THE FRAMES
THE FRAMES
emotion,feelings, experiences, imagination, psychological experience, opinions,personal reactions, evocative, subconscious, intentions, memories, interpretations, mood, themes
The Subjective Frame refers to a person’s personal perspective or opinion, particular feelings, beliefs, and desires. It is about looking at something and deciding if you like it or if you don’t based mostly on emotion and individual preference. Think about how the artwork makes you feel when you look at it and consider your own individual reaction in comparison with others. Everyone likes different things and that is what makes us unique. When we look through the Subjective Frame, we are looking from our own point of view.
Through this frame, art may be thought to be about and represent deeply felt and sensory experience, human consciousness, intuition, imagination, originality, creative expression, and the aesthetic response. Meaning is understood in relation to the intersubjective experiences afforded to the maker and viewer.
Medium, composition, signs, symbols, language, visual codes, techniques, forms, direction, colour, tone, texture
When discussing an artwork through this frame you need to consider how it can be read and how its meaning understood, in terms of how specific symbols refer to the world. You will discuss how information is conveyed in artworks, what the formal and organisational relationships in a work mean, and how the artwork shows a visual language at a certain time and over time.
Through this frame, art may be thought to be about and represent a visual language as a symbolic system: a system of relationships between signs and symbols that are read and understood by artists and audiences who are able to decode texts. From this view, meaning is understood in terms of the relationships of symbols that are used to refer to the world. Through this system ideas are circulated and exchanged.
Describe the visual language of line, shape, colour, texture, tone, focal point, visual devices lighting, composition, 3D space.
identity, race, class, gender, place, art movements, art styles, scientific and artistic practice, politics, economics, cultural symbols
When discussing an artwork through the cultural frame, you need to consider how notions of cultural identity can inform the production of artworks. Research differing cultural attitudes towards the visual arts, and the effects of scientific and technological innovation, politics and economics. Look at concepts of social and cultural identity (for example gender, Indigenous, regional, national, modern, contemporary) on artistic practices in particular places and cultures at a certain time and over time.
Through this frame art may be thought to be about and represent the collective interests of cultural groups, ideology, class, politics, gender, and the celebration of spiritual and secular beliefs, events and objects. From this view, meaning is understood in relation to the social perspective of the community from which it grows.
Appropriation, challenging, quotation, popular culture, non-traditional, media, new, diversity, mass media, irony, parody, reinterpretation, the role of art, power, authorities, classifications
The postmodern frame brings challenge, doubt, suspicion and scepticism to the assumptions of the other frames. It should be recognised as highly responsive to contemporary and emergent social, cultural and critical theory. The postmodern frame has particular effectiveness in understanding contemporary artistic practices where the other frames have insufficient or incomplete explanatory application and where new philosophical, theoretical and interpretive perspectives are required. It can also support critical reconsiderations of artworks and artmaking practices outside of the contemporary. It is responsive to diverse and contested contemporary investigations in art practice.
Through this frame, art may be thought to be about and represent ‘texts’ that reconfigure replicate and question previous texts and current narratives.
In art criticism and art history, students can: