Aims

The aims of this assignment are designed to help you:

Build on the skills of visual analysis and critical thinking you engaged in for Assignment 1.
Develop a deeper understanding of an artwork — the significance of its formal qualities, historical context, and critical framework.
Apply, synthesise and evaluate your knowledge of ideas and issues relating to modern art.

Task

Undertake the visual analysis of an artwork developing an argument in response to this question:

How did the modern artist engage with the impact(s) of modernity and develop new ways of seeing and communicating through their artwork?

Steps to the task:

Select an artwork by an artist that we’ve explored or referred to in the first six weeks of the lecture program.
Select a related idea or issue explored or referred to in the first six weeks of the lecture program as a focus for your argument.
Undertake scholarly research on your artwork to gain an understanding of its relation to the selected focus of your argument, paying close attention to its formal qualities, historical context, and critical discussions about the ideas it communicates. And include at least four references to scholarly texts in your analysis.
Develop an argument from your close and detailed visual analysis of your selected artwork and any other associated, relevant artworks, which help support and demonstrate your discussion. And include within your analysis at least four images that can advance and enhance your argument.

 

Further tips and instructions

Visual Analysis

With this assignment it is important that your argument is developed from the visual analysis of your selected artwork. Think about how you are trying to make your reader see and understand the artwork in a specific way. What aspects or characteristics of the artwork, what details, are you directing the attention of your reader towards? Again, what do you want to make them see and be aware of, and why?

Other artworks in the analysis

To advance and strengthen the visual analysis of your selected artwork you can include the analysis of and reference to other artworks. But remember the main focus should be on your one selected artwork. The discussion of any other artwork must be used to enhance the reader’s ability to better understand your argument in relation to your primary selected artwork.

Selecting images

In addition to an overall image of your selected artwork, think about how an image that might focus on a detail or aspect of that work, or an image or detail from another artwork, might enhance your analysis. You can use these images to help the reader see certain aspects, details, or characteristics of your selected artwork; or the connections and/or differences between your artwork and other artworks. Or you could also consider how other images, such as from the historical time, might be useful to refer to when making your point.

Selecting your idea or issue

Try to focus in on your selected idea or issue as much as possible. The more focus you have with your selected idea or issue then the more you will be able to focus your visual analysis and the better it will be.

You will need to review the lectures to find a focus for your argument. Here are some examples of some ideas or issues that you could focus on within the two broad themes from the first six weeks of the lecture program. You can find a focus within these suggestions or find one in the many other possibilities:

photography and new ways of seeing, the camera-eye, impact of mass production, new forms of reproduction, the mass media/film as changing how we see and experience the world, experiences of speed and fragmentation with city life, new ways of seeing and experiencing nature, new revolutionary ideas for the purpose and role of art.
abstraction and the spiritual/seeing other worlds, colour and the senses, colour and emotion, ‘primitive’ forms and seeing as a counter to the modern, new ways of seeing traditional genres (the nude, the landscape, the still life), the mask and the hidden, new ways of seeing with the unconscious and dreams

Important to also include

Footnotes or endnotes and a bibliography with your submission, in Chicago style. See: ‘Chicago Manual of Style Online’ https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html
 Links to an external site.
Images of any artwork or image that is discussed in any depth.
Your student id number only, on the first page of your submission.
A note if you have been granted an extension.