This course will re-examine a number of theoretical approaches to the understanding of images and objects that have been addressed during the course. These approaches will be applied to a range of artworks produced in Australia and internationally over the last decade or so. It will offer an overview of many of the contemporary developments, themes and issues that have concerned artists in the period up to and beyond postmodernism. Issues to be considered include: how objects and images come to have meaning; the ways in which artworks differ from other objects; the relations between language and visual images; the ways 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 visual, tactile and kinaesthetic; and the significance of art images and objects in relation to the politics of information dissemination, gender, postcolonialism, class and ethnicity.