Context elaborations – level 7 art history

• Discourse and reflection
• Reaction and change
• Aesthetics and beauty
• Pluralism and flux

The context elaborations mirror culturally responsive pedagogies.

As students progress from level 6 to 7, teachers might expect to see increasing complexity, control, depth of thinking, independence, and consciousness.

The listed context elaborations are examples only. Teachers can select and use entirely different contexts in response to local situation, community relevance, and students’ interests and needs.

Each context elaboration is coded, using the summary notation recorded with each strand. A bold strand code indicates a dominant strand in the given context. If both or all codes are bold, they are considered to have equal weighting in the given context.

Discourse and reflection

The contexts for learning outlined below make links to the art history key concept of discourse and reflection.

Discourse and reflection build partnerships in the classroom based on trust and equity through valuing all learning experiences. Students talk, listen, and ask questions of each other, the teacher, and themselves using the terminology of art history about art works and the artists who made them.

Possible context – against the wall – street art or vandalism?

(CI, UC, DI)

• Select an issue that:
  • encourages open-ended debate
  • responds to ideas or practices that young people see as their domain
  • is a valid contemporary art practice.
• For example, students collect photographs of graffiti or tagging in their local environment and the teacher gathers resources to cover a wider range of street art and related practice.
• Teacher and students initially discuss the relative positions of tagging and graffiti; their social purpose as political protest, self-expression, or artistic practice; and the relationship between these views.
• Students could be asked to read additional material (see the notes below) then discuss questions such as how the political viewpoints in the graffiti report are expressed through the language it uses.
• Students might further clarify their views on graffiti and tagging as visual culture/ personal/political expression or as vandalism and anti-social behaviour against property.
• This discourse could be the basis for teaching and assessing:
  • AS91185 Art history 2.7 Communicate a considered personal response to art works – 4 credits; Internal
  • AS91186 Art history 2.7 Demonstrate understanding of art works in relation to their physical environments – 4 credits; Internal.

Notes

• The website Fatcap showcases local and global graffiti and street art through still photographs, videos of artists producing their work, and interviews. It includes twelve artists from New Zealand. In “Interview 123KLAN”, French Canadian graphic artists explain the formal and conceptual connections between logo design, typography, and graffiti.
• August 2010 position paper: The Auckland Grafitti Review and Recommendations Report

Possible context – questions come before answers

(DI, CI)

• Ask the class to write questions of their own for discussion or questions probing an art history topic that they are studying or want to know more about.
• These questions could be wide-ranging or deep, open, and thought-provoking.
• Questions of interest may spring from current or controversial topics, such as the use of religious imagery in a way that offends or challenges the rights of certain groups.
• Examples of challenging topics could include the return of ta moko from overseas museums or the appropriation of indigenous design for commercial gain by multi-nationals.
• To spark debate, ask starter questions, such as:
  • What if …?
  • What does X mean …?
  • How does X affect me …?

• Nobody needs to know the answers in advance. The excitement of the question encourages thinking, understanding, apprehending, and revelation.
• For strategies and theories on how to ask questions that make thinking visible and visual, visit Visible Thinking.

Possible context – I know what I like …

(DI, CI)

• Ask students to reflect on how they know that they are learning (metacognition) in art history and to use these responses to reflect on artist’s intentions or thinking that occurs in art production and appreciation.
• Students choose a focus from a favourite painting, a powerful artwork, or image they find beautiful or interesting.
• These foci might include examples of artist models from visual arts subjects, surfboard or graphic novel design, tattoo design, or traditional, representational, sentimental, or religious art imagery.
• Students could make connections to popular culture through New Zealand pop art, such as the early works of Bill Hammond; through Colin McCahon’s spiritual references; or through the use of traditional and contemporary moko design in tattoo imagery.
• The students express their personal response to their focus work through a datashow presentation, wall display, or book cover.
• Alternatively, they could use visual software applications to create representations of their thinking.

Possible context – How is the value of art determined?

(CI, UC, DI)

• How is art valued? What functions do we see art works as having?
• Begin locally and find out where art (in its broad definition) exists, for example, in the school’s community, galleries, museums, personal collections, prints at home, libraries, on-line.
• Art works might range from reproductions of old masters (Constable’s The Hay Wain, 1821), New Zealand landscapes ( Nicholas Chevalier’s drawings and paintings of Otago and Canterbury, 1865 or Rita Angus’s Cass, 1936), or cultural artefacts, such as a hei tiki.
• Students decide to survey those who use or view art and what functions it holds for them, asking questions such as:
  • Who are the patrons of art?
  • Who supports art or craft?
  • Who is the intended viewer or consumer of the art or design?
  • (for objects/artefacts/art from past eras) How was this work understood when it was first made?

• From this discourse and reflection, students start to see art as moving beyond the parameters of a school course of study and as a way of connecting to what is studied in art history.

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Reaction and change

The contexts for learning outlined below make links to the art history key concept of reaction and change.

The contexts below connect to whanaungatanga by celebrating high expectations and achievement.

Art develops through the vehicle of reaction and change. In art history, students learn how artists change art through risking new ideas and practice, resulting in innovation and invention.

The following context elaborations suggest themes or topics appropriate to issues of change and reaction, invention, and innovation.

Possible context – atelier and innovation

(UC, CI)

“Art is the highest expression of the cultural epoch.”

Lázló Moholy-Nagy (1938)

• This context is a framework to investigate how the structures of the art world affect change and invention in art.
• Specifically, students investigate the role of the guilds, art academies, salons, atelier, and art schools in implementing innovation or supporting tradition and convention.
• In New Zealand, they might trace the development of the art groups, art schools, and museums in the nineteenth century and their impact on colonial art.
• They could compare the different factors in how each regional centre, (Christchurch and Auckland) developed their art education institutions and galleries.
• They could examine the impact of the La Trobe scheme on the development of modernism in New Zealand. The La Trobe Scheme introduced a new generation of artists in this country to contemporary art from Britain and Europe. Paintings such as Robert Nettleton Field’s Christ at the Well of Samaria gave local artists the chance to see modern art principles up close, and to study contemporary developments that were changing art in Britain.
• They could compare their discoveries with examples of organised systems of art training and teaching such as guilds (Gothic art), bottega (Renaissance art), the salons of the French court, the Salon des Refusés (Impressionism), the Bauhaus (Germany, 1919–1933).
• Divide the class into two positions to debate a moot such as “art institutions prevent innovation” or “art flourishes with tradition”.

Notes

Feeney, Warren (2011). CSA: The Radical, the Reactionary and the Canterbury Society of Arts 1880–1996. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press. (This book is an example of revised points of view about the role of the art societies in New Zealand art.)

Possible context – art as change; enacting art history

(CI, UC, DI)

• The teacher presents a thematic survey of influential and innovative artists associated with revolution, invention, reaction, and innovation.
• Students select an artist and research their life and work (oeuvre).
• Each student creates a class presentation that explains and evaluates the significance of the artist’s achievements.
• Artists might include David, Courbet, Monet, or Cezanne or the “grandfather of modernism” Len Lye, McCahon, or Woolaston.

Possible context – Who’s coming to dinner?

(UC,CI, DI)

• Bring women artists to life by planning an event in which each student adopts the persona of a woman artist they have researched.
• The event could be based on Judy Chicago’s collaborative feminist installation work The Dinner Party (1974–79) depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical women (now in the Brooklyn Museum, New York).
• The dinner party could be seen as a response to Linda Nochlin’s famous question “Why have there been no great women artists?” (ArtNEWS, January 1971).
• Students could represent a range of woman artists, including:
  • early woman artists (Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot)
  • American feminists (Miriam Schapiro, Barbara Kruger, Eva Hesse, Cindy Sherman)
  • New Zealand women artists (Carole Shepheard, Juliet Batten, Allie Eagle, Jacqueline Fahey, Robyn Kahukiwa, Emare Karaka, Jane Zusters).

• The students might find it helpful to compare the American with the New Zealand contexts. For example: Why did New Zealand empower women with the vote more than two decades ahead of America and Great Britain? Was this emancipation reflected in the New Zealand art world?
• Students could enact their “herstory” by scripting then role-playing the women artists they have researched, using simple costumes and/or props.
• A starter point would be to imagine how they might introduce the artists to each other.
• The students write brief profiles (80–100 words) for each artist, celebrating their individual achievements.

Possible context – ask that mountain; non-violent resistance at Parihaka

(UC, CI)

• The students research accounts of the history and issues of Parihaka, including the positions of Te Whiti o-Rongomai, Tohu Kākahi, and Titokawaru, and the responses to Parihaka by selected New Zealand artists, including Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere, Tony Fomison, Nigel Brown, and John Pule. (See the notes below for suggested sources.)
• To understand how political and social viewpoints have changed over time, students could enact different protagonists, including:
  • the Māori leaders
  • the contemporary military
  • George Clarendon Beale (1856–1939), an artist who recorded aspects of the event
  • the modern artists who have interpreted and acknowledged the events through their artworks.

• Students use their research to script responses from each party or individual.
• The class might also re-enact an incident from the New Zealand wars with imagined responses in the form of modern television documentary interviews.

Notes

• George Clarendon Beale’s painting Parihaka
• Scott, Dick (2008). Ask that Mountain: The Story of Parihaka. Auckland: Penguin. (This is the ninth edition.)
• King, Michael (2003). The Penguin History of New Zealand. Auckland: Penguin. (See in particular chapter 15.)
• Artworks from the Parihaka exhibition.

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Aesthetics and beauty

The contexts for learning below make links to the art history key concept of aesthetics and beauty.

The contexts for learning below conect to ako by valuing the individual and reciprocity of values, especially in language and identity.

Possible context – the property of beauty

(DI, CI)

• Context, students investigate ideas of art as beauty.
• Students could discuss and compare the portraits or figure paintings of expressive artists (Tony Fomison, Philip Clairmont, Seraphine Pick, Shane Cotton) and the work of artists who reflect (or reflect on) conventions of human beauty (Ian Scott, Peter Stitchbury, Sofia Minson).
• They could broaden their discussions of the selected art works into debating questions such as:
  • Is taste subjective or can it be shared or “universal”?
  • Is beauty (or ugliness) a property of the object we are looking at?

• Discover and respond to works of art that confront issues, challenge conventions, spread propaganda or make political statements.

Notes

See general discussions of aesthetics, such as the page in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Taste, beauty, and ugliness are embedded in our experiences of art and culture. Art history facilitates student and teacher appreciation of and taste in art works, artefacts, and visual culture through expressing and sharing personal and critical responses.

Art during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has challenged the idea that one of its functions is to create beauty. The provocative nature of visual culture challenges many people to rethink the purpose of art.

Possible context – beauty and the body

(CI)

• Students research changing ideas of female or male beauty. (Consider appropriateness to the school community.)
• An example might be to survey images of the female body across the following periods:
  • pre-history fertility goddesses
  • the classical canon
  • the Renaissance humanist treatment of the figure
  • Rococo
  • Boucher’s portraits, Manet’s Olympia (1863), and Gauguin’s paintings from the Pacific.

• Another strand might look at images of Māori beauty from the early European perspective to modern studies, including:
  • Lindauer’s Para Watene (1878)
  • Louis John Steele’s Spoils to the Victor (1908)
  • Maude Burge’s Portrait of a Maori Girl (1940s)
  • Russell Clark’s Tuhoe Woman (1957)
  • Robyn Kahukiwa’s Hine-titama (1983)
  • Sofia Minson’s Tuihana with the Magic Feet (2009).

• Other related themes that could be explored include values such as the heroic, romantic, and sublime; mythic figures (gods and goddesses); and (from religious or new age iconography) angels.

Notes

Many of the listed New Zealand works are profiled in the Auckland Art Gallery collection.

Possible context – framing the New Zealand landscape

(CI, UC)

• Students investigate the development of landscape art in New Zealand, including exploring the influences of Western art and the idea of the sublime.
• For example, the students could focus on paintings of Mt Taranaki, including:
  • Charles Heaphy’s Mt. Egmont from the Southward (1840)
  • Christopher Perkins’ Taranaki (1939)
  • Michael Smither’s Rocks with Mountain (1968) or Alfred Road Bridge (1971)
  • Colin McCahon’s A Painting for Uncle Frank (1980)
  • Laurence Aberhart’s The Heavens Declare the Glory of God (1986)
  • Ralph Paine’s Matrix, Reference, Index (1988).

Notes

Wedde, Ian and Burke, Gregory (Eds.) (1990) Now See Hear!: Art, Language and Translation. Wellington: Victoria University Press. A large sample from this book can be accessed on a Google book search, including the chapter Framing Taranaki by Gregory Burke. Many of the listed works feature in this chapter, together with older and more recent photography.

Possible context – light as spiritual beauty

(DI, CI, UC)

• Students could study the aesthetic of light as spiritual or religious beauty through its expression in gothic cathedrals, for example:
  • development and functions of the gothic cathedral
  • stained glass in gothic cathedrals
  • illuminated manuscripts.

• Students could examine the use of gothic stylistic conventions, such as exposed structural forms and towering heights, with nineteenth and twentieth century inventions. For example, students could compare:
  • Chartres with the Crystal Palace (designer Joseph Paxton, 1851), the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa, New Caledonia (architect Renzo Piano, 1998), and the modernist Futuna Chapel in Wellington (architect John Scott, 1958)
  • gothic rose windows with Tiffany, Art Nouveau, floral-based patterns of tivaevae and tapa design, and the modern stained-glass windows by Shane Cotton and Robert Ellis in Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell, Auckland.

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Pluralism and flux

The contexts for learning below make links to the art history key concept of pluralism and flux.

Possible context – pluralism; diversity and multiplicity

(DI, UC)

• Students explore sequences of change, which could include:
  • movement-to-movement shifts, such as Neoclassicism to Impressionism to Post-impressionism, and the changing relationships in these movements, for example, to naturalism and realism
  • the emergence of a new pictorial language, for example, cubism, which eventually develops into a pluralism of abstractions
  • the development of abstraction, for example, reduction to formal elements (geometry, colour)
  • the influence on change of key theories or works, for example Wassily Kandinsky’s seminal 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

• Students analyse the ways in which ideas are made visible through a range of art works.
• For example, teachers might suggest a range of works by a particular artist (for example, Mondrian) and have the students organise a timeline or continuum to show the progression or development of an idea or ideas in/through his work. The timelines could be presented:
  • in physical form, with a sequence of students each holding up a reproduction of an art work, and presenting a summary of that work to the class
  • as a wall chart or as a presentation copied onto the subject page on the school moodle site.

Notes

Art historiography uses models of change and innovation. Change can be combative or adversarial: a reaction against the actual or perceived restrictions of previous styles and conventions. Change can be inventive in developing new conventions such as abstraction or perspective.

The history of art tracks change. Particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, rapid change has led to a proliferation of styles and individual artists (pluralism).

NZC level 7 courses provide scope for surveying invention and transformation through stylistic or conceptual change over time. They can be designed to consider historical periods of 120–300 years.

Possible context – flux as flow or change

(DI, CI, UC)

• Students trace the flow and change of an idea through a period of time. Single ideas or idea clusters could include:
  • emotion and expression
  • loss and suffering
  • light and darkness
  • outsiders
  • anthropomorphism, or anthropomorphism and transformation
  • utopia and dystopia.

• Students select a range of artworks to showcase development of the idea they are exploring. For example, anthropomorphism (the attribution of human characteristics to a non-human object) could be traced from the Egyptian gods to Hieronymous Bosch to Surrealism to the art works of Louise Bourgeois.
• The students could use dress-ups, props, mime, and actions to enact the changing idea and extrapolate a narrative.
• They could record a video of their dramatic performance for further discussion.
• Students could create their own virtual 3-D exhibitions based on student or artist works at Exhibbit.
• Please make sure students are aware of the terms and conditions of this site before they use it.

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Last updated July 10, 2024

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