This course explores and examines visual representations in a variety of media resulting from, or referring to, cross-cultural interactions in various parts of the world.  It will focus mostly, although not exclusively, on New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific, and also North America, North Africa, the Middle East, China and Japan,  from the mid 18th Century up to and including the 21st Century, though images and objects from earlier periods can be studied. Overall, then, the course addresses cross-cultural interactions and creativity.

While most of the lecture topics deal with the European representations of non-European peoples and places and encounters between peoples of different ethnicities and cultures, there are also classes which focus on the work of non-European artists, in particular contemporary artists, addressing cross- or intercultural contact and exchange.  Historical subjects include representations of Maori and Pacific Islands subjects by painters, sculptors and photographers, the works of Cook’s artists in the 18th Century, later depictions of Pacific subjects (including Gauguin’s Polynesian work), 19th and 20th Century Orientalism, and the work of travelling artists, such as Augustus Earle, Nicholas Chevalier and John Thomson (China).  Modern and contemporary subjects have included the work of artists diverse as Picasso and Matisse, Mona Hatoum (UK/Lebanon), Shirin Neshat (USA/Iran), Peter Robinson (New Zealand), Gordon Bennett (Australia), Yasimusa Morimura (Japan), and Kara Walker and Man Ray (both USA). How  contemporary photographers from Europe and USA, such as Susan Meiselas, Alfredo Jaar and Donald McCullin,  have addressed war and combat in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Central America is also an important and crucial subject.

Travel and art more generally, and creative responses to exile, displacement and migration (especially from the 1930s to the present) are emerging as compelling themes and concerns.  For instance, representations both of and by Jewish peoples in European cultures and societies, as well as the work and careers of refugee, émigré and immigrant artists in New Zealand and the Pacific, can be studied and researched.

Other topics include depictions of ‘new’ landscapes in New Zealand, Australia and North America in the 19th Century, paintings and photographs both of and by Afro-Americans, Australian Aborigines and Chinese and Japanese peoples in differing societies and cultures, and non-European and indigenous peoples’ appropriations and recontextualisations of Euro-American imagery and artefacts.  The images and objects that can be studied are not limited to ‘fine arts’ and photography.  Cartoons, comics, postcards, book illustrations, touristic and advertising material, monuments and graffiti, for instance, as well as architecture, ornament and the crafts, all come within the scope of the course.

The concerns and questions addressed include: the uses, values and meanings of the images and objects  both when they were first produced, exhibited, and circulated, and in later periods and in different contexts of use, both European and non-European; the varying factors that went into the making of the representations and which contributed to their formal structures and mediated their meanings; the ways in which formally and iconographically, images and objects were shaped by models and conventions in Euro-American art and image-making; the attitudes and values which sustained representations and were sustained by them. Related to this, the nature of the links, if any, between representations and contemporary social and political events, such as wars, and colonialist and imperial projects, and the resistance to, or criticism of, such events and projects, are also studied.

A consideration of the ways in which the past informs the present and the contemporary, or the ‘lives’ in the present of images and objects from the past, are fundamental concerns of the course also.

Are their limits to representation? Are there experiences and events that are beyond adequate representation? Can displacement and loss stimulate creativity? These are among the questions that the course addresses too.