- Department: History of Art
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: M
- Academic year of delivery: 2023-24
- See module specification for other years: 2024-25
A detailed examination of the intersections between artistic production and reception, and feminist, ‘queer’ and postcolonial politics and thought, across the eighteen years of Conservative government in the United Kingdom 1979-1997, primarily through a psychoanalytic lens.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
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A | Semester 1 2023-24 |
This module examines how art practices between 1979-1997 became a crucial site for the articulation and mediation of psychic and social conflict in Britain. These years witnessed profound economic and social change in the United Kingdom - and the wider world - as heavy manufacturing went into abject decline, financial markets were deregulated, and state welfare and nationalised industry were gradually remodelled away from the ‘postwar consensus’ of 1945. At the same time, the ongoing reverberations of women’s and gay liberation struggles of the 1970s, and the adult maturity of the first generation of British-born postcolonial citizens, clashed with the nominal Victorianism of the Thatcher governments. Artists working across a wide range of media - in the wake of the 1960s conceptual break - addressed their work to these concerns, attempting to intervene in the field of representations of sexuality, ‘race’, conflict, and latterly gender, as well as the institutional structures of the art world in the UK. We will examine how trenchant and advanced ideas concerning the political efficacy of art, and the articulation of psychic and social conflict through aesthetics, developed in this period, and the fate of those practices in contemporary art now. The primary theoretical framework will be psychoanalysis, as a discourse of the articulation of sexuality and violence in cultural forms, and an ascendent intellectual concern for artists of the period. We will work closely on the relationships between different material-conceptual practices and inscriptions of psychic life, and the question of ‘theory’ in art history more broadly. Whilst the UK is the central context of study, students will learn approaches and critical skills that apply across the global modern and contemporary. Artists may include Tina Keane, Helen Chadwick, Susan Hiller, Sharon Kivland, Mary Kelly, Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Mona Hatoum, Hamad Butt, Stuart Marshall, Sunil Gupta, Sutapa Biswas, Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar and Tessa Boffin.
By the end of the module, students should have acquired:
Task | % of module mark |
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Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
Task | % of module mark |
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Essay/coursework | 100 |
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