Visual Arts: should I choose it?

Practice in artmaking

Practice in art criticism and art history

The conceptual framework: agencies in the artworld

The frames: subjective frame

The frames: cultural frame

The frames: structural frame

The frames: postmodern frame

HSC AOS1 — Practice in Artmaking, Art Criticism and Art History

Practice is the syllabus's word for agency: what artists, art critics and art historians actually do, and the beliefs, actions, motives and ideas built up over time that shape those choices. Artmaking practice is treated as a network of procedures — materials, processes, techniques, styles and qualities — through which representation is built from subject matter and form, and judged for conceptual strength, meaning and resolution. Art criticism and art history are handled as their own networks of procedures: speculating about meaning, and locating works in critical narratives and significant histories. The artworks in play span art, craft and design as 2D and 3D works including architecture, 4D and time-based works, multimodal and interactive media, temporal, ephemeral and relational forms, and synthetic realities — and the 12 expressive forms name the territory: Documented Forms, Collection of Works, Drawing, Painting, Photomedia, Printmaking, Textiles and Fibre, Graphic Design, Designed Objects, Sculpture, Ceramics and Time-based forms.

HSC AOS2 — The Conceptual Framework: Agencies in the Artworld

The conceptual framework is a theoretical model of four agencies in the artworld — artist, artwork, world and audience — and the intentional relationships and functions each performs relative to the others. Artist is not a fixed category: roles are assigned or assumed differently in different times, places and value systems, and the term covers craftspeople, designers, architects, filmmakers, performance, digital and multimodal practitioners, working individually, collaboratively, or by enlisting others. Audience covers art critics, art historians, teachers, students, entrepreneurs, patrons, curators, dealers, the public, auction houses, writers and theorists, and is produced through display of and interaction with artworks. Artwork carries material, virtual, physical and symbolic properties, and the form of production or reproduction affects how audiences infer meaning. World is the source of the interests, ideas, conditions and events an artist represents — systematic ideas of the time, theoretical commitments, experience, class, ideology, age and events of significance.

HSC AOS3 — The Frames

The four frames are philosophical, theoretical and interpretive positions used to layer meaning, significance, value and belief onto art. The subjective frame deals in personal and psychological experience — feeling, emotion, imagination, the unconscious, intuition, originality and intersubjectivity. The cultural frame deals in collective meaning — the interests of cultural groups, ideology, class, politics, gender, economic conditions, and spiritual and secular belief. The structural frame treats art as visual language: signs, codes, symbols and conventions of representation that artists encode and audiences read. The postmodern frame turns challenge, doubt, suspicion and scepticism on the assumptions of the other three, working through intertextuality, appropriation, irony, parody, quotation, satire and revisionist histories. Each frame sets up a different set of relationships between the four agencies, so a single work re-examined from a second frame yields a genuinely different account.

HSC AOS4 — Case Studies in Art Criticism and Art History

The HSC course requires a minimum of five case studies, each of four to ten hours, and each one exists to illustrate something of significance while keeping practice, the conceptual framework and the frames in play together. Between them the case studies should reach artistic practice in Australia, in other regions and in globalised contexts, and cover both contemporary and historical material. A case can be re-examined or compared from a different frame or with a different critical or historical focus, which is how one body of study serves several different essay questions. Art criticism and art history are aligned with the audience function in the conceptual framework: reading and reviewing interpretations, visiting and evaluating exhibitions and sites, following debates in contemporary and emergent media, and supporting your own speculations by reference to significant critics and historians.

HSC AOS5 — The Body of Work and the Visual Arts Process Diary

The body of work is developed across the HSC course in one of the 12 expressive forms and is externally marked for 50 of the 100 external marks — the same weight as the written paper. The selection of works must represent a coherent point of view and indicate your intentions as an artist, with conceptual strength and meaning existing both within and between the works included. A Visual Arts Process Diary is required in both the Preliminary and HSC courses and the two must be differentiated; it records investigations of subject matter, interests, issues, processes, expressive forms and conceptual challenges, along with technical details and copyright matters. NESA is explicit that the diary is not a substitute for making the work. Submission is governed by real limits on size, weight and duration, by rules on dangerous and prohibited materials, and by exclusions covering work already assessed in Content Endorsed Courses.

Preliminary (Year 11) course — not externally examined, foundational

The Preliminary course runs 120 indicative hours, the same as the HSC course, and covers the same three content areas at an introductory level: practice, the conceptual framework and the frames. It requires its own body of work and its own Visual Arts Process Diary, kept distinct from the HSC ones, and its outcomes are coded P1–P10 against the HSC's H1–H10. In art criticism and art history it introduces a broad range of artists, artworks, critics and historians rather than the deeper five-case-study structure of Year 12, and it is where students usually settle on the expressive form they will pursue.