The Graduate School and University Center

                                                           of The City University of New York

                                                                 Ph.D. Program in Art History

 

            FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS & PRELIMINARY READINGS

 

If you purchase your books through http://www.gc.cuny.edu/bookshop, you will have these discount prices (through arrangement with Amazon.com and other retailers) and the Mina Rees Library will receive a 15% donation for the purchase of library books.  Most of these books, of course, are also available to borrow from the Graduate Center and other CUNY schools’ libraries. 

 

N.B.    Lecture classes are limited to 20 students, Methods of Research is limited to 15 and seminar classes are limited to 12 students.  Three overtallies are allowed in each class, but written permission from the instructor and from the Executive Officer and/or the Deputy Executive Officer is required.

 

ART 70000 - Methods of Research

GC: Mon., 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Long, Rm. 3421, [96031]

Office Hours:  Wed. 4:30-6:00 P.M.

 

This course will examine a variety of methodological approaches associated with the practice of art history in the twentieth century.  Beginning with formalist interpretations, we will proceed to discuss iconographical, social/political, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, feminist, and post-colonial approaches.  Among the authors to be discussed will be Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Clark, Derrida, Freud, Fry, Greenberg, Herbert, Panofsky, Pollack, Riegl, Sedgwick, and Wolfflin.  Students will prepare an oral report, followed by a paper, on an object or building located in New York, using a method/s of their choice.  Auditors by permission.

 

Preliminary Readings:

Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940) in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 539-548, 562-567.

Susan Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, and Americanism (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1999), 219-224, 246-250.

 

 

ART 72000 - Topics in Greek Art and Architecture:  Classical Athenian Art

GC: Wed., 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Kousser, Rm. 3421, [96032]

Office Hours: Wed., 5:30-6:30 P.M., 8:30-9:30 P.M. or by appointment [rkousser@brooklyn.cuny.edu]

 

The art of Classical Athens has long been seen as canonical, but its very familiarity has complicated its analysis in modern terms.  Past scholars have tended to focus on issues such as style, attribution, and workshop practices, but given the limited evidence available, these may not be the most fruitful avenues of approach.  Surveying the major monuments and debates within the field, this course will examine how new methodologies can illuminate long-familiar works of art such as the Parthenon and Nike Temple Parapet.  In addition, we will consider the critical role played by scholarship on Classical Greek art — from Pliny the Elder, to Vasari, to Winckelmann — within the development of the field of art history as a whole.  Major topics will include the evolution of naturalism; mythological narrative; democratic and imperial  art; the categories of Western/non-Western in relation to Persia; philosophical and scientific theories of vision and their impact on the arts; and classical revivals  in later Greek and Roman art.  Auditors permitted. 

 

Course Requirements:  a paper, a final exam, and a brief (15-minute) in-class presentation.

 

FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART 72000 - Cont’d

 

Preliminary reading:

J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

 

 

ART 740000 - Topics in Modern Art and Architecture:  Islamic Art, Architecture and Society in the West

GC: Mon., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Dodds, Rm. 3421, [96823]

Office hours: Mon., 4:00-5:00 P.M. or by appointment.

 

This course will explore the meanings that can be drawn from interchange between the architecture of Islamic communities within pluralistic societies in Europe, the Mediterranean and America.  In the 20th century, global

economics and politics will draw the architecture of Iraq, Iran and New York City into the subject of the course.

It will begin with an introduction to Islamic Architecture, and an exploration of issues surrounding the formation of visual identity in a multi-confessional landscape. It will continue with a number of case studies ranging from

the 8th century to the present, that include introductions to some of the theoretical discourses that have emerged

concerning cultural representation and exchange and appropriation in art and architecture. Auditors by permission of instructor. Course Requirements:  A Final Examination and a short paper.

 

Preliminary reading:

Oleg Grabar, Chapter 4 “Islamic Attitudes Towards the Arts” in The Formation of Islamic Art, Revised and Enlarged (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

 

 

ART 75000 - Topics in European Art and Architecture, 1300-1750: Early Modern Disseminations: Encounters with European Culture East & West

 GC: M, 6:30-8:30 P.M., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [96835] Cross listed with CL 80900, ENGL 81000 & RSCP 72100

 

This course will explore the impact of contact between European and non-European cultures in the Renaissance and Early Modern period, an age of exploration and expansion.  It will concentrate on the transformations that occur when cultural forms originally associated with the Italian city-state move across borders via national states and empires to the New World and the eastern Mediterranean, to Tenochtitlan and the Ottoman Empire.  We will begin by considering cartography as the European mapping of its own internally dynamic geographical space and its relation to geographies beyond its borders in the major English and Spanish cartographic projects.  We will then consider both the reciprocal effects of encounters between European and non-European cultures on each other and the resulting hybrid forms expressing a range from resistance, absorption, and synthesis.  Themes will include culture as forms in geographic motion, as well as issues of authenticity, imitation, appropriation, and mimicry.  Emphasis will be placed on Italian English, French, and Spanish encounters with the New World and the Ottoman Empire.  Examples will be drawn from the historical, literary and visual traditions, including case histories and the theory of the state and empire; lyric, epic, travel narrative, and ethnographic description; prints, drawings, architecture, and cartography.  Emphasis will be placed on critical approaches and research problems as illustrated in readings from political and cultural history, literary criticism, and art history as applied to such figures as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, Cervantes, Garsilaso, Thevet, Léry.

 

FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART 75000 - Cont’d

 

This course satisfies a requirement for the Renaissance Studies Certificate program, but all students are welcome.  Because this is a cross-disciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material drawn from their home discipline for discussion and assignments.  Auditors permitted only if regular in attendance.

 

 

ART 75020 - Topics in Northern Renaissance Art and Architecture:  German Painting and Graphics from 1375 to 1550

GC: Tues., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Lane, Rm. 3421, [96035]

Office Hours: Tues., 6:15-7:15 P.M. and by appointment

 

An intensive study of German painting, woodcut, and engraving from the late Gothic period to the Reformation.  After considering the work of Master Bertram, Master Francke, Witz, Lochner, Master E.S., Schongauer, and Pacher, lectures will focus on Dürer and Grunewald and then address the paintings and prints of Cranach, Altdorfer, and Holbein.  Five (5) auditors permitted.

 

Course Requirements:  Choice between a term paper and a final examination.  Students who wish to write a term paper must have a strong background in Northern Renaissance art and a good reading knowledge of German.

 

 

Preliminary Reading:

Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, 1967).

James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art:  Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575. 2nd Edition. Revised by Larry Silver and Henry Luttikhuizen (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2005), Ch. 1, 3-4, and 12-15.

(In addition, students who have no background in Northern Renaissance Art should read Ch. 2, 5-10, and 16).

 

 

ART 76020 - Topics in Modern Art: Narratives of Twentieth-Century Art:  Modernity, Modernism and Post-Modernism

GC:  Wed., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Braun,  Rm.3421, [96039]

 

Structured as a chronological survey, this lecture course addresses the historiography of twentieth-century art by re-examining the theoretical frameworks for the key terms modernism/avant-garde and modernism/postmodernism. Clement Greenberg’s theory of high modernism is established in its historical context and then contrasted with the actual intentions and reception of the earlier European avant-garde. Cubism, Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism are discussed in detail with particular attention to the avant-gardes' involvement with political ideologies and gender politics, and to the dialogue between fine art and mass culture. Separate lectures are devoted to Picasso, De Chirico, and Duchamp as precursors of postmodern strategies of appropriation, pastiche, kitsch, and the copy. The course then considers the fate of the avant-garde project under totalitarian regimes, and its subsequent transformation in post WWII America, with lectures on Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and definitions of post-modernism. Students will be given weekly reading pertaining to the lectures, including artists manifestos and critical theory. These will be discussed in class. Course textbooks: Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-garde (Minneapolis, 1984); Andreas Huyssen,

 

 

FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART 76020 - Cont’d

 

After the Great Divide (Indianapolis and Bloomington, 1986); Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990 (Oxford and Cambridge Mass., 1992).  The course will have a final exam.  Auditors permitted.

 

 

ART 76020 - Topics in Modern Art:  Dada and then Surrealism

GC:  Mon., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Caws, Rm. 3421, [96040]

 

After an abbreviated glance at the DADA movement – in its performance, texts, and art --we will move on (or, depending on the point of view adopted), over to surrealism in its textual/performative  and visual representations. In both cases, the performance/writing/speaking preceded painting, so the literary element has to have its place alongside the performative – and many of the performers/visual artists left verbal traces. Among the figures to be considered, in all probability, there are  Louis Aragon, Hans (Jean) Arp, Antonin Artaud, Hugo Ball, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Sophie Calle, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Leonor Fini, Wilhelm Freddie,  Diego Giacometti, Jacqueline Lamba, Dora Maar, René Magritte, André Masson, Matta Echaurren, Meret Oppenheim, Benjamin Péret, Pablo Picasso,

Kurt Schwitters,  Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, and Tristan Tzara. Class presentations, readings textual and theoretical, a short and a long paper.

 

Preliminary Readings:

Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets (Harvard, second edition, 1981).

Mary Ann Caws, Surrealist Painters and Poets (Cambridge: MIT, 2000).  

Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT, 1993).

 

 

 

 

ART  76020 - Topics in Modern Art:  Beyond Impressionism:  French Painting, 1880-1900

GC:  Tues., 2:00-4:00 P.M., Prof. Sund, Rm., 3421, [96037]

Office Hours:  Tues., 4:00-5:00 P.M.

 

This course focuses upon those artists traditionally labeled "Post-Impressionist" (Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh), as well as on Monet's post-1880 production, and proposes their linkage in a tendency toward willful subjectivity -- as opposed to the ostensibly empiricist aims of the Impressionists in the 1860s and '70s.  Discussion centers on the devaluation of mimesis in order to develop an evocative art of ideas, emotion, and personal sensation.  While attention to the late-nineteenth-century revivals of traditional narrative art, allegory, symbolic motifs and dramatic incident (e.g., in the work of Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, Gauguin), are explored, emphasis falls upon the development of abstract means of expressive signification (i.e., upon the avant-garde's interest in exploiting the evocative potential of color, line, form and space) -- hence the ways in which late-nineteenth-century trends lay groundwork for the rise of early-twentieth-century nonobjective art.

 

Course Requirements:  Students will be required to write three critiques of scholarly essays chosen from the course bibliography (approximately 5-6 pages each).  There will be a final exam (consisting of several image-based essays).  The critiques will be worth 20 points apiece (hence, 60 percent of the final grade); the exam will be worth 40 points.  Auditors permitted.

 

 

FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART  76020 - Cont’d

 

Preliminary reading:  

M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: 1953, pp. 3-46).

Robert Goldwater, Symbolism, (London: 1979).

Richard Shiff, "The End of Impressionism," in: Charles S. Moffet, et al., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-86 (exhib. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986).

 

 

ART 76020 - Topics in Modern Art:  Modernism and Nationalism in Germany and Central Europe, 1898-1938

GC: Wed., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Long, Rm. 3421, [96036]

Office Hours:  Wed., 4:30-6:00 P.M.

 

This course will focus on the multiple modernisms that emerged from the polarizing tensions of industrialization and political instability in Germany and Central Europe from the end of the nineteenth century through the 1930s. Although we will focus on the visual manifestations, such as Expressionism, Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit, that captured the attention of critics and patrons in Germany from the end of the Wilhelmine Empire through the Weimar Republic, we will also discuss the spread of such developments among the enthusiasts of modernism in Poland and Hungary.  In addition, we will examine the impact of Soviet Constructivism upon experimental painters, photographers, and designers in these countries during the twenties.  Essays by contemporary critics such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, and Wilhelm Worringer will help to explain how modernism became the antithesis of nationalism, especially in Germany.  To produce a more nuanced picture of the artistic experimentation that emerged out of the conflicting demands of modernism and nationalism, attention will be given to women artists such as Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Hannah Höch, Lucia Moholy as well as to their male colleagues – Ernst Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.  We will conclude the course with a discussion of the Soviet and Nazi censorship in the 1930s of these experimental artists.  A final exam and a short oral report/paper will be required.  Auditors permitted. 

 

Preliminary reading:

Bertolt Brecht, “Popularity and Realism” (1938) in Art in Theory: 1900-2000, ed. C. Harrison & P. Wood (Oxford, UK/ Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 489-93; and George Lukacs, from “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline” (1934) in German Expressionism: Documents from the end of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. R. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 307-11. 

 

 

ART 77200 – Topics in Native North American Art and Architecture:  North American Indian Art

GC: Thurs., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Corbin, Rm. 3421, [96034]

Office Hours:  Thurs. 11:30-12:30 p.m.

 

This course is an introductory survey of North American Indian and Eskimo art.  It covers the following art-producing areas and cultures:  Northwest Coast (Ozette, Salish, Nootka, Haida, Kwakiutl, Tlingit); Eskimo (S.W. Alaskan Eskimo):  Southwest (Hohokam, Mogollon, Anasazi, Hopi, Navajo); Plains (Arapaho, Kiowa, Mandan, Sioux);  Woodlands (Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, Ojibwa, Iroquois); contemporary art (tradition and innovation in several contemporary Native American and Eskimo artists).

 

Course Requirements:  a ten-page research paper and a final exam.  No auditors permitted.

FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART 77200 – Cont’d

 

Preliminary Readings:

Janet C. Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 or later editions).

Christian F. Feest, Native Arts of North America (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992 edition or later).

 

 

ART 77300 - Topics in American Art and Architecture:  Innocents Abroad:  The European Training of 19th Century American Artists

GC: Tues., 11:45 A.M. - 1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Webster, Rm. 3421, [96038]

Office Hours: Tues. 3:00-5:00 PM

 

This lecture course will trace the development of American art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through a review of the impact of European instruction on American artists. The course will begin with an examination of the experience and training in Benjamin West's London studio of such artists as John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart.  Further along there will be a review of the education American painters received in Düsseldorf, and sculptors in Italy, but the majority of the lectures will focus on the training of American artists in Paris culminating with a review of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Americans in Paris, 1860-1900."  Curators of the exhibition have been invited to lecture in class and/or the museum.  There will be written assignments throughout the semester, a midterm and final exam. Auditors permitted

Preliminary Readings:
Required
Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 (London: National Gallery, 2006).
Recommended
Lois Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris, Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville, 1991).

 

 

ART 79400 - Aesthetics of Film

 GC:  Thurs., 2:00-5:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Liebman, Rm. C-419, [96041], [Cross-listed with Theatre 71400 and MALS 77100 & FSCP 81000]

Office Hours: Thurs., 3:30-5:30 P.M.

 

This course introduces students to graduate-level film analysis by acquainting them with basic film techniques, strategies, and styles. Central topics to be studied include narrative and nonnarrative forms, mise-en-scene, composition, camera movement, editing, sound and music, genre, and spectatorship. 

Students will become familiar with a variety of critical perspectives on film as well as the essential bibliographical sources and fundamentals of research in the field. The major required course texts are: David Bordwell/Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 7th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2003)--and Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor (Princeton U.P., 1988), an introduction to "neo-formalism." Some key historical and theoretical primary

 

FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART 79400 - Cont’d

 

texts, as well as others focusing on contextualizing single films, will also be assigned. Whenever possible, books and articles will be placed on reserve.  No auditors, permits, non-matrics allowed.

 

Preliminary Readings:

Students would be well advised to look through the Bordwell/Thompson text over the summer so as to accelerate their progress in the course.

 

 

ART 83000 - Seminar:  Selected Topics in Medieval Art and Architecture:  Paris, 1130-1270:  Creation of a Capital

GC:  Thurs. 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Clark, Rm. TBA, [96836], Cross-listed with MSCP 80500

 

By 1250, Paris was the largest, best organized, and the most cosmopolitan city in western Europe.  This multi-disciplinary seminar will examine the conceptual and practical recovery, development, and ascendance of Paris through its social, economic, political, educational, and religious institutions.  We will examine monuments and organizations from the cathedral to the university, from the royal palaces to the marketplaces, from the city walls to the river trade, to trace the creation of the capital and the Gothic style.  We will study the works of scholars such as Robert-Henry Bauthier, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean Dufour, among others.  Special attention will be paid to such monuments as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, and the development of the manuscript trade.  Students will be required to do an oral presentation and a research paper.  Auditors by permission of instructor at first day of class.

 

Preliminary Readings:

A "familiarity" (as opposed  to reading them) with relevant volumes of the Nouvelle Histoire de Paris would be a useful preparation.

 

 

ART 85010 - Seminar:  Selected Topics in Italian Renaissance and Mannerist Art and Architecture:  Italian Sculpture from Michelangelo to Bernini

 GC: Mon., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Richter, Rm. 3421, [96043]

Office Hours:  Mon., 3:00-4:00 P.M.

 

This seminar focuses on the transition from Renaissance to Baroque sculpture.  The view of sculpture in the fifteenth century was largely defined by Ghiberti in his Commentaries.  For the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries the sources are considerably richer: Vasari and Condivi on Michelangelo, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and Baldinucci’s Life of Bernini.   An examination of these primary sources will be followed by a study of such major Florentine artists as Michelangelo, Jacopo Sansovino, Ammanati, Bandinelli, and Cellini, along with the Northern sculptor Giovanni Bologna.  Shifting to Rome, students can focus on the early career of Algardi, Duquesnoy, and Bernini. Classes will concentrate on the creation of new genres such as the bronze statuette, the fountain, the colossus, and the emphasis placed on the creation of innovative, decorative

objects such as the Saleria of Cellini (stolen from Vienna, but recently recovered). We will also be exploring the political, religious and social ambiance of Florence and Rome during the reign of the Medici dukes and the pontificates of Sixtus IV, Julius II, and Urban VIII.  Three (3) auditors permitted.

 

Course Requirements:  30 minute oral presentation followed by a research paper (approx. 15 pages)

 

FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART 85010 - Cont’d

 

Preliminary Readings:

John Pope-Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1st paperback edition, 2000).

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. G. Bull (London: Penguin paperback, rev. ed., 1999).

Vasari, Life of Michelangelo.

 

 

ART 86040 – Seminar:  Selected Topics in Contemporary Art:  Reconsidering the European Fifties

 GC:  Thurs., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Golan, Rm. 3421, [96044]

Office Hours:  Thurs., 12:00-2:00 P.M.

 

This course will consider painting and sculpture, bringing in design, architecture, photography, cinema, and music as well. We will focus on the following issues: 1945: Year Zero or continuity? (i.e. the legacy of Fascism and the question of reconstruction); the impact of the Cold War (i.e. the “double fracture” of 1947) the European/American culture wars, and, in Europe, the impact of the Iron Curtain and colonial wars; the ethos of neo-realism; the thematics of caves & ruins; the shift from Synthesis of the Arts to the Open Work; the concept of late modernism vs. a neo-avant-garde; the rewriting of the history of the first historical avant-garde. Auditors not allowed.

 

Besides the secondary literature, readings will include texts by R. Banham, R. Barthes, G. Bataille, G. Bazin, J. Cage, J. Dubuffet, U. Eco, S. Giedion, E. Gombrich, J. Huizinga, A. Jorn, Le Corbusier, F. Leger, H. Sedlmayr, W. Worringer.

 

Course Requirements:  There will be weekly readings and discussion of the readings in class.  In the last two weeks there will be class presentations based on your research papers, which topic will be decided in consultation with me in my office. They should be ca. 45 minutes long, with a written version circa 20 pages long to be submitted at the end of the course.

 

Preliminary readings:

Paul Betts, “The Bauhaus as Cold War Legend: West German Modernism Revisited,” German Politics and Society, Summer 1996.

Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Grey Room, Fall 2001.

 

 

ART 87000 - Seminar:  Selected Topics in Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture:  Aztec Art, Pre-and Post-Hispanic

GC:  Wed., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Profs. Quiñones-Keber, Rm. 3421, [96042]

Office Hours: Wed., 2:00-4:00 PM

 

In less than a century before the Spanish conquest of 1521, the Aztecs of ancient Mexico not only gained political ascendancy but also created an extraordinary number of artworks in a distinctive, vigorous style.  This seminar approaches Aztec art as a continuation of earlier Mesoamerican traditions as well as a bold and cohesive manifestation of uniquely Aztec religious, political, and cultural concerns.  Introductory lectures will survey the range of Aztec art forms (e.g., architecture, stone and clay sculpture, manuscript painting, ceramics, featherwork), their style and iconography, inherited and invented features, survival into the post-conquest period, and the indigenous and colonial sources that permit us to understand them.  Requirements include readings,


FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

ART 87000 - Cont’d

 

written critiques, and discussion as well as a seminar paper (oral and written).  Auditors permitted, but they are expected to attend regularly, do all readings, and participate in discussions.

 

Students should view the artworks of all cultures represented in the Mesoamerican collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, with special attention to the Olmecs, Tlatilco, Teotihuacan, Toltecs, and Aztecs.

 

Preliminary Readings:

For background on the Aztecs, read Serge Gruzinski. The Aztecs: Rise and Fall of an Empire. (New York, Abrams, 1992).

 

 

ART 87500 - Seminar: Selected Topics in American Architecture, Urbanism, and Design:   Greenwich Village:  Architecture and Culture

 GC: Thurs., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Murphy, Rm. 3421, [96045]

Office Hours:  Thurs., 10:00 A.M.-12:00 P.M.

 

This seminar will consider Greenwich Village as both an architectural and cultural phenomenon.  The course will trace its development from its origins as an actual village to its emergence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a center of artistic and bohemian culture.  In addition to examining how the Village grew physically—in relation to its plan and to its architecture—we will also be considering how it began to have a particular identity within New York City.  The significance of Greenwich Village to the debates about urban renewal in the twentieth century (it was home to Jane Jacobs who based many of the observations in her seminal anti-modernist tract, The Death and Life of Great American Cities [1961], on observations of the Village where she lived) and its place in ongoing considerations of gentrification in New York, will also be addressed.

Seminar meetings will consist of discussions of common readings, site visits, and presentations by students of their research projects.  The course will require a research paper and active participation in seminar discussions.

Auditors permitted.

 

Preliminary reading:

Terry Miller, Greenwich Village and How it Got That Way (New York: 1990).

 

 

ART 89000 - Seminar:  Selected Topics in the History of Photography:  Photography:  The Difference Within

 GC:  Wed., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Batchen, Rm. 3421, [96046]

Office hours: Wed., 11:30 AM-12:30 P.M. and by appointment (212-817-8044)

 

There has been an increasing amount of scholarship on the photography produced elsewhere--in Africa, Latin America, Asia. This seminar will examine a selection of this literature with a view to determining its strengths and weaknesses as a discourse on photography. This examination will then inform the research project to be undertaken by each participant in the class, an 'ethnography' of a particular photographic practice to be found in the New York area. These practices might include the wedding photographs made for members of the Vietnamese diaspora, or the assembling of shrines incorporating photographs in Thai restaurants, or the deployment of photographic portraits in home altars by Mexican Americans. Or participants might bring the ethnographic method to bear on some of our own strange, indigenous photographic rituals (professional wedding


FALL 2006 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

 

ART 89000 - Cont’d

 

photographs, for example). These research projects will be presented as CAA-style talks and then as finished essays. The aim of the class will be to demonstrate (or refute) the proposition that there are many photographies,

not just one. But it will also investigate the nature of difference (is it only to be found elsewhere or also within our own culture?) and seek appropriate ways to represent all these differences in our accounts of photography.

No auditors allowed.

 

Preliminary Reading

Christopher Pinney, 'Preface' and 'Prologue', Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Reaktion Books, 1997), 8-15.

Geoffrey Batchen, 'How the Other Half Photographs: Looking Globally,'

The New York Times (July 12, 2003), B9.

 

 

SEE ALSO

 

FSCP  81000 Cultural Theory and the Documentary Film

 GC:  Thurs., 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Griffiths, Rm. C-419, [96605], Cross listed with THEA 81500

Office Hours:  Thurs., 5:30-6:30 P.M., Room 3403 (212-817-8888).

 

Cultural Theory and the Documentary Film is a lecture course examining documentary cinema through the lens of cultural theory.  The course is organized around three key topics:  the documentary archive and the ethnographic gaze; national identity and documentary aesthetics; and experimental and postcolonial documentary practice.  Cultural Theory and the Documentary offers students a broad indroduction to cultural theory, drawing upon such theoretical frameworks as historiography, race, gender, social class, nation, ethnography, and postmodernism.  Films screened in class will encompass the following genres:  silent ethnographic film, Griersonian documentary, feminist documentary, direct cinema, auteurist documentary, postcolonial documentary, activist video, and popular Imax films.  The course considers how these films circulate within and across historical, social, and cultural spaces and evoke discourses of “truth,” “realism,” and “authenticity” through their representational forms and cross-cultural readings.  A short mid-term essay and a research paper are required.  Auditors permitted.