Explore approaches to artmaking through the broad classifications of Pre-Modernism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, using them to inform and drive your own practice.

What this dot point is asking

Module 2 asks you to explore approaches to artmaking through three broad classifications: Pre-Modernism, Modernism and Post-Modernism. These are not tidy date ranges with hard borders, and the course treats them as broad rather than precise. They are best understood as three different attitudes toward what art is for and how it should be made, especially toward the question of whether artistic conventions should be upheld or broken. Holding that idea, attitude to convention, makes the whole framework usable rather than a list to memorise.

Pre-Modernism covers the long period in which art largely worked within accepted conventions and served established purposes. Art communicated shared beliefs, told known stories, recorded the world and asserted status, and skill was often measured by how convincingly it could represent reality or tradition. A Renaissance altarpiece or a grand history painting operates here: the conventions of perspective, idealised form and recognisable subject matter are followed, not questioned. The defining attitude is that art upholds and refines an inherited language. Understanding this baseline matters, because Modernism and Post-Modernism are partly reactions against it.

Modernism, broadly from the later nineteenth century through much of the twentieth, is defined by a drive to break with tradition and to pursue originality, innovation and the essence of the medium itself. Modernist artists asked what painting could be beyond representation, leading to movements such as Impressionism, Cubism and abstraction. The conventions of accurate depiction were deliberately abandoned: Pablo Picasso's Cubism fractured the single viewpoint, and abstract painters removed recognisable subject matter altogether. The defining attitude is that art progresses by challenging and overturning convention, valuing the new and the authentic individual vision. Modernism still believed in big ideas, in art having a serious purpose and a forward direction.

Post-Modernism, broadly from the later twentieth century, reacts against Modernism's confidence and its faith in originality and progress. It is sceptical, pluralist and self-aware. Post-Modern artists freely quote, appropriate and remix earlier styles, blur the line between high art and popular culture, and often use irony, parody and pastiche. The idea that there is one correct direction or a single authentic voice is itself questioned. Andy Warhol's silkscreens of consumer products and celebrities sit here, treating mass-produced imagery as art and undermining the notion of the unique original. The defining attitude is that conventions can be borrowed, recombined and subverted knowingly, with meaning becoming open, layered and dependent on the viewer.

The course makes a crucial point that runs through all three: artistic conventions can be adhered to or subverted. That single idea is the thread. Pre-Modern art largely adheres, Modern art overturns, Post-Modern art knowingly plays with adherence and subversion at once. When you place an artist in this framework, you are really asking what they do with convention, and answering that question is more valuable than slotting them into a labelled box.

Use the classifications to locate the artists you research in Module 2. When you investigate an influence, ask which approach they belong to and why, because that tells you what game they are playing and what their choices mean. An abstract gesture means something different in a Modernist context, where it asserts authentic individual expression, than in a Post-Modern context, where it might quote and ironise that very gesture. The classification reframes how you read the work.

Most importantly, use the framework to drive your own artmaking. Deciding whether you will work within conventions, break them, or knowingly remix them is a real creative decision, and naming it gives you control. If your investigation leans Post-Modern, you might deliberately appropriate and recombine imagery; if it leans Modernist, you might pursue a personal, original visual language. The classification becomes a tool for making, not just for sorting other people's work, which is exactly the investigation-driving-practice intent of Module 2.

Pre-Modernism, Modernism and Post-Modernism give you a map of approaches to making, and using that map to locate others and to position yourself is how Module 2 turns art history into fuel for your own investigation.