This course will re-examine a number of theoretical approaches to the understanding of images and objects that have been addressed during the undergraduate course. These approaches will be brought to bear on a range of artworks produced in Australia and internationally over the last decade. It will offer an overview of many of the contemporary developments, themes and issues that have concerned artists in the period after postmodernism, that is, during the late eighties and nineties. Issues to be considered will include how objects and images come to have meaning and how stable this meaning is, the ways in which artworks differ from other objects, the relations between language and visual images, the ways in which images and objects can be seen and the sort of viewer/s they imply, the different forms of perceptual 'address' that we bring to artworks, including the visual, tactile and kinaesthetic and the significance of artworks in relation to the politics of information dissemination, gender, postcolonialism, class and ethnicity.