Course Descriptions

Not all courses can be offered every year.  Applicants are advised to check the website at the beginning of the calendar year for the list of COURSES OFFERED in the upcoming academic year when preparing their applications.  Current offerings are available on the MA Course page.

The Values of Design in the Italian Renaissance - Dr Alison Wright

By considering the role of design, the course addresses central issues in the production and reception of Italian art of the 15th and earlier 16th century, considering paintings and sculpture as well as new fields of representation such as wood inlay, medals and prints and how they were evaluated in the period. We look at the theory of disegno and the practice and processes of design in Renaissance workshops. We address issues concerning illustration, narrative and allegorical invention and the inscription, dissemination and development of styles, as well as the rôle of design in communication between patron and maker.
The course offers:
- knowledge and understanding of the circumstances of production and contemporary evaluation of art and 'artists' in a period of rapid social and artistic change.
- interpretation of contemporary sources as well as recent critical frameworks
- familiarity with the facture and functions of some of the major monuments of Renaissance art but also types of production overlooked in grand narratives of renaissance art but important to the understanding of the period -- as well as to present day curatorial skill and professional expertise.
- a focus on works to be studied at first hand in London collections from Pisanello to Pontormo.

Theories of Authorship in Early Modern Italy - Dr Maria Loh

Freud's Leonardo, Vasari's Michelangelo, Jarman's Caravaggio, feminism's Artemisia - who are these 'authors' and how did they come to be constructed? This course challenges the popular image of the artist as a solitary genius creating ex nihilo through an examination of different theories of authorship and a consideration of their application to the study of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. Some of the issues addressed include: the role of authorship in self-portraiture, the historiography of connoisseurship, the Romantic myth of 'the Renaissance', Roland Barthes' Death of the Author, the post-Enlightenment splitting of repetition from originality. Some of the questions this course will examine include: what does 'authorship' imply in a period where artistic production was largely based on imitative practices, workshop collaboration, and the patron's demands? How do we understand authorship in an age before copyright law, originality and anxiety? Is the Old Master Author dead? Can we construct a serviceable notion of authorial intention? How does a sustained consideration of 'authorship' help us deconstruct the related themes of originality, genius, imagination and the artist in the study of Early Modern Italian Art?

Vision and Body in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities - Dr Rose Marie San Juan

The fraught relation between original and replica haunts the conflicts and debates that surround the visual image in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. A particularly productive site for considering this relation is the cabinet of curiosities, installed from the late century and bringing together the study and display of the wonders of nature with oil paintings removed from religious settings and other collections. The course will address the cabinet of curiosities and focus on three interconnected areas: (1) the cabinet's practices of collecting and contextualizing, its modes of vision, visual display, and knowledge based on the interrelation between nature and culture; (2) the emergence of the picture cabinet, its decontextualization of religious imagery, its links to the new art market, its claims about vision based on new distinctions between nature and culture; (3) the importance of the human body in the formation of forms of vision and knowledge that address the embodied nature of the senses and pursue the possibilities of mimesis, mirroring and doubling. Some themes of the course are the cabinet's preoccupation with animation and deterioration in the body (automatons, talking statues, embalmed foetuses and heads, wax bodies simulating life and death), the potential and limits of visual representation in relation to bodily animation and demise, the relation of the cabinet to the scientific study and dissection of the human body, and painting and print (for example Caravaggio's controversial dead bodies, Bosch's grotesque and mutating bodies, Carracci's studies of labouring deformed bodies, scientific anatomical prints, the problems of imaging 'New World' bodies) that moved established notions of the body to the limits of its ability to signify (death, mutation, dissection, inversion). The course will focus on Rome, Naples and Milan, where the first cabinets of curiosities were established, but it will also address other European centres and even beyond as the dispersion of objects and images and their re-contextualization in different kinds of cabinets interlinked places in unprecedented ways.

The Senses and the Rise of Capital -  Charles Ford

NEW COURSE! 


In this course we shall be looking at/for manifestations of the emergence of ‘visualism’ and the decline in prestige of other forms of sensory experience in [not only, but especially] middle-class, urban cultures during the long seventeenth-century. We shall look for an emerging ‘middle-class sensorium’, which can be traced in transformations in the structures of both elite and popular knowledges. In other words we shall be tracing what Donald Lowe has called the ‘History of Bourgeois Perception’. We shall read for this in paintings, literature and the procedures of emergent sciences, as well as more archaeological enquiries into the new spaces of daily life [in homes, in new kinds of civic and commercial spaces, in the new spaces of viewing, in the gardens and parks around towns]. We shall also consider general tendencies in historical methodology as regards past bodily experience and historical subjectivity [since Bakhtin, Elias, the Annales historians, Foucault, De Certeau], each of which has been developed within a particular historical and philosophical moment, paying special attention to the recent ‘anthropological turn’. (This can be read for in David Howes ed., Empire of the Senses, The Sensual Culture Reader, Oxford/NY, 2005 and Mark M. Smith, Sensory History, Oxford/New York, 2007.)

Early Modern Horror (16th/17th centuries) - Dr Maria Loh


Why study horror?  What can we learn about the past through the confrontation of horror, abjection, and obscenity?  Departing from Nicolas Poussin's Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake in the National Gallery, London, this course proposes a visual history of pathos and metamorphosis anchored around what Noel Carroll defined as 'art-horror' and what Linda Williams referred to as 'the frenzy of the visible'.  Forcing ourselves to look with critical attention at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of horror--works specifically designed to elicit fright, confusion, terror, pity, and/or pain from the spectator--this course will push beyond the staid clichés about the 'Renaissance' and 'Baroque' as periods of extraordinary beauty and order and turn instead to embrace a messier, murkier, experimental, and experiential history of early modern visual culture. The course will be structured around four themes: 1) Special Affects and the Moving Image (which will look at the tension between narration and affect, on the role of gesture and theatricality, and on the staging of the passions); 2) Mal'occhio (which investigates the unsettling animation of icons, portraits, ex votos and other images set into action through ritual and ceremony); 3) Ghost in the Machine (which addreses the authority of the senses and somatic experience, the question of the early modern cyborg or the boundary between anima and machina, and how the pre-medical body was conceputalised); 4) Science Fictions: Posthuman/Premodern (which turns to how images attempted to contain fear, terror, and anxiety in the face of the unknown in a liminal period when 'science' was still looked upon with much suspicion as a form of fiction).

Painting and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England - Diana Dethloff

This course will examine the production of painting and the changing patterns of patronage in seventeenth-century England. It will consider the influence of European art and culture on the royal courts and the importance of collecting during this period. Specific topics will include the patronage of Anna of Denmark, Henry Prince of Wales, Charles I and Charles II; conduct books and the representation of women and the family; studio practice and the training of artists and the emergence of new middle-class patrons after the 1660 Restoration.

Tracing the Body: Technologies of Representation in 18th and 19th Century France - Dr Mechthild Fend

The period between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century saw a fundamental shift in the understanding of the body and the relations between body on the one and soul or mind on the other side. In the course of what has been described by
Michel Foucault as the birth of the human sciences a range of disciplines began to focus their scholarly attention on the human being. The course will address this process of anthropologization by investigating various modes of registering the body and bodily expression. It will consider visual material from both the arts and the sciences and will explore the interrelatedness and differences between these two fields of image production. One focus will be on the body as itself a side for the expression of a person's feelings or character and on related visual practices from Le Brun's classifying drawings of the expression of passions to Duchenne de Boulogne's electrically induced and photographically registered movements of the face muscles. The notion of "expression" as such implies a perception of the body as a medium on which informations are imprinted. Such an understanding of the body as medium was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century and the course will explore the relation between such a notion of the body and the development of various technologies of representation that are based on the principle of the trace and demand the presense of the body for the production of an image: the silhouette, casts or wax moulages, photography and finger prints.

Art and Technology in Nineteenth-Century France - Dr Richard Taws

NEW COURSE!

This course explores the interfaces between art and technology in France during a ‘long’ nineteenth century, from the decade preceding the French Revolution to the First World War. Drawing on contemporary debates in media theory, history of technology, communication studies and media archaeology, we will examine the ways in which transformations in technology both affected, and were conditioned by, a wide variety of artistic practices in diverse media. Technological change in the production of images and objects will form a central part of the course, focusing especially on the emergence of ‘new’ media in printmaking, photography, architecture, and film. However, we will also address the more subtle ways in which technological innovation (not to mention stagnation, obsolescence or even regression) outside the field of art had a bearing on the production of art and the discourses that surrounded it. The materiality of technology, and its significance in the context of practices of consumption, communication, industrialisation, war and colonisation, will be central concerns. Challenging deterministic, triumphalist assumptions about the social and historical function of technology in modernity, particular attention will also be paid to those technologies that did not ‘succeed’; the techniques and objects that fell by the wayside, or which were perhaps never meant to endure. Although the focus of the course will be on France, other national and global contexts will be discussed where appropriate.


Popular Imagery and Revolution in the 'long nineteenth century' - Dr Tom Gretton

The course is about a set of relationships between technologies, representational practices, political events and social processes. We will study in particular the periods of revolutionary upheaval by which my ‘long nineteenth century’ (c. 1788 – c. 1925) is marked: the first French Revolution, the revolutions and agitations around 1830, the 1848 Revolution, the Siege of Paris and the Commune, and then the long period of political crises and revolutions in the first quarter of the 20th century. The course will consider the transformation of graphic technologies, from woodcut and intaglio to photomechanical methods in the period, and will consider the relationship between new sorts of commodities and markets and a variety of conflicts over the politics of representation: the People, and the State in Revolutionary France, the representation of social conflict and political ideals in France around 1848, and the Class struggle, nation-formation and modernisation in Russia and Mexico c.1900 - c.1920. In each case, we will be discussing the dominant forms of printed visual representation of the actors and values in play in these revolutionary moments and processes. In the case of the first French Revolution, we will be looking at the slow and chaotic emergence of a ‘political print’ commodity form out of the wide range of legal and illegal forms of print published in and for France at in the closing years of the ancient regime. In the case of 1830 and 1848, we will look at the impact of new technologies (wood-engraving and lithography) and new commodity forms (in particular the serial publication)and the way these impinged on the strategies and tactics of representation. In considering prints published in in and after the end of the nineteenth century we will look at the processes of ‘massification’ (wood-pulp paper, photomechanical printmaking) and ‘globalisation’ (the spread of modes of critical and mobilisatory representation around and between first and third-world political contexts).

Vision, Tourism, Imperialism: Art and Travel in the British Empire, 1760-1870 - Dr. Natasha Eaton 

This course traces the negotiations of British art with the image-making of other places through the conflictual artistic practices anticipated and produced by the figure of travel. The expansion of an art market in 18th-century Britain, a parallel investment in pleasure touring (Britain, Europe and beyond), the East India Company’s colonization of India and the institutionalized, metropolitan sponsorship of projects of exploration in Polynesia, Melanesia and Tibet generated conflicting visual economies of travel. Located in the historical framework of the Second British Empire, the course will explore the agency of the visual in the construction of other places, peoples and temporalities through an exciting range of media and ideas. This endorses a set of preliminary questions: what might be ‘eye-witness precision’ or quasi-scientific objectivity, ‘authenticity’ or an aesthetic of the Exotic? How far did this entanglement of art and travel embody a charged semiotics of nostalgia? Did British/colonial artists create an auratic sense of place whereby objects, peoples and spaces became signs of themselves? And what are the tensions between materiality and visuality enacted by travel? In the later parts of the course we track alternative regimes of travel as figured by the dialectic of tourism and pilgrimage in 19th-century India.

Politics of the Image: Germany 1890-1945 - Dr Fred Schwartz

For historians, the parameters of this course—from the reign of Wilhelm II to the end of the Second World War—are clear. The historiographical stakes are also high: to what extent does this period represent developments typical of twentieth-century modernity, and to what extent are they specific to one nation? And as art historians know, this is a time in which the visual image becomes radically problematic and problematised. The course will attempt to combine these perspectives, considering this period in the light of the changing nature of the image: its political uses, its economic values, the bodies of knowledge brought to bear in the attempt to understand and manipulate it.
The course will attempt to set up a sort of counterpoint between, on the one hand, the basic protagonists of inherited art-historical narratives (Expressionism, Dada, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Neue Sachlichkeit, etc) and the usual tropes (the rise and fall of an avant-garde, the contrast between figurative and abstract, between tradition and modernity); and, on the other hand, a set of concepts that might help us make a different sense of the image in modernity. We will consider not only art and architecture but also film, advertising and political propaganda. These will be examined in the light of changing definitions of the subject of culture, the pressures producing and eclipsing a public sphere, the legal status of cultural products, the role of crime in culture and danger in vision, and the new networks available for the distribution and circulation of images. At the same time, the course will trace new theories of the image—from the academic history of art to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and beyond—that emerged out of the historical experience of this period.

Race/place:exotic/erotic - Professor Tamar Garb

This course will focus on recent theoretical and political debates around orientalism/primitivism in the context of post colonial scholarship. It will include consideration of foundational authors and texts (Fanon, Said, Clifford, amongst others) and art historical debates around photography and painting in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiography of these debates will be crucial for the intellectual underpinning of the course which will go on to address contemporary practice that foregrounds issues of the body, identity and the historical mapping of locale in the context of art produced in post-Apartheid South Africa. Video, installation, photography, sculpture and painting from this context will be considered in relation to equivalent practices that dramatise these issues in the global context. Questions of power, agency, sexuality and visuality will be central to the course as a whole.

Contemporary Art and Globalization - Dr TJ Demos

This course examines how contemporary art has negotiated globalization, at times finding progressive resources within its developments, at others, contesting its structures and effects. We will consider ways to theorize globalization--from
Marxist analyses to post-structural approaches--and investigate how select models of artistic practice--largely in video, photography, installation, and new media--parse current developments, raising new options of resistance and inventing new modes of being and belonging in the world.

Art and theory:  the writing of art -- Briony Fer 

This course sets out to examine the relationship between art and art writing. It aims to equip students with the critical skills to question the terms which produce current discursive frameworks in order to reconfigure the critical field of contemporary and recent art history. The course examines a range of theoretical and art critical positions through close textual analysis, including a sustained discussion of ekphrastic models of descriptive writing - drawn not only from conventional art historical and art critical writing but also from literary and other theoretical sources. The course investigates the possibility of understanding the artwork itself as a work of theory. Testing the limits of art historical approaches that assume the primacy of the historical and geographical circumstances of art’s production, the course is designed to open up discussion of the artwork’s theoretical and phenomenological demands on us as viewers. Rather than underestimate the theoretical content of art, this course intends to maximise it – by making the object of speculation more porous not only to different geographies but also to early modern art not normally considered in the same breath as modernist and post-modernist art. We explore the possibilities of new types of critical writing in relation to a range of work, not only from Europe and the US but also Latin America, especially Brazil. The course is structured on the basis of a series of in depth case studies, focusing on contemporary art and its recent histories. Rather than privilege the more familiar critics, the course aims to foreground artists writings and take them seriously as writing models before going onto consider larger critical and theoretical frameworks.


Inhabiting Art: Communes, Colonies, Squatting - Petra Lange-Berndt

NEW COURSE!

This course discusses the architectures, poly-sensual environments and urban structures connected to artists' houses, communes and colonies. Wewill consider issues of countercultures, community-building, artistic authorship and self-staging: Since the nineteenth century a multitude of projects has been experimenting with forms of collective habitation as well as the subcultural lifestyles associated with hotels and farms, or the activism around squatted properties. By considering related theories of authorship in relation to collectivism, to models of the group, cooperative, network, sect, horde, pack, or swarm – ranging from anarchist, marxist or feminist to postmodern thought – we will criticise and revise romantic notions of artistdom and spaces of art production. We will also investigate in which ways communes and colonies as well as the desire to speak in a collective voice are relevant for artistic practices today.



<Back to Top

Page last modified on 14 feb 12 15:46