The apparatus of vision, How ideas about the eye contain ideas about the world and people’s relation to it.
Art Assignment
During this exam you will be expected to complete three sections:
- Part 1 consists of short answer questions (complete 2 from a choice of 5).
- Part 2 requires longer essay questions (1 from a choice of 3). You should spend about 10-15 minutes on each short answer and 20-30 minutes on the essay questions.
- Part 3 requires you to write a short essay based on the following prompt (you can prepare this answer beforehand, but you will you will write it up during the exam):
What is the difference between works of art and other kinds of images?
Study Topics:
Sight and Vision
Key Image – Johann Zahn, illustration from Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium (Würzburg, 1685)
Relevant ideas include:
– The apparatus of vision, How ideas about the eye contain ideas about the world and people’s relation to it.
– The difference between ‘sight’ and ‘vision,’
– The concepts of extramission and intromission.
– Sight, visibility and power.
The Digital Self
Key Image – Lolly Luck @gonefishin93, “harnessing all my energy… “ 2019
– similarities and differences between the visual space of the “real” world and that of cyberspace.
– Self-representation – how ideas about ourselves, whether personal, social or political, manifest in visual form.
– Selfies and self-portraiture.
Visual Hierarchies
Key Image – Brass plaque showing the Oba of Benin with attendants, Edo peoples, 16th century AD. From Benin, Nigeria.
– Representation of others – how categorizing other people based on their physical characteristics results in the construction of hierarchies of power.
– The concept of the ‘Other’
– Cultural impact of ideas of race and ethnicity
The Gaze
Key Image – Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face, 1981, Collage.
The male gaze and female object
Power and looking in visual culture – the Panopticon
Lacan’s theory of the “mirror phase”
– difference between the eye’s look and the gaze
Modernity
Key Image – Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877.
What is modernity? – characteristics and definitions
Marx, “commodity forms” and how capitalism affects looking
Marx and class exploitation. Workers paid less than the value of their labor in order to enable the capitalist investor to turn a profit.
Display
Case Study – The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The history of Museums
What factors determine a person’s interest in or access to museums/knowledge
How are different kinds of art given value by institutions?
Art
Key Image – Tim Jenison, The Music Lesson, 2013
Competing definitions of what constitutes art – intrinsic or contingent qualities?
Who decides what is or isn’t art?
– the institutional theory of art
- Identify the erotic or sexualized elements to images.
- Recognize the place of multiple sexualities as creators, consumers and subjects of works of art.
- Differentiate different ways in which sexuality is coded into works of art and other examples of visual culture.
- Recognize alternative ways of looking to uncover hidden allusions to sexuality.
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