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Through
this class students will gain a better understanding of the
contemporary cultural context for their work. The class is structured
around
a survey of contemporary cultural theory. To create a focus for our
discussions we will pay particular attention to an expanded, expansive
and
non-fundamentalist concept of "composition."
"Composition" seems akin to those mythic fundaments of "creation"
which have
been usefully critiqued as by postmodern thinkers. Thus it was posited
that
an artist’s work was not primarily formal or even material but largely
conceptual or more recently "relational". Yet, if we accept
the critique and
subsequent deconstruction of such unexamined universals, what does it
mean
that we still go on composing? What are artists composing? What are we
composing with, on, in? We compose with materials, sounds, images, bodies
and words, but more intangibly, duration, space, intensities and flows.
I
hope that composition can be a useful, comparative and interdisciplinary
concept for discussing the artistic process. Many questions will be
considered, such as can the concept of "composition" be usefully
contrasted
with ideas of "performance" and "performativity" as
elaborated by Judith
Butler. Perhaps we can usefully assert that composition is opposed to
the
notion of the all-consuming concept of "design" which Hal Foster
critiques
in his recent book "Design and Crime". What is the relation
of composition
to simulation; what do we compose in our immaterial, virtual reality?
However, while composition is the focusing question, the writings we will
examine address a broad range of questions which concern contemporary
artists and thinkers. Texts by Barthes, Foucault, Butler, Jameson, Deleuze
and Guattari, Gertrude Stein, Jean Luc Godard, Sarat Maharaj, and many
others will be assigned.
Learning Activities: Students will be asked to begin the class by
researching both a historical and contemporary picture of their "discipline"
with the goal of situating their own practice in this context. This exercise
will be good background for the MFA thesis. Students are expected to
generate reading notes on weekly readings and to make brief in class
presentations on the readings. A final essay on a topic developed in
consultation with the instructor will be required.
Required Texts: text and Reading package, TBA (students will be notified
by
email)
Grading: TBA (first class)
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