Week 2 - Painting the Exotic

Lecture notes on pp:

Tutorial notes:

‘The Snake Charmer’

• organised/balanced composition

• creates significance and weight

• Tonal (warn away tiles behind the people)

• Being a distance away from the piece as if it is something we are not apart of (same distance away from the performer as the audience)

• Point starts at the artifact on the wall

• exotic subject matter

• not actually noticing the actual snake charmer

• they are holding their weapons (moment of hypnotism???)

• relaxed body language

• decaying background

key terms

• Orientalism

• Orient

• Occident

• exoticism

• romanticism

• neo-classicism

• classicism (appreciation of Greco-Roman)

• Picturesque* - ideal aesthetic // romanticism romanticised the medieval period (gothic and celticism) find better definition

Baroque, :

• everyone looks like a statue in neo-classism (return to order and your dictators favourite art style // ref Napoleon)

• Baroque and rococo is still considered classism, they just got carried away

• Baroque sensuality // rococo exaggerates

John Glover ‘Ben Lomond from Mr Talbot’s property - - four men catching opossums’

• winding river leading into the painting

• tiny Indigenous men // so small hard to notice

• very life like // ref to blue haze over mountains

• windy branches (look up) - - not how the branches really look so blind to the Australian landscape looking for ideas about nation that is not there, biblical narrative with the serpent like branches trying to predict the fate of the aboriginal people with then climbing up the serpent tree (garden of Eden)

• strange composition as it is unbalanced, wild sense of balance

• Sappling mature death with the preservation of time

• picturesque was obsessed with ruins and decay as an enactment of time long imorial time of landscape

• wild beauty, emotions sown through the land, claim that the ;and is pictureque, navigate yourslef to find a ready made copmistion, more truthful as the land is aready organised

Satire of the pictureque

• alaways casels, showing man buliding something and it broken down

• man finsing perfect compisition but falling in river

• asking nature to perform for his paint making him trip and fall not seeing the danger

• idealising someithng stop seeing it for what it is

Edward W. Said

• “Edward Wadie Said (1 November 1935 – 24 September 2003) was a Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist.” (Wiki)

• unequal power dynamics

Linda Nochlin

• Art critisicm, American, professor, ‘why have there been no great woman artist’

• “The ‘seriousness’ of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really a question of art” - the imaginary orient

• Artifice - real - realism ← serious (find own definition)

• Idealised reality hence why we don’t critique, not reflective of reality (makes history look good) something something male gaze

• serious of beyond critism

• Bersani - queer theroist

• “art history as a positive rather than a critical discipline”

• disipline that is only ruled by positive - only look at great masterpieces “trail of greatness”

Ibn Warraq

• British-Indian

• not his real name, didn’t want to be attack for criticizing Islam