BA (Hons) Contemporary Art History

This unit runs for the entire year and Contemporary Art History students will work alongside Fine Art and Interactive Arts students in lectures and seminars. Contextualising Practice will explore themes in art history. Students will also consider employability, addressing issues and skills necessary for work in the professions associated with art history such as curation, journalism, and the heritage industry.

This unit is an introduction to the basic approaches and skills that you will require to interpret art (particularly painting) and other visual culture (such as photography, advertising and new media). Through a mixture of theoretical research and practical application, you will explore topics such as representation, the relationships of word and image, political imagery, iconography, and display. During the unit, students will spend time in London exploring both established and contemporary gallery and museum sites. Assignments for this unit include group presentations, photographic work and image analysis.

This unit is designed to introduce you to the interpretation of objects, whether these are purposefully designed contemporary objects, or collected everyday things from many historical periods and different geographical locations. The unit explores the subject of ‘things’ through a combination of theoretical and practical approaches and will introduce you to philosophical ideas about what an object is as well as approaches to production, making, magic and enchantment. The unit incorporates a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum and other institutions in Oxford. Assignments explore different approaches to writing and analysis and a practical project concerning collecting and classification.

This unit provides a foundation in critical, historical and professional issues that will enhance your development within practice-based clusters.  You will engage with a set of selected thematic options in critical and historical areas.  The course also raises cluster-side professional issues and those related to employability; these will facilitate the development of both your studio based work and your identity as a practitioner. 

Framings offers an opportunity to examine the ways that art and design are framed through the architectural, institutional, and evaluative contexts within which they are circulated, used, and stored within our society. This ranges from the actual framing of works of art in their gallery settings to the metaphorical framings of art market economics and politics. As with the previous unit, students will be introduced to this subject as a group and then will be able to select from a choice of options; these being fine art, design, photography/new media, architecture and practice. For this unit, students will be required to construct, source, and present a hypothetical planned event, environment, or exhibition that must be situated within a real-world setting.

This unit offers an extension of ideas encountered in The Uses of Images and Thinking Through Things by examining, for example, theories of ideology, the commodity, materiality and the body, gender difference, post-colonialism, and cultural geography. Students will begin the unit collectively and then will have a choice of options; these will cover fine art, design, photography/new media, architecture and practice. The options will further develop the themes addressed in the first part of the unit in relation to a specific medium or area of art and design practice. Assignments for the unit involve the writing of a blog-post on a key theoretical idea and an essay involving the application of a theoretical approach to an example of art or design of their choice.

This unit provides you with the opportunity to produce a negotiated project focussed around an individually defined area appropriate to your aims and ambitions.  Your project will be weighted either towards critical/historical or professional/employability issues.  In order to support your self-directed study and individual research you will also engage in lectures, seminars, facilitated student group presentations and tutorials. 

This unit looks at a range of art practices developed in recent decades and considers old and new mediums as well as both traditional and new contexts for the display and circulation of contemporary art.  You will consider contemporary art in the areas of painting, sculpture, installation and site-specific work, lens-based practices and internet art amongst others. The aim of the unit is to explore the technical and aesthetic forms of these works as well as their discursive, institutional, professional, political, and ethical contexts and ramifications.

This unit will enable you to engage in the study of contemporary theory and practice within architecture, craft, design and material culture.  Reading the Contemporary II examines contemporary material culture and design study theories, alongside contemporary practice. Lectures will examine the most current theoretical concerns including supermodernity, globalisation and post-colonial studies, post-industrial and sustainability theory, consumption studies, issues around identity, museology and space. Ultimately this will lead to an examination of the interchange between theory and practice and the emergence of hybrid practices.