Overview
Write an essay of 1,500 - 2,000 words (excluding bibliography and citations) on a topic of your own choice: - Your choice of subject matter for the essay should be made in response to concerns, ideas and questions arising from your studio practice. However, this does not mean that the essay should be an account of your work and your motivations. Instead, it should be an exploration of one of the questions or issues that your work (or process of working) raises for you. You should use the essay as a way to reflect critically upon, research and develop those concerns. - Issues within the essay may be explored across a range of art works or practices, texts (theoretical and/or literary), objects and any other relevant cultural phenomena that might include, for example, film or music. - Wherever possible, the essay should include reference to ‘primary research’ – for example, a work seen in an exhibition or elsewhere sited, an event experienced or an original text read rather than a secondary interpretation by someone else. - Images should be included in the essay wherever they are appropriate to the essay and help to support and clarify the ideas that you are developing. • A bibliography must be included with the essay. The bibliography lists all the sources you consult when preparing your essay. In addition all quotations within the essay must be clearly cited within the text of the essay itself. For guidance on how to structure your bibliography and for information on how to make citations, see the ‘Referencing Guidance’ information on pg 3. For further and more detailed information consult: Cite Them Right Online: http://www.citethemrightonline.com/ • Essays must be type-written, 1.5 spacing with a minimum font size of 10. • The essay should be submitted electronically by 12 noon on the day of the deadline following the procedure described in the overall Unit 4 Brief (see the ‘Submission Procedure’ section on the Unit 4 Brief on Moodle). Any submission received after 12.00 noon will be regarded as a late submission. • The submission of the essay is an assessment requirement to pass the Unit. The deadline for your essay submission is final. Students who do not present for their allocated time will be deemed to have failed. • You should keep a copy of the essay before submitting it. 2 Your essay should demonstrate that: - you have worked on expanding and deepening your subject knowledge and that you have researched and thought about practices, theories and debates that form the broader field by which your studio practice is informed. - you are developing your ability to analyse works of art, other cultural objects, concepts and ideas in dialogue with the analyses of established writers. - you are reflecting on your own responses and statements. This is to say that, in addition to the development of your ideas and argument within the essay, you should also include consideration of your purpose in researching and writing as well as possible further questions the essay writing leads you to. - finally, you have endeavored to make the essay coherent. This does not mean, however, that you should necessarily avoid complications, ambiguities or ambivalence, but rather that you should be as clear and honest about them as possible, as they arise. 3. Resources: Bibliographies will be provided at lectures and seminars. There is also an extensive Fine Art Programme Bibliography that lists examples of recommended texts, arranged by theme in alphabetical order. The Fine Art Programme Bibliography is intended to be a resource that will help you identify some of the key texts that you might draw upon once you have identified the themes you wish to explore in more detail. In addition: • The library, with its comprehensive array of critical, historical and theoretical writings, is an essential resource. • The e-library, too, is a resource that you should learn how to use early in the Unit, as it allows you access to a vast archive of journal articles and reviews. • Visual resources are of equal importance, whether they are primary materials like exhibitions or secondary ones such as a documentary about an artist. • Live events such as the many relevant lectures and artists talks that frequently take place in London, have much to offer, and many organizations make such events available in recorded form on the internet (e.g. TED talks at http://www.ted.com/ or Tate at http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment). • Internet sites such as Wikipedia can be helpful for producing new threads to follow up, but should not be relied on as the central pillars of your research either factually or conceptually 3 4. Referencing guidance: A bibliography lists in alphabetical order all the references and sources you have explored in the course of your research, even if you have not quoted from them, and even if they have turned out not to feed directly into the writing. The bibliography indicates the comprehensive extent of your research and makes clear your decisions about what to include and what to exclude. The usual form for referencing a book is: Author(s), Date, Title, Publisher, Place of publication: Adorno, T.W. 1973, Negative Dialectics, Routledge, London. For a magazine article: Author(s). Date, ‘Article title’, Journal Title, volume, issue, article pages: Raverty, D. 2002, ‘Art and Calamity’, Art Papers Magazine, vol. 26, no.5, September/October, p14-15. For an exhibition catalogue without a prominent author: Pentangeli, F. ed. 1997, Victorian Fairy-Painting, Yale Center for British Art, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, Conn. For a web-site: Author(s). Last update or copyright, Title, [Online], Publisher, available from: [Date of access]: Baird, R, (5 September 2000) Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Use of Profiles in Vertigo [Online]http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/features/vert... [accessed 14 July 2002] CITATION Citation is the referencing of other authors’ works within your text. This should be done using the Harvard style system. When using the Harvard system, a citation in your paper requires only the surname of the author(s), the year of publication, and relevant page number(s). Citations can be direct quotations or indirect references: “If, then, there is any ‘subject matter’, it is immediacy.” (Lyotard 1991, p.82), or: Other writers, e.g., Lyotard (1991) have discussed these issues from another vantage point. If the author has more than one text in the same year, then distinguish these by placing ‘a’, ‘b’, or ‘c’ after the publication date. If there is no author’s name is associated with your source, you may use the name of the organization responsible for the publication (e.g. ‘Tate Gallery’ for a catalogue), and if this is not available you may use the title of the publication. For further information on Harvard Style referencing see Cite Them Right Online: http://www.citethemrightonline.com/