Art as Communication: Pre- and Post-1990 - TCE Visual Art (Tasmania)

What this dot point is asking

A core idea of Module 1 is that visual art is a form of communication. It is a way for people to make sense of the world, to share experience, and to pass culture from one generation to the next. The course deliberately asks you to look at art from different periods, with works grouped roughly as pre-1990 and post-1990, and to include Australian art and the art of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The point is not to memorise dates but to recognise that what art communicates, and how, shifts with its time and culture.

The pre-1990 framing covers the long sweep of historical, modern and earlier contemporary art. Much of it communicates through recognisable means: a religious altarpiece transmitting belief, a portrait asserting status, a modernist abstraction communicating feeling or formal ideas rather than a story. The point is that the message and the visual language travel together. When you read an older work, ask what it was trying to communicate to its original audience and through what visual conventions, because those conventions were the shared language of the time.

The post-1990 framing matters because contemporary art often communicates differently. It is frequently conceptual, installation-based, time-based or socially engaged, and it often expects the viewer to participate in making meaning rather than simply receiving it. A contemporary work might communicate through an idea, a juxtaposition or a situation rather than a depicted scene. So the question how does this communicate is more open, and your interpretation has to account for that openness rather than searching for a single hidden message.

Australian art is central to this dot point. Works responding to the Australian landscape, to colonial history, to migration and to national identity communicate experiences specific to this place. Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series, for instance, communicates an Australian myth through a flattened black helmet shape set against vast bleached country, so a national story is told in a distinctly local visual language. Reading Australian art means recognising what it says about living in and making sense of this particular country.

The art of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples must be approached as one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated systems of visual communication and cultural transmission. Works can carry connection to Country, ancestral knowledge, story and law, and the visual language often operates differently from Western pictorial conventions. The Papunya Tula movement from the early 1970s, for example, transferred ceremonial and Country knowledge into acrylic on board, communicating cultural meaning to both community and wider audiences. Approach these works with respect: recognise that some knowledge is restricted, that you may not be entitled to or able to read every layer, and that the appropriate response is careful, informed interpretation rather than assumption.

The unifying skill is reading art as cultural transmission. Every work you study passes something on: a belief, an experience, a way of seeing, a piece of identity. Your task is to identify what is being communicated, to whom, and through what visual means, and then to recognise that you are reading it from your own time and position. Holding that awareness keeps your interpretations honest, especially when you read across large gaps of time or culture.

In practice, respond to these works in three modes as the course expects: verbally in discussion, practically by letting them inform your own making, and in writing through analysis. Each mode sharpens the others, and together they build the habit of treating every artwork as a message worth decoding with care.

Reading art as communication across time and culture is what lets you move beyond liking or disliking a work toward understanding what it was made to say and how it says it.