History of Art is the core course for all Fine Arts undergraduates, and available to general BA student upon request. Second year is focused on visual analysis and critique orientated around ‘thinking through time’. The first semester course is an introduction to three of the oldest image-making conventions in art history – landscape, figure and portrait, whilst the second semester course is an introduction to the curatorial practices and exhibition histories that have shaped different concepts of modernity and modernism from the nineteenth century to the present.
CPVC2003A: Portrait/Landscape
Portrait/Landscape interrogates these subjects/genres in terms of their deep-rooted histories and conventions and the ways in which these have both persisted and been challenged. There is a strong focus on visual analysis skills including description and socio-political contextual analysis and interpretation. Portraits and landscapes are never simply objective documents modelled directly from reality. They are intricately tied up with relations of power. The course starts from the premise that most art forms are informed by, if not directly driven by, those who wield power in their own social groups, but can also be seen to work to critique, invert and subvert those power relations in various ways.
CPVC2004A: Art Historical Modernisms and the Global South
The second semester is divided into an introduction and a critique of art historical modernism, that aligns the development of industrialisation and modernism/modernist production with the age of colonisation. This discourse of binaries and primitivism that still casts long shadows in the present. The discussion of post modernism (and the problems with the term ‘post’) foreground modernisms and the Global South and expands the understanding and knowledge of modernism with a focus on African, African-American and/or South American artistic practices.
History of Art is the core course for all Fine Arts undergraduates, and available to general BA student upon request. Third year focuses on ‘thinking through methods’ across four blocks. The first term introduces different art historical methods and theories. The second term introduces a critical framework for understanding archival, curatorial and exhibition practices, while the third term engages concepts of Africa, explored particularly through the relationship between art and artefact. Finally, the fourth term introduces ways of reading and writing the contemporary.
CPVC3005A: ART HISTORICAL METHODOLOGIES
This module is broadly focused on art historical methods and methodologies.
Though not always explicit, the ways in which art objects are analysed and written about are entrenched in discursive and ideological positions, ways of knowing and broader sociological frameworks. In analysing and understanding methodologies we are able to challenge and unlearn inherited ideologies and begin to write new art histories from here.
CPVC3006A: CONTEXT AND DISPLAY
Focusing primarily on the circulation and reception of art in the public domain, this module examines how different contexts, within which art gets encountered, become critical ‘sites’ of value making. These contexts, argued here as art events, exhibitions and site-specific interventions (all of which speak to different forms of display), in different social and political milieu, enable various kinds of artistic and institutional critique. They enable an understanding of how the arts economy and its systems influence the environment from which art and the public meet. Engaging notions of the curatorial and the archive, this module attempts to explore the workings of different contexts and displays, particularly how these ‘sites’ are part of the construction of ‘art history’.
CPVC3007A: CONSTRUCTIONS OF AFRICA
The course focuses primarily on the varied and diverse constructions of Africa within art-historical discourse. Undertaking a survey of contemporary art practice and philosophy, the course material will contend with questions of de/coloniality, museological and exhibition practices, discourses of subjectivity, as well as issues related to knowledge production. Highlighting the reception of art from Africa in diļ¬ering socio-political temporalities, CPVC3007, will think with and about how artists, collectives, philosophers and thinkers have grappled with and responded to conceptions of Africa - both within the continent and its diaspora.
CPVC3008A: READING THE CONTEMPORARY
The theoretical framework for this course emphasizes situated and decolonial modes of critique and methods of close reading, introducing students to a range of contemporary forms of writing, and transmedial visual, sonic, filmic, and print practices. Students consider manifestos, photographic theory, reviews, interviews, conversations and listening as production. This course engages with contemporary art practices from the perspective of Johannesburg, Africa, and engages local arts landscapes as it is in relation/ conversation with the rest of the world. The module explores how contemporary art expands our world and thinking through art, making crucial links to understanding global discourses on contemporary art.
