Chapter 3

• Visual culture


  The tangible, visible, expressions by people, a state, or a civilization that collectively describes the characteristics of that body as a whole
• Visual culture


  • Studied using art history, humanities, sciences, and social sciences
  • Intertwined with everything that one sees in day-to-day life - advertising, landscape, buildings, photographs, movies, paintings, apparel
• Visual culture analysis


  Focuses on production, reception, and intention, as well as economic, social, and ideological aspects<|>Reflects the culture of the work and analyzes how the visual aspect affected it<|>Focuses on questions of the visible object and the viewer - how sight, knowledge, and power all are related
• Visual culture is the collective evidence overlapping the boundary between the external object and the internal thought processes
• Visual culture


  The collective expression of aesthetic values and cultural studies (way of life)
• Art is always being built and reinterpreted as civilization evolves. Visual culture is a dynamic art form that evolves in front of our eyes and influences us.
• Conceptual Framework


  Comprises four agencies: Artist, Artwork, World, and Audience. Highlights the cause and effect of the art world.
• Conceptual Framework


  • Each agent is reliant on the others to survive in the art world
  • Changes radically over time depending on the artist, the artwork, and the time it is produced
  • Changes are due to factors such as the values and beliefs of society, new users of technology, personal discoveries of the artist, and the audience's reception of artworks
• Artist


  The one who makes the artwork and establishes representation and intentions<|>Attempts to connect to the audience through their artwork
• What the Artist is


  • Guided by their philosophies in artmaking
  • Have their original process in artmaking
  • Develops distinctive subjective views
  • Communicates personal experiences in their artworks
  • Artworks reflect documented events and ideas
  • Explores media and develops new aesthetic conventions
  • Own critical curators, constantly reflecting and refining their artmaking
  • Visionaries who represent their ideas and beliefs
• Artwork


  The object that shows the artist's intentions and ideas by their technical innovation and finesse<|>The bridge between the artist and the audience<|>Objects that convey ideas and conventions of artists<|>Objects shaped by the technology of that time<|>Objects that can be read like books for meaning<|>Challenges or compliments traditions of the artmaking process<|>Objects reflect ideas and beliefs of a time and place
• Audience


  • Historians and critics who document thoughts and tastes of that period
  • General public who respond to the artwork
  • Critics who influence and govern the acceptance of an artwork, its intentions, and its meanings
  • Those who sponsor the artist
  • Historians who place value and importance on artworks
  • Specialized audiences such as curators
• World


  The time and place where the artist, audience, and artwork reside<|>Involves the acceptable ideas and conventions in that period, including historical events<|>Includes beliefs and conventions of a period<|>Involves technical advances<|>Involves links to what the world was going through, the artworks, and the artists of that time<|>Includes the fashion, politics, and society of that time<|>Includes the influence of influential people who shaped the thought process at that time
• Frames


  Tools used to provide different perspectives or viewpoints for understanding the relationships between the 'agencies of the art world': artist, artwork, world, and audience<|>Allow for a deeper focus on particular aspects of artworks and artist practice
• The 4 Frames

  • Subjective
  • Cultural
  • Structural
  • Postmodern
• Subjective Frame


  Interprets art from a personal or individual perspective<|>Meaning is understood about feelings and emotions, personal and psychological experiences, imagination and fantasy, and/or the world of dreams and the subconscious
• Subjective Frame Glossary

  • Emotion
  • Memory
  • Individual experiences
  • Personal responses
  • Sensory experiences
  • Psychological experiences
  • Dreams and the subconscious
  • Fantasy and imagination
• Cultural Frame


  Interprets the ways social and cultural issues shape meaning<|>Includes race and ethnicity, class and economic conditions, gender and sexuality, politics, technology, religion and spirituality, and the environment
• Cultural Frame Glossary

  • Culture and communities
  • Race and ethnicity
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Class and economics
  • Political issues
  • Religion and spirituality
  • Impact of technology
  • Humans and the environment
• Structural Frame


  Interprets art using a visual language through which meaning can be understood<|>Includes signs, symbols, and codes and may refer to historical art and practices
• The frames aren't definitive, but they serve as an interpretive framework for pupils to build understanding
• The language and questions supplied can facilitate classroom discussions or scaffold writing projects, such as critical and historical
• Artworks


  Symbolic objects that are constructed and communicate meaning through visual language, including materials and techniques that represent ideas
• Audiences


  Visually literate and aware of conventions in visual arts and the systems of signs and symbols used to communicate meaning
• Visual language


  Sets of codes, symbols, and conventions understood by both artists and audiences to understand the world
• A deeper understanding of the structural frame is revealed by considering relationships between multiple agencies of the art world
• Artists


  Embed artworks with meanings communicated using visual language, including signs, symbols, and coded meaning, which they develop themselves
• Artists


  Use their knowledge of the world, including the art world and art history, to apply or develop a visual language to communicate their understanding of aspects of the world
• Artworks may reference existing ideas in the art world, including formal conventions and aesthetics associated with particular art movements, periods, styles, subject matter, and genres
• Audiences


  Apply their knowledge of the art world and visual language to decode and interpret artwork's symbolic meaning
• Structural frame glossary

  • Signs, symbols, and codes
  • Visual language
  • Hidden and layered meaning
  • Materials and techniques
  • Composition
  • Subject matter
  • Examples of art style/period/movement
  • Aesthetics
• Structural Frame


  Refers to the rules and conventions that have been established to guide and develop approaches to art-making
• Structural Frame aims to explore

  • How artworks are made
  • The artist's intentions in the artwork
  • The visual language used in the artwork and its functions
  • The use of different signs and symbols and how the audience will understand them
  • The elements of design and the effectiveness of its structure
  • The artist's approach or philosophy in art-making
  • Conventions and rules that relate to style, genre, or material practice
  • Underlying features that influence and determine the structure of an artwork
• Postmodern Frame


  In the postmodern frame, traditional and mainstream ideas are challenged. Using appropriation and intertextuality, humor, parody, satire, and irony, new ideas and technologies are explored
• The postmodern frame and the conceptual framework


  • Artists are aware of trends and issues in contemporary art and use innovative practices to explore new ideas and techniques that challenge traditional or mainstream values
  • Artworks are conceived as visual 'texts' that may feature reconfigurations or responses to previous texts, explore popular culture, or represent innovative applications of new ideas or technologies
  • Audiences are aware of power relationships within the world and art world and are also empowered to bring their challenge, doubt, and skepticism to their interpretations of artworks
  • The world consists of power relationships that are challenged and exposed and an archive of source material to be re-interpreted
• Postmodern frame glossary

  • Appropriation
  • Challenge, doubt, skepticism
  • Power relationships
  • Humour, irony, satire
  • Popular culture
  • Contemporary art
  • New technologies
  • Diversity and representation
• Postmodernism


  Challenges the authority of historical and modernist conventions, uses eclecticism, irony, parody, and recontextualization of images and ideas. Representation is built upon the relationship between artists, world, artwork, and audience that can change at any moment
• Normalization


  Associated with the fields of science, bureaucracy, and government. Enables the formation of visual regimes which manage to export its ways of seeing to most or all other fields, leading to a universalizing of the authority of different forms, genres, mediums, and practices of the visual to provide access to visual reality. Produces a bio-power as they control the form of knowledge, techniques, mechanisms, and operations developed to analyze, define, manage, and regulate behavior
• Subjectivity in art


  Explains how different people can respond to a work of art differently, based on personal opinions and feelings rather than on agreed facts
• Subjective taste has a historical dimension, even if we prefer to think it doesn't