Understanding Visual Culture with the Open College of the Arts
The last module of level 1 of a Fine Art degree.
Write 10 sentences containing these words. The origin of the River Kennet is near Avebury in Wiltshire. The origin of the universe is considered to be The Big Bang. To shop ethically it is important to be aware of the origin of the things that you buy. The original painting now hangs in the gallery …
Continue reading “Exercise 3.4 Origin, Original, Originality.”
“Find and collate 10 diverse examples of meta-painting from the 17th century to the present” To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of the term “meta-picture”. I was familiar with Walker Evans’ photographs, but not Levine’s “After Walker Evans”. I love the concept of novels-within-novels and plays-within-plays: even plays within plays within plays, like …
This is a course about Visual Culture. Prepare yourselves, then, dear readers, for a visual feast. Here is the comment we are invited to discuss for this exercise: Do you think art is and will remain a distinct category or is it best seen as a species of visual culture? List reasons for and against …
I have included this photograph of the City of London because it embodies some of both Searle and Emerson. It represents, with the relentless flow of the Thames and the clouds in the sky, Emerson’s “Everlasting Now… that produces on our bushes the self-same Rose which charmed the Romans and the Chaldaean. The grain and …
To be honest, it has been hard enough translating this manual into understandable chunks as it is, without throwing Sokal in as well. This just goes to show how many clever academic-types there are out there. Yes: Sokal made a point by publishing this paper, but to say if he was right or wrong in …
I admit to struggling a bit, with what is required for this exercise. I can’t work out what it means. “How does the image (that I have yet to choose) indicate a point of view for the spectator?” Does this mean, what is the point of view of the spectator supposed to be? Because I …
“Flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art” Greenberg, 1960 (quoted from the UVC manual) “The eye…is more directly compelled to treat the whole of the surface as a single undifferentiated field of interest, and this in turn, compels us to feel and judge the picture more immediately in terms of its overall unity” …
Vladimir Tretchikoff, the self-taught artist known as “The King of Kitsch”, was born in Russia, settled in China in the 1930s and moved to South Africa following the war. He worked in set design, and was a commissioned portrait painter and worked in advertising in America after the Second World War. He did have many …
Continue reading “Exercise 2.2 Greenberg’s Kitsch, Vladimir Tretchikoff and Andrew Hewkin.”
Ah, The Barr Chart. Some years ago I studied archaeology, and something called the Harris Matrix. Invented in the 1970s, it is used in the recording of an archaeological excavation and “consists of a diagrammatic representation of the stratigraphic relationship between all the layers and features on a site. On a small, simple site this …
Continue reading “Exercise 2.1 Genealogy of the Modern: Alfred Barr, Edward Harris, Harry Beck.”
“Modernism refers to a global movement in society that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life. Building on late nineteenth century precedents, artists around the world used new imagery, materials and techniques to create artworks that they felt better reflected the …
Continue reading “Exercise 2.0: Modernism, Modernity, Modernisation: Redon, Modigliani and Klee.”
Understanding Visual Culture with the Open College of the Arts