Art History

From illegally spray-painted stencils to secret exhibitions in abandoned warehouses to exclusive multi-million dollar art fairs, this course explores the rise of street art in the contemporary city. The course examines the diversity of artists, materials, and political impulses that drive street art and graffiti and its shift from an illicit subculture to a mainstream practice. Using examples from Melbourne and other key cities such as New York, Rome, and Berlin, the course investigates how the meaning and impact of street art derive from spatial and social contexts and how street art can provide new ways of understanding a city. It also covers broader debates about art, public space, and urban development. Students develop skills in identifying, mapping, and designing street art in Melbourne’s laneways.

This course gives an overview of the development of public and private architecture in Berlin during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Following an introduction to the urban development and architectural history of the Modern era, the Neo-Classical period is surveyed with special reference to the works of Schinkel. This is followed by classes on architecture of the German Reich after 1871, which was characterized by both modern and conservative tendencies and the manifold activities during the time of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s such as the Housing Revolution. The architecture of the Nazi period is examined, followed by the developments in East and West Berlin after the Second World War. The course concludes with a detailed review of the city's more recent and current architectural profiles, including an analysis of the conflicts concerning the re-design of Berlin after the Cold War and the German reunification. Seven walking tours to historically significant buildings and sites are included (Unter den Linden, Gendarmenmarkt, Potsdam, Chancellory, Potsdamer Platz, Holocaust Memorial, etc.). The course offers a deeper understanding of the interdependence of Berlin's architecture and the city's social and political structures. It considers Berlin as a model for the highways and by-ways of a European capital in modern times.

This course examines the architecture of East Asia from prehistory to the early modern period. In addition to monumental buildings such as temples and palaces, the examples range from urban planning and garden design to peasant dwellings and nomadic structures. A number of architectural traditions are covered, including Bhutanese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uyghur. Among the socio-cultural factors that have shaped East Asia’s built environments, it looks at Buddhism and the literati as influences traversing geopolitical borders, as well as vernacular development of structural systems, spatial geometries, and material utilization based on the land, climate, and other natural conditions.

The course discusses the various expressions of popular culture within 20th-century art and media. Collaboration between different media is emphasized. The main focus is on contemporary western culture, the latter years of the 20th century, and the expressions of postmodern culture, although several episodes in the cultural history of the whole century are studied historically. Advertising, television, music videos, movies, literature, and music are analyzed. Theoretical tools are introduced from the foundations of intermedia studies, cultural sociology, hermeneutics, and semiotics. Several examples are presented for analysis and discussion. Students identify basic concepts, ideas, and terminology in intermedia studies, and describe popular cultural conditions that account for some of the processes that shaped the postmodern art of the 1900s and its relationship to popular culture. 

This course analyzes the main contemporary art manifestations in their various forms of expression. It focuses on their origin, evolution and meaning, and plastic and stylistic values within their historical and social contexts. 

This course examines the relationship between art and political struggle in the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring how practitioners around the globe have contributed to socio-cultural change and forged new ways of seeing. It addresses how artists, architects, photographers, and designers have responded to the increasingly industrialized and fast-paced nature of modern and contemporary experience, and how this has led to a constant re-evaluation of what might be expected of art. Each week is devoted to a specific theme, including modernism, the metropolis, materiality, protest, dissent, and globalization.

This course examines the development of Chinese classical gardens; the characteristics of Chinese feudal society and the historical causes of the development of Chinese classical gardens; the cosmology and the realm of Chinese classical gardens; the principle of "neutralization" in Chinese classical aesthetics; the art of framing Chinese classical gardens' and the high degree of self-improvement of Chinese traditional cultural system and its influence on garden culture.

This course explores the development of Pop Art in the U.S. throughout the 1960s, with particular focus on its most prominent practitioner, Andy Warhol. It discusses how artists of the era created a new paradigm of modern art that often depicted consumerism and banality. This course also examines the ways some pop artists engaged with social issues such at the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement.