Art and Experience focuses on the history of pagan, Christian and Islamic art and architecture in Western Europe and the Mediterranean region from classical antiquity to the early modern period. A key focus is on recognising the social, cultural, political and religious purposes an object or building was designed to serve, the range of meanings the work was intended to embody and how these changed across time. Historical analysis will be combined with discussions of different approaches to interpretation

This unit of study will focus upon the art and visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining this historical period in relation to the thematic of the modern. Visual material studied will include painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, film and design. As with ARHT1001, historical analysis will be combined with discussions of the different methodologies and approaches to the interpretation and study of these visual materials.

The Unit of Study will explore a range of alternative approaches to some of the most famous works of art in the Western tradition, including works by Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. Topics to be investigated include: problems of definition in High Renaissance and Mannerist art; Rome under Julius II and the creation of an imperial capital; Venetian visual poesie; art and dynastic display in Medicean Florence; civic ritual and public space; eroticism and mythology at princely courts; portraiture and gender.

This unit of study will examine the diverse responses of nineteenth-century British artists to the profound social changes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism and the development of the modern city. The focus for this course is on the distinctive ways modern urban life was represented by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Victorian narrative painters. We will also examine the work of artists and craftspeople who sought to express alternatives to the urban experience through medieval revivalism and Orientalism. Topics to be investigated include the relationship between revivalism and realism; masculinity and modernity; varieties of photographic and painterly realism; gender and Orientalism; Aestheticism and the grotesque; religion, race and empire. We will make use of the rich collection of paintings from this period in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This unit treats a familiar area of French Art in terms of the cultural structures that allowed academic art, Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism to emerge. Mainstream art will be studied alongside emerging avant-garde spaces. The language of art criticism will provide a key to the politics of the painted surface and ethics of the female nude. Other topics for study will include nationalism, exoticism, and peripheral as opposed to metropolitan modernism.

This unit of study examines contemporary international art and craft. Focus is on art materials, technologies and processes, along with recurrent themes and issues raised in work from selected regions. The course is organised thematically, and its international frame is not centred on Europe and the U.S. An important component of the unit is the analysis of contemporary art writing and curatorial practice. Tutorials will include visits to significant exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney. Students are encouraged to work with contemporary museum holdings.

Examining cinema as a manifestation of modernity, this unit of study contextualizes film as commodity, industry, institution and mass production of the senses. These concepts will be explored through a study of early American cinema and the Weimar cinema of Germany. The focus is on the aesthetics of the genres of Slapstick, Melodrama, and Horror/Fantasy, studied within an understanding of the historical and industrial context of each national cinema.

This unit of study will give an introduction to how film studies has analysed the meaning of a film in relation to how the film incorporates or addresses the spectator (what is known as theories of spectatorship). Commencing with debates around classical Hollywood cinema and the functioning of the point of view shot, the unit will examine how theories of spectatorship have understood the significance of different genres.

This unit of study considers the place of the artist and the architect in European courts during the seventeenth century. The focus will be on the image of the ruler and the princely palace as a political and social symbol. Patterns of patronage and issues of artistic independence will be investigated through examples of major commissions in painting, sculpture and architecture. Tutorials will involve a more careful examination of theoretical approaches to the expression of power, wealth and glory in visual form.

This unit explores European Romantic Art as it took root and flowered in Europe in the fifty years from 1780-1830. With a specific emphasis on the relationship of Romantic art with wider social, cultural, philosophical and literary currents, we will engage with some of the most compelling and complex art and architecture of the period, including works by Caspar David Friedrich, Henry Fuseli, William Blake, Joseph Turner, and Eugene Delacroix.

This unit challenges the conventional view that Australian art is a pale copy of a European paradigm, instead arguing that Australia has a robust and idiomatic visual culture of its own. By examining a wide variety of images (including painting, sculpture, popular prints, cartoons, tableaux vivants, theatrical scenery and public spectacle) this unit will demonstrate how, from first European contact, appropriation and parody - whether conscious or unconscious burlesque - characterised Australian visual culture throughout the nineteenth century.

This unit explores the art and visual culture of modern and contemporary East Asia. It will explore links between art and nationhood, art and the build environment, and art and consumer societies across the entire region. Specific attention will be given to developments in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan. The course will be structured along a contextual chronological approach, linking major developments in art and visual culture to social, economic and political conditions of practice and reception.

1. A historical study of independent cinema, or New Wave movements in post-World War II Europe, including Italian Neo- Realism, the French New Wave and New German Cinema among others. 2. The study of Gilles Deleuze's thesis about these cinematic movements and concepts. 3. A study of the idea of Epic cinema cross-culturally so as to understand how memory is erased, sustained and created anew by film.

Nations are like movies: they are the result of complex imaginings. To what extent have nations been imagined through movies, and have movies been affected by national imaginings? This unit of study takes Hollywood as a starting point to examine the evolving relation of national cinemas and film genres. A national case study - for instance, Australian cinema - will be studied to identify and analyse some of the complexities of the relation of film genres and national audiences.

This unit of study will investigate the last two decades of the cinema of the USA, including Hollywood. Students will be introduced to the work of a number of established and emerging American filmmakers, to the work of a number of important film critics, and to issues concerning the theory and practice of film criticism. Critical and analytical focus will centre on the changing relation of subjectivity and time in independent cinema. Films that explore questions of subjectivity and that experiment with narrative structure will be featured.

The Honours program in Art History and Theory consists of: 1. a thesis written under the supervision of one or more members of academic staff, 2. two seminars (Art is the Issue and Analysing the Visual) that meets weekly for two hours each semester. The thesis should be of 18000-20000 words in length. Each seminar requires 6000-8000 words of written work or its equivalent. The thesis is worth 60% of the final Honours mark and each of the seminars is worth 20%.

Refer to ARHT4011

Refer to ARHT4011

Refer to ARHT4011