Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Empire follows Art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. - William Blake, annotations to Sir Joshua Reynold's Discourses (ca. 1798-1809) For WJ.T. Mitchell, pictures have lives and loves. Instead of seeing images as inert objects that convey meaning, he urges us to see them as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. In the past three decades, literature on visual culture has burgeoned in art history, cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy and anthropology, and recently it has taken on a "performative turn." For art history, which is traditionally concerned with the interpretation of art objects, the artists who make them and the interests of patrons, the interdisciplinary field of visual culture has opened up new ways of thinking about images of all kinds. In a culture in which the production and dissemination of images has grown exponentially, it has never been more necessary to pay attention to how images work and what they do. While histories of images tend to locate intentionality in the maker or the patron, this seminar seeks to bring forward the intentions of the image, how, for example, its formal material characteristics, modes and contexts of circulation and use, reproducibility and referentiality, solicit responses: how images seem to take on, in Mitchell's words, "lives of their own." For your paper, you can choose as your main object of study a work of art, a landmark exhibition, or a famous image drawn from popular culture. This image or event will be the subject of student presentations at the end of the term. The topic must be a visual phenomenon about which there is a substantial discourse in print, preferably in both scholarly and popular sources. The final paper will be based on your presentation and should address some of the critical issues and readings discussed in class. Students with credit for FPA 823 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

In recent decades, the field of Environmental Humanities has emerged in recognition of the impossibility of relying on any one system or culture of knowledge to address complex environmental issues, such as climate breakdown. Integrating ecological inquiry from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts, the field has also insisted not only on the dismantling of all nature/culture divides but also on the dismantling of hierarchies between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of knowing and relating. Taking this kind of intervention as its starting point, we will explore how art, philosophy, and decolonizing methodologies might help us to connect more intimately and imaginatively to the disaster of the present. In our meetings, we will explore together the aspects of life that, in Isabel Stengers’ words, “have been anaesthetized, massacred, and dishonoured in the name of a progress that is reduced today to the imperative of economic growth.” In doing so, the seminar seeks to inspire hope and a sense of possibilities, and to catalyze creative solutions and collective action.

Course topics include: productive alternatives to apocalyptic thinking; cultivating deep listening; Indigenous and anthropological methods for “knowing from the inside”; studying the earth’s material witnessing; and building new worlds through an Indigenous understanding of deep time. Students will be asked to keep a journal of notes and questions; to engage with the intimate and astonishing nature of multisensory study; and to complete an essay or trans-medial project (that may involve writing, video, soundscape, etc.) that relates to one or more of the issues addressed in the course.

Grading

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