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School of Art and Design · ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
In this course we interrogate the position, place, and appearance of the human body in art and artistic production across temporalities, geographies, disciplines, and media. The human body is examined in its myriad states: anatomised and whole, dead and alive, healthy, diseased and disabled, naked and dressed, real and ideal. Attention is paid to the various ways the body has been sexed and gendered through artistic representation, along with the way artists have challenged and reinforced gendered binaries and stereotypes through creative practice. Cross-cultural perspectives will work to de-centre dominant Euro-American models of the normalised human body, while a transdisciplinary approach will allow for an examination of the representation of the human body across art, science, medicine, and beyond. We take an object-based approach, with students being encouraged to find images and objects of interest to them for focused examination. Together we endeavour to engage with established methodologies and develop new ways of thinking critically and writing sensitively about images and objects that sit at the intersection of art history and gender studies.
Object Analysis (1000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4
Exhibition Proposal (1000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 5
Research Essay (2000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Participation
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
130 hours of total student learning time made up from: a) 36 hours of contact over 12 weeks: lectures, seminars and tutorials; and b) 94 hours of independent student research, reading and writing. Contact hours may include visits to major art institutions in Canberra.
No textbook required. Preliminary Reading Callen, Anthea. Spectacular Bodies: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Kemp, Martin and Marina Wallace. Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000.