AHT2031 · World wide: Art beyond the Western canon

Overview

This unit offers an overview of “non-Western” art and exhibition histories underlined by a decolonising impulse. You will be introduced to art and visual cultures across times, places and cultures, situating art history within the broader world landscape. You will have opportunities to explore the art of regions such as Asia, the Pacific, South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Indigenous art. The unit emphasises contemporary art in the globalized context, however you will have opportunities to also consider pre-modern histories of our global contemporaneity. As well as becoming broadly familiar with a range of “non-Western” artists and art practices, you will be introduced to important methods for thinking about “world” or “global” art (postcolonialism, alternative or parallel modernities) and their intersection with alternate cultural knowledge and other disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, museum studies). You will develop critical skills for problematising categories of “Western” and “non-Western art”, and learn to recognise the geo-politics that underpins the making of art history.

Offerings

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

100% in-semester assessment

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

Learning outcomes

1. Recognise and discuss a wide variety of art from non-Western countries and regions;
2. Employ, and critically engage with existing art historical methods to analyse art from non-Western countries and regions;
3. Contextualise art from non-Western countries and regions, historically and culturally, within local and world contexts;
4. Critically analyse the biases of Western art history and its relationship to the geo- and cultural politics informing art history;
5. Situate both contemporary and historical Australian art within a wider world context.

Workload

12 hours per week including 3 contact hours plus 9 hours of independent study.

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.