Project Development March 2003

The BA Art History courses at the University of Plymouth are offered to students enrolled in the single honours degree but also to those completing combined degrees in Gallery and Museums Studies, American Studies, Fine Art, Visual Arts, Media Arts, English, Theatre & Performance, Popular Culture and History. As in many other Universities offering Fine Arts degrees, tutors need to take into account the different levels within a class when planning the assessment criteria. The emphasis of the programme is on Western art traditions from around 1750 to the contemporary, but the department has been actively seeking new strategies for diversifying the curriculum while strengthening students' critical skills. The GLAADH project provided an incentive to implement changes that were already being planned by the department, now taking place within the context of a University-wide restructuring.

To achieve some results within the GLAADH time scale, Stephanie Pratt, Senior Lecturer, proposed to modify two BA modules at levels 1 and 3 and introduce a new course at level 2. Dr.Pratt followed a twofold approach to combine her research interest while increasing the level of practical skills offered to students. Dr Pratt spent the autumn term developing new materials for the Myths of Primitivism (level 1) and Cultural Difference (level 3) modules. The new level 2 course, Collecting and Exhibiting Cultures will be developed during the spring term of 2003. This course needed validation and has now been approved by the appropriate University committees.

Myth of Primitivism serves students drawn from three programmes: Visual Arts, Gallery & Museum Studies, Art History. It is being offered during the Spring term 2003 to 25 students, 15 more than what was expected, an indication of the interest in these topics. The course looks at the ways in which cultures outside Europe have been displayed and the impact of these cultures on the development of western art during and after the modernist project. Dr Pratt currently teaches the module in collaboration with Visual Arts tutors. This combination of staff is a transitional arrangement, allowing Art History staff to work with Visual Arts tutors to develop appropriate pedagogical methods for that constituency of students. In future, this module will be delivered by the Art History department, drawing on relevant outside expertise when appropriate.

The diversity of the student constituency has impacted on teaching strategies, with some resistance registered from practice-based students experiencing difficulties with historical and critical frameworks more familiar to art history students. To open up debate about habits, assumptions and methods in organisation, classification, evaluation and display of materials, all students are initially required to assess their own collecting patterns by presenting and re-presenting each other's possessions to the group for critical debate. In order to address the clash of skills-base between art history and visual art students, the focus has been on seminars, artists' statements, and key texts by such writers as James Clifford, Gerald McMaster, and Mieke Bal. For the final assessment students are offered two options: 1) a critical and comparative assessment of selected examples of writing on African Art or 2) a critical and historical analysis of an object in an ethnographic collection, with a view to assessing the usefulness of established descriptive contexts for it, both western and original. For this option students will have access to some parts of the archive at the Museum, accession documents and the curators documentation on the material.

Collecting and Exhibiting Cultures will engage more specifically with the problems of representation and interpretation that were introduced at level 1, and will follow on from those introductory discussions to engage more fully with the way particular world cultures developed and were understood during the late-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. An example of this would be a discussion of Plains warrior societies and the development of martial/spiritual clothing as an important constituent in the constructing of a visual metaphor for the American West, and the ways in which this visual metaphor became collected and displayed in nineteenth-century museums. The module will continue exploring the methods of display of non-European cultures within the UK and how these ideas have shifted through time.

The module Cultural Difference offered at level 3 will bring the discussion forward chronologically to address current notions of difference and identity as they impact on contemporary practice in the arts. Some historical contextual material will precede the presentation of current debates being offered in this module. The three modules will draw upon the ethnographic collections of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, which include exceptional materials from Africa, middle and south Americas, Pacific Islands, and North American Amerindian cultures. Dr Pratt established a productive working relationship with the curators and will be organising an exhibition for the museum in 2004. Myths of Primitivism and Collecting and Exhibiting include lectures in the Museum with the tutors and the curators to offer the experience of debating issues around display and representation in situ.

The Art History group, which forms part of the School of Arts and Humanities, will move in 2004 to the Plymouth campus. However, the Dean and Head of School are interested in maintaining a relationship with Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum and have offered support for future site visits and lectures outside the University premises. The project is also supported by other members of the Department and the library which has allocated funds for the purchase of new books and visual aids. Resources in this area have so far been strong on basic texts, including recent monographic studies, but relatively weak on historical and empirical material. The slide collection is good, and has already been expanded by a hundred new images. Staff development funds towards gaining IT skills are also being sought.

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