Context elaborations – level 8 art history
Context elaborations are possible contexts for learning, with a suggestion of how they might be used with the focus achievement objective.
Many of the following context elaborations look for opportunities for intrinsic motivation within art history such as personal appreciation, curiosity, and engagement with the world.
As students progress from level 7 to 8, 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.
These context elaborations are based on the
key concepts for art history.
The context elaborations mirror
culturally responsive pedagogies.
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 below make links to the
art history key concept of discourse and reflection.
The contexts for learning below connect to
manaakitanga or building partnerships in the classroom through discourse and reflection based on trust and equity where all learning experiences are valued.
Possible context – what is art’s value?
(CI, UC, DI)
- Challenge students to discuss and clarify what intrinsic or instrumental values a work of art might hold.
- Ask them to select a particular value, such as historical, didactic, or investment and research points of views held by artists, art historians, or critics.
- For example, as a starting point to considering the art market (art as investment), students could investigate Christies’ auction of
Jasper Johns’ Flag (1953).
- They could listen to Robert Hughes on the power of the investment market to influence art in the online documentary
The Mona Lisa Curse.
- To complete this context, students could argue points of view on the value of art they have been studying in an argumentative essay.
Possible context – what if …?
(DI, CI)
- At the beginning or the end of a topic, ask the class what they want to know about and have them write their own questions for discussion.
- Foster questions that are wide-ranging, open, and thought provoking. The answer does not need to be known by anybody.
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The excitement of the question encourages thinking, understanding, apprehension, and revelation. Initially, model open-ended question forms:
• What if …?
• What does this mean …?
• How does X affect me (or us)?
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Encourage the students to think up challenging questions about art:
• Was Dada the best response to the anger and pessimism of World War I?
• Is the Renaissance the beginning of the modern world?
• Does the use of chance in art negate reason?
- Students gain confidence and build trust by thinking privately, talking in pairs, sharing in groups, and finally presenting to the class on such issues
- They could create visual representations of their thinking with a visual software application.
Notes
- Read about ways of making thinking visible and visual on
Visible thinking in action.
- Andrew Churches’s Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy begins as a digital taxonomic update of Bloom’s Taxonomy but is also an excellent overview for teachers looking for guidance on using digital technologies in the learning space.
Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.
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Reaction and change
The contexts for learning below make links to the
art history key concept of reaction and change.
The contexts for learning below also connect to
whanaungatanga by celebrating high expectations and achievement.
Art develops through reaction and change. In art history, students learn how artists change art through risking new ideas and practice, resulting in innovation and invention.
“Art is the highest expression of the cultural epoch.”
Lázló Moholy-Nagy (1938)
The following context elaborations suggest themes or topics appropriate to issues of change and reaction, invention, and innovation.
Possible context – architecture – building blocks for innovation
(UC, CI)
- Change and invention in architecture offers a contextual framework for teachers to scaffold student understanding.
- To learn the visual language of architectural forms, such as columns, facades, or windows, students can begin by gathering images at home, at school, and in the local community.
- Students could discuss the images they have collected and use these as a stimulus to develop an architectural vocabulary or glossary, before starting a study of architecture.
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As a study, they might trace aspects of invention through architectural materials or forms.
• Students will readily recognise the carport in their own environments. Frank Lloyd Wright developed this economical design from the porte-cochère (coach gate) used in mansions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for his 1930s Usonia house.
• Students could consider development of Māori-built spaces and forms. (See the notes below.)
- Students could apply, create, and synthesise form and invention by designing a sustainable building, such as their school or house, which they present to the class digitally, or on a poster, or by making a model.
Notes
Possible context – the lives of artists; innovation and achievement
(UC,CI, DI)
- The class surveys influential and innovative artists.
- Each student selects a significant artist’s achievement to research and present to the class, evaluating using evidence to explain and analyse.
- Artists might include Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo or Picasso, Malevich, Duchamp.
- Alternatively, through a feminist lens, challenge a patriarchal view of art history and create a “herstory” of women artists, using Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party 1975–79 as a model.
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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 connect to
ako by valuing the individual and reciprocity of values especially in language and identity.
When we take time to share appreciation, critical evaluation, and our notions of taste and beauty, then we create a learning space that values everyone’s identity.
Aesthetics begins with appreciation and value placed on the student and teacher experience of art works, artefacts, and visual culture.
Possible context – the property of beauty
- Students can investigate ideas about art and its value and function by questioning and discussing individual values and ideas about art as beauty and art as ugliness.
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 contemporary visual culture challenges many people to rethink the purpose of art.
Possible context – the dark side – ugliness in art and the human condition
(CI, UC)
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Students communicate meaning through investigative research in which they connect the meanings or interpretations of art works with darker or challenging contextual factors, such as:
• war
• the Great Depression of the 1930s
• the rise of fascism
• the Cold War
• feminism
• post-colonialism.
- They could translate their research into meaning through wall charts of mind-maps or other pictorial representations of connective thinking.
- Alternatively, they could record information on large charts that can be photocopied and shared.
Note
In the twentieth century, creative ugliness, torment, and angst have reflected the pessimism and agony of the century. For example, Leger found beauty in the silver shine of military hardware in the First World War, Ernst in perverse collage, and the Surrealists in Bataille’s theories of transgression and base materialism.
The artists’ lives express anguish and torment, for example, the Abstract Expressionists after the Second World War (Pollock’s abuse of alcohol, Rothko’s suicide, de Kooning’s perceived misogyny).
In New Zealand, expressionist artists Tony Fomison and Philip Clairmont have used personal iconography to convey a sense of other and outsider.
This context touches on themes of interest and relevance to young people but could be controversial within some school communities and may require consultation with parents, caregivers, and whānau.
Possible context – beauty or the beast?
(DI, UC)
- Students make a thematic study of the aesthetics of nature, through notions of the value and beauty ascribed to it.
- Their thematic study could include a survey of images of landscape, flora, and fauna exploring how ideas about these changed from the Renaissance to twentieth century.
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Particular topics could include:
• the mythology of animals such as the unicorn
• the use of animals as crests and insignia and in art, for example, the ermine in Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani: Lady with an Ermine (1489–1490)
• surrealist inventions of human and animal morphed.
Students could research contemporary artists who continue to anthropomorphise animals, such as:
Possible context – a canon of beauty
(DI, CI)
- Challenge students’ assumptions about aesthetics and beauty.
- Begin by watching the documentary series Why Beauty Matters by contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton.
- Use the documentary to generate questions about modernism, originality, and the importance of art and the avant-garde.
Notes
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Why Beauty Matters
Scruton argues that the dilemma for art is that the twentieth century has turned its back on beauty. The six segments draw on the thoughts of philosophers and discussions with artists. The site includes a comments thread that may also interest the students.
Possible context – light is the key
(DI, CI, UC)
- To explore the aesthetics of light as beauty, students could research the development of modern architectural space and the forms for public building.
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Give students a brief to research how key architects have combined materials, form, and design to express light as beauty, including:
• Paul Andreu
• Frank Gehry
• I. M. Pei
• Louis Khan
• Noel Jessop.
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Students could then examine in more detail specific innovative architectural uses of light through form. Examples might include:
• Paul Andreu, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing (2007)
• Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1997)
• I. M. Pei, Pyramid at the Musée du Louvre (1989)
• I. M. Pei, Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar (2008)
• Louis Kahn, National Assembly Building, Dacca (1962–1974)
• Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Museum (1966–1972)
• Oscar Niemeyer (principal architect), Brasilia (1956–1960)
• Noel Jessop, the Bunker House, Waikato (residential award winner 2005).
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Pluralism and flux
The contexts for learning below make links to the
art history key concept of pluralism and flux.
Art historiography uses a model of change and innovation. The principles and role of art have come into question as the avant-garde and modernism have shifted to the pluralism of post-modernism and other contemporary art, such as relational aesthetics. Some of the questions include:
- Does art continue to exist?
- What should art do in the face of technological change?
- How does art emerge in a world of uncertainty?
- What happens if art does not look like art? Why?
Possible context – art unlike art
(DI, UC)
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Ask students questions about the impact of avant-garde modernist art (from the early twentieth century) on art at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first:
• Where can art go from here?
• What is (or are) arts function(s)?
- A discussion starter might be the ironic documentary from the BBC Art Safari series, in which interviewer Ben Lewis asks whether Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics defines the newest “ism”. (See notes.)
- Students might also consider Michael Parekowhai’s installation for the 2011 Venice Biennale: On first looking into Chapman’s Homer. (See notes.)
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Students could then:
• blog or wiki on relational art or the impact of social media on art
• devise a class “relational art” event.
Notes
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Art Safari: Relational Art: Is it an Ism?
- Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. This accessible account of contemporary art that does not look like art discusses Felix Gonzalez Torres, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Carsten Hoeller.
- Michael Parakowhai’s On Looking into Chapman’s Homer is named from the poem of the same title by English Romantic poet John Keats. Parekowhai forms a narrative structure from introduced species (two bronze bulls), introduced culture (the grand piano on which the bulls stand), two bronzed olive saplings (symbols of peace or victory wreaths), and the security guard figure from the artist’s Kapa Haka series. A more detailed description of the work and links to news stories and reviews of it can be accessed on the
New Zealand at Venice website.
Possible context – flux and change
(DI, CI)
- Students could keep a notebook (hard copy or digital) over a period of time to track flow and change in their own reflections, inspirations, and interest in particular artists, art topics, or cultural elements.
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Students could trace the flow and change of an idea (or paired ideas) through the period they are studying. These might include:
• emotion and expression
• loss and suffering
• light and darkness
• outsiders
• anthropomorphism and transformation
• utopia and dystopia.
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To strengthen higher-order thinking skills, such as hypothesis and critique, have students interact to link these concepts to a range of art works spanning the period being studied.
• The students could use groups, props, and mime to explore the selected works and video their improvisations for further analysis.
• Alternatively, the students could make a visual survey or record of a series of artworks on a theme, which they link together.
Possible context – virtual exhibition
(DI, UC)
- Students work in groups to create works based on artists who have made the most impact on them or influenced or changed the course of art.
- They could set up their works as a virtual 3-D exhibition 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 April 6, 2023
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