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:

CA823: Special Topic:  Art After Nature

A study of contemporary art, philosophy, and decolonial ecology, Art After Nature foregrounds naturecultures: the embeddedness of human and more-than-human beings within a complex meshwork of relations upon which all life depends. For its viewers, contemporary art provides a vital space for contemplation, feeling, “staying with the trouble” (Haraway), and a slowing down of time. From bio-art and site-specific installations to moving images and speculative fabulations, artists are turning to the human/vegetal/animal/mineral entanglements on our seriously damaged planet to propose new modes of world-making or to revisit old ones.

Topics will include art and activism, critical plant studies, Indigenous philosophy, elemental ecocriticism, posthuman feminism, and decolonial environmental justice, among others. For their final projects, which may involve research-creation, students may explore works of art or visual culture from any place or period using the course readings and activities as a foundation. Our approach will involve critical reading, but will also include what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed “reparative reading,” in which the reader seeks solutions and healing. Such an approach allows us, in Zoe Todd’s words, “to make capacious room to grieve with and for everything humanity is losing to plural crises today.”

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Learning outcomes:

• To understand the ways visual art contributes to and is constitutive of culture.
• To read and write about core concepts, methods, and theories from the discipline of art history and visual culture studies.
• To observe, analyze, and interpret a range of works of contemporary art.
• To apply art historical principles and research techniques as a means of investigation and knowledge creation.
• To develop a focused topic of research that combines written and possibly creative elements.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING NOTES: