The seminar course engages with significant areas of international and Australian decorative arts and design from the industrial revolution in Europe to the close of the 20^th century. Movements covered may include the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Art Déco, Expressionism, the impact of the Ballets Russes, de Stijl (the Style),the Bauhaus, modern art and design in Vienna, organic modernism, post modernism and contemporary re-evaluations of modernism.  The course allows the student to examine the interactive role that art, design and the decorative arts have played as forces for change and the making and reconstitution of social classes, identities and human societies.  The overarching idea of this seminar series engages with paradox: design has often signalled a futures aesthetic, Utopias, and beliefs that the creation, production and consumption of form, structure, pattern and ornament may fabricate a more enlightened future for society.  How the tension of historicism and modernism played itself out as cultures and societies changed and looked to designing futures is another key theme of the course.

The course is designed to introduce the student to the interaction of art, design and the decorative arts and to examine them as ‘semiotic’ systems encoded with aesthetic, philosophic, psychological, economic and political concerns. The course equips the student with an understanding that art and design movements are a changing entity, shaped by technology, culture, aesthetic, philosophic, and economic and political concerns.  Students learn to critically consider the formation of chosen period styles, changing materials and techniques, the roles of function and aesthetics, and the importance of the patron and consumer.  Students gain a specialist understanding of art and design movements through their research, and the importance of establishing ‘context’ in researching and communicating art and design history, over the appreciation of art, design and the decorative arts for their own sake.

Assessment is on the basis of two 5,000 word essays which are presented orally in class as well as in a fully documented written format.  They are due two weeks after their oral presentation depending on their position with the course, with one generally in the first half of the course and the second in the second half.

One weekly 3 hour seminar normally held on Monday afternoons.

Transitional

Nikolaus Pevner, Pioneers of modern design: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, Penguin Books, 1964 and later editions.

Penny Sparke, Design in Context, Bloomsbury London, 1987 (1991)

Ann Stephen et. al (eds.) , Modernism & Australia: documents on art, design and architecture, 1917-1967, Miegunyah Press, Carlton Victoria, 2006.

Christopher Wilk (Ed.) Modernism: designing a new world 1914-1939, Victoria & Albert, London, 2006