Visual Culture- The Golden Age of Illustration

This weeks visual culture lecture focused on The Golden Age of Illustration, between the years 1880-1920. As you could guess, it heavily featured the art of illustrators and a brief history of illustration. An interesting point that was brought up that I found enlightening was the fact that the term illustration is quite problematic, we've always had drawings and pictures, they just weren't considered illustrators at the time. Being an illustrator didn't exist but illustrations did. The German painter and theorist, Albrecht Durer was mentioned for some of his early contributions to the world of illustration and print work, such as his piece 'The Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. Once illustrations and printing became popular, many printing houses hired artists to create illustrations to go along side stories, such as novels by Charles Dickens. There was also a point where we explored The Golden Age and Japan, looking into how Japans illustrations were formed and how they impacted on the golden age. Artists like Katsushika Hokusai were mentioned for his input to the golden age, and the link of Japonisme which was when the japanese style was eventually introduced to the western world.

When coming back for our lecture with our film tutor, we looked at this from a narrative point of view and looked into topics like Ideology. We had already explored Ideology last year but only briefly. Ideology being the shared set of values and beliefs within a given group. In todays culture, ideology has become certain things we've learned to accept, such as religion, politics and morales. Karl Marx introduced the idea of the Dominant Ideology, the ideology that exists within the largest group. John Berger, an English art critic known for his documentary realism and advertising fantasy ideas, got us discussing adverts and how false and pretend they are by selling you something that it's really not. Once we caught on to how everything is a product of time, we were split up into groups and each given a different decade. We then had to come up with events and impactful pieces of work that happened in that decade and how its influenced the world or art or anything since. My group was given the decade of the 1990's and we listed off such things like:

NWA (American Hip Hop Group)
Star Wars Episode 1- The Phantom Menace
CGI in Animation- Disney and Pixar
The introduction of the Internet
Y2K
First Gulf War
Nelson Mandela Freed
Hubble Telescope
Princess Diana's Death
First Harry Potter Book Published
James Cameron's Titanic Released- Most Successful Film at the Time


Although there are many more events in the 1990's these were the ones we thought of first, from the list you can see technology a major player in affecting the life's of people in the 1990's with the internet connecting people for the first time, and it revolutionising animation how we know it, with the likes of Toy Story being released. The other decades that were split off to the other groups were the 1970's, 80's, naughties and the 2010's.