magic and lovesickness, disciplining the body, spiritual exercises, metamorphosis and martyrdom, and the spectacularisation of death and desire.
Duration of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
HART3205 Patrons and Painters in Elizabethan and Stuart England [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Diana Dethloff
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Wednesdays 11.00-13.00.
The
course covers artistic production in England and the system of court
patronage from c. 1558 to c. 1650 (from Elizabeth I to the end of the English Civil War).
Particular topics will include: the importance of the visual arts in the 'cult' of monarchy; the role and patronage of the courtier; ephemeral spectacles such as masques and courtly entertainments; the representation of power and authority; the representation of women; the influence of continental practice on English art; printed and medallic imagery; studio training and workshop practice; the effects of the Civil War on established patronage systems and art collecting and the beginnings of an art market.
Duration of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
HART3206 Dutch Genre Painting [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Charles Ford
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Fridays 11.00-13.00.
The course concentrates on the ‘everyday life’ imagery produced in the United Provinces during the 17th century. It is taught through gallery visits and seminars. It discusses art objects within the theoretical and institutional frameworks of art production at the time, as well as assessing the history of their evaluation and interpretation (eg issues relating to ‘Dutch realism’ and ‘hidden meanings’). Particular attention will be paid to the subject matter and style of Dutch genre painting in relation to contemporary social (class and gender) issues. Classes will be devoted to subjects such as: iconography and symbolism, developments and changes in subject matter and imagery, centres of production and individual painters.
Duration of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
HART3218 Hogarth and Visual Satire [1.0 cu]
Course
Tutor: Danielle Thom
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Mondays 16.00-18.00
This course looks at the phenomenon of the 'satirical print' in eighteenth-century Britain: its aesthetic roots; social and cultural functions; modes of production and consumption; and relationship to the academic art establishment of the period. Tracking the evolution of the satirical print from its antecedents in seventeenth-century woodcut production to Hogarth's sophisticated 'modern moral subjects', and on to the 'drolls' of the 1770s and the 'Golden Age' of Gillray and Rowlandson, the themes of this course will address prints' intermediary role between 'high' and 'popular' culture in the eighteenth-century public sphere..
Duration of
Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion
of 2nd-year History of Art course or equivalent relevant experience.
HART3239 Forming Collectives [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Petra Lange-Berndt
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Tuesdays 14.00-16.00.
Since the nineteenth century a multitude of artists has been experimenting with forms of collective art production. In a post-communist world these projects are taken up again within contemporary art practices. In what way is the desire to speak in a collective voice relevant today? What does it mean to work together on a commonly shared platform, to assemble as group, cooperative, commune, network, sect, horde, pack, or swarm? How are artists enacting change and making creative proposals for alternative ways of being through socially engaged practices? This course is concerned with these spaces of production and related subcultures from a contemporary perspective but will at the same time consider the history and theory of how collectives have been formed.
Duration of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
HART3103 Advanced Undergraduate Course in the History of Art (3) Us and Them: Modernity and the Representation of Armed Conflict [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Paul Fox
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Fridays 14.00-16.00.
This course explores artistic responses to armed conflict in the shifting political, social and technological contexts of the period. We work with theoretical frameworks concerning the construction of both national and gendered identities, witnessing and testimony, censorship, protest, trauma, and commemoration.
We assess how martial types have been constructed as political subjects, and explore how monuments, memorials and images of war have mediated remembrance of past events. We visit London’s military museums to consider the relationship between art and the non-art object. We examine official war art, protest art, battlefield illustration and photography to explore how artists negotiate boundaries imposed by censorship, notions of patriotic duty and propriety. We conclude by considering contemporary responses to 9/11, torture, and the trauma of war.
Duration
of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
HART3101 Advanced Undergraduate Course in the History of Art (1) ‘We Capture the Walls’: The Politics of 20th Muralism from the Mexican Revolution through to Contemporary Street Art [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Warren Carter
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Mondays 11.00-13.00.
In this class we will look at the development of the mural as a significant form of visual propaganda during the political upheavals of the 20th century in both Europe and the Americas: from its establishment as an important form of revolutionary rhetoric during the Mexican Revolution; through to its more recent incarnation as just yet another commercial strategy within the globalised contemporary
art market.
Duration
of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
HART3102 Advanced Undergraduate Course in the History of Art (2) Art and Technology [1.0 cu]
Course tutor: Cadence Kinsey
Timetabled: Autumn and Spring terms; Wednesdays 11.00-13.00.
This course will look at the history of technology in art, beginning with the development of photography, moving through film and video, to the emergence of digital media and internet art. This course will be framed by the theoretical work of Martin Heidegger on technology, and his concept of techne as a challenge to the instrumentalising objectivity presupposed by traditional models. We will look at core issues related to technology in art including: theories of production and re-production and the pressure this puts on the category ‘art’; artist film and haptic vision; the rise of the amateur and homevideo in the 1970s; the intersections between performance and technology; questions of visual epistemology (the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’); the crossover between art and medicine in the 1990s; and ‘post-internet’ art and the selfimage.
Duration
of Course: 20+ weeks.
Student Contact Hours: 40+ hours.
Student Workload: Prescribed and back-up reading, class
presentation, private gallery visits, 2 essays.
Means of Assessment: Two
2000–2,500 word essays weighted at 45%; oral component 10% and a 3 hour exam
in exam term weighted at 45%.
Prerequisites: Completion of 2nd-year History of Art course or
equivalent relevant experience.
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