ARTHIST 114

Reading Images

Please note: this is archived course information from 2016 for ARTHIST 114.

Description

‘You look, but you do not see’, Sherlock Holmes said to Dr Watson.

This course is about how to look at and really see visual images and objects; about how  to observe, analyse, interpret and understand both art and non-art images and objects, such as photographs, paintings, graphic images, cartoons, comics, advertisements, buildings, monuments and sculptures, as well as film, television, digital and internet images, maps, landscapes and postage stamps.

A high level of visual literacy is increasingly necessary today in order to navigate our way through the  world of images, at times a flood of images in which it is easy to drown. It is not just that visual images are central to everyday life. It is rather that they are increasingly predominant, even dominating, in social and cultural life and communications. To misunderstand them is to be severely disadvantaged.

In this course students will learn how visual images and objects in various media are constructed, how they generate ideas and emotions, how they ‘work’ on their consumers (that is, ’us’), as well as how they can be interpreted and understood. To these ends the course involves close and intensive study of particular images and objects in various media.

As much as possible the images and objects selected for study are compelling and memorable in themselves, besides exemplifying the mechanics and meaning production of particular media and types of images and objects.

‘I break up an event into little pieces and analyse it’: Li Yan, contemporary artist.

Images and objects are studied in terms of their structural, formal, thematic and iconographic (meaning-producing) features. They are also placed in the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced and used in order to more fully understand how the production of meanings are context-specific. The various ways the one image or object can be, or has been, interpreted and understood are studied, while the limits of verbal interpretation of images are also considered. As such, the course provides invaluable skills in observing, analysing and interpreting more generally; skills that are fundamental to all disciplines.

A range of questions are addressed - for example: Is seeing learned? Can an image or object be read in the same way as a verbal text? Why is it so important to be an active viewer? How and why can we learn so much about seeing and understanding images and objects generally from the close study of art, whether made by Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso, Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Damian Hirst, or Robert Crumb??

Availability 2016

Semester 2

Lecturer(s)

Lecturer(s) Associate Professor Leonard Bell

Points

ARTHIST 114: 15 points