This course explores the key preoccupations that have guided recent art historical enquiry. It does so in two ways. Firstly, it explores the writing of several influential art historians whose work exemplifies the concerns that characterize modern practice of the discipline, and who brought such concerns to bear in fruitful ways in their study of art. A central feature of this part of the course is to clarify how art historical study involves both close critical interpretation of actual works of art and historical analysis of the social, political and cultural context from which works originated. The critical and the historical approaches developed by the discipline can complement one another, but they do also result in diverging and even at times conflicting priorities. Among the larger themes to be explored are visual representation and viewing, the relation between artistic form and cultural mentalities and ritual practices, and the role played by politics, including the politics of gender, in the visual arts. We also consider how the approaches emerging out of the study of non-Western art may differ from those developed from the study of Western art. The second part of the course shifts perspective and focuses on modern systems of thought that have had a particularly significant impact on how art history is now practiced, such as Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology and semiotics. The purpose is to arrive at a fuller understanding of the intellectual models informing these ways of thinking and to consider how they might fruitfully be applied in study of the visual arts.
