Spring 2001 Courses

ART 70000 - Methods of Research
GC: Mon, 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Golan, Rm. 3416, [40552]
This course will consider some foundational texts in the history of art and aesthetics focusing on the following questions: whether there is such a thing as pure formalism, the definition/framing of the art object, the historicity of style, the strategies of neo-formalism. Authors will include: Riegl, Wölfflin, Worringer, Panofsky, Sedlmayr, Gombrich, Benjamin, Adorno, Schapiro, Heidegger, Derrida, Kubler, Bois, Krauss. Four (4) auditors allowed. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 72100 - Topics In Baroque Art and 18th Century Art: Dutch Painting 1590-1675: The Figurative Tradition
GC: Mon., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Slatkes, Rm. 3416, [40553]
This lecture course will focus on history and genre painting. We will start with a discussion of the late mannerist tradition in Haarlem and Utrecht. Among the topics covered will be the Haarlem Academy, the influence of Bartholomaus Spranger, Karel van Mander as a painter, Hendrick Goltzius - as printmaker and painter - and Cornelis van Haarlem. Among the Utrecht late mannerists, there will be lectures on Abraham Bloemaert and Joachim Wtewael. We will discuss the development of caravaggism in Utrecht with lectures on Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrick Ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen. In Haarlem, we will examine Frans Hals as a genre painter, and artists such as Pieter de Grebber. In Amsterdam, we will look at Pieter Lastman, in Leiden, early Rembrandt and Jan Lievens, and we will follow Rembrandt to Amsterdam. The development of the "new" genre styles with Samuel van Hoogstraten and Nicolaes Maes in Dordrecht will be looked at. "Dutch Classicism," does it actually exist?: Problems raised by the recent Rotterdam exhibition will be investigated (Caesar van Everdingen, Jacob van Campen as a painter, the decorations of the Huis ten Bosch in The Hague). The so-called "little Dutch masters": Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer will complete the course. A research paper will be required in addition to a final exam. Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 75500 - Topics in Modern Art: International Romanticism
GC: Wed. 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Mainardi, Rm. 3416, [40554]
This course investigates recent revisionist thinking about Romanticism with emphasis on how new interpretations of gender, politics, nationalism, and popular arts interact with traditional readings. Subjects covered will include orientalism, the gothic revival, the new individualism, naturalist landscape, shifts in artistic careers and exhibition venues, the relation of visual arts to literature, the rise of lithography and caricature. Major artists include Géricault, Delacroix, (France); Blake, Turner, Constable, (England); Runge, Friedrich, (Germany); Goya, (Spain); Cole, (America); Format of the course will be lecture and discussion. Students will choose individual reading projects and will give brief in-class presentations on this work. There will be a final paper based on this presentation and a slide exam at the end of the semester. Auditors by permission of instructor. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 75500- Topics in Modern Art: Art and Film Across the 20th Century
GC: Thurs. 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, Rm. 3416, [40555]
This lecture course explores the crucial inter-actions between cinema and fine art. It analyzes how film provided a new mode of looking at images and a vast visual data bank that profoundly impacted painters and photographers, how art influenced film, and how the two came of age with modern life. The focus is this dialogue, all-important but yet little-explored. We consider representative figures: Lumiére Bros, D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, Edward M. Porter, Oscar Micheaux, Cecil B. DeMille, Dudley Murphy alongside Fernand Léger, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Florine Stettheimer, Joseph Cornell, John Sloan, the Mexican Muralists, Weegee, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman. Chronological histories of art & film are woven together, with particular attention paid to developments in the United States. Lecture topics covered include: Movies begin, 1890s; Writing Race into early movies; Cubist Cinema; Directing Woman; Golden Age of Hollywood; avant-garde Films, Cinema & the City. Student projects may focus on any

Weekly reading assignments are compiled in a course packet; weekly viewing assignments on reserve in the library are done outside class. Five (5) auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 75600 - Topics in Modern Architecture: Early 20th Century Modernisms in Europe and America
GC: Thurs., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Bletter, Rm. 3416, [40556]
This course will deal with such concepts as modernism, nationalism, functionalism, and progress and their changing interpretation. While earlier histories saw this period as possessing a unified approach, a monolithic internationalism, exemplary of "classic modernism," at least at the outset, it is characterized by quite distinctive regional, often concurrent developments in the Soviet Union, Germany, Holland, Italy, France, and the U.S. Problems, contradictions, and conflicts between these movements and avant-gardes will be discussed: the deStijl group and the Amsterdam School, the Italian Futurists and the Rationalists, the German Expressionists and the architects of the New Objectivity, the Russian Constructivists and the "de-urbanists," the mid-western modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright and his California followers Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra and the "modernism" of the prevailing Beaux-Arts tradition and Art Deco. Although the course will not be primarily concerned with a monographic development of major architects, central figures such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Wright will be examined to establish a context that became a benchmark for other members of the avant-garde. Requirements: term paper. Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 76000 - Topics in Contemporary Art: Perspectives on Minimalism
GC: Mon., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Chave, Rm. 3416, [40557]
Focusing principally on the New York-based history of the Minimalist movement, this course will investigate Minimalism's critical reception and the latter-day legacies of the movement. To be conducted colloquium-style, with students discussing readings and giving short end-of-term reports. Auditors accepted by permission of instructor at the first meeting of class. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 77100 - Topics in American Art: The Gilded Age and the Dawn of Modernism
GC: Wed., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Webster, Rm. 3416, [40558]
Just when many American artists thought they had bested France at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, new developments in architecture (Sullivan and Wright), photography (Stieglitz and Steichen), and painting (the Ashcan School) challenged the newly won authority of such tastemakers as Charles McKim, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John La Farge. Covering the period from 1876 and the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition to 1913 and the Armory Show, this course will examine the competing agendas for cultural authority during America's gilded age. Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 79500 - History of the Motion Picture: History of the Cinema I: 1895-1930
GC: Mon., 6:30-9:30 P.M., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Custen, [Cross-listed with Theatre 71600 and MALS 77200], [40559]
The course is devoted to the analysis of the development of the cinema largely through the rise of Hollywood, though other national cinemas throughout the world will also be covered.

The growth of the international film industry, above all of Hollywood, the emergence of representational codes, popular genres, and cinematic canons, and the cinema's impact on society will be central topics of discussion. We will also look at the struggles various groups waged to control and define the cinema, as well as investigate the influential role played in its development by other art forms. Different strategies and theories of historiographic research will also be analyzed. Auditors by permission of instructor. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 80100 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Non-Western Art: Masking as an Art Form in Melanesia, Africa, and North America
GC: Mon., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Corbin, Rm. 3416, [40560]
The seminar will study masking as an art form in several areas of West Africa (Mali, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria), North America (Northwest Coast and the Southwest), and the Pacific Islands (Island New Guinea, New Britain, and New Ireland). In-class student reports with slides will focus on an in-depth study of masks from these three regions of non-western art as found in the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A final research paper - ca. 10 pages of double-spaced text and additional footnotes, bibliography, and illustrations - will be required of each student in the class. Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 80100 - Seminar: Selected Topics In Art History: Art and Psychoanalysis
GC: Tues., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Adams, Rm. 3416, [40561]
This course explores the application of psychoanalytic method to western art. It focuses on the contributions of Freud, Winnicot and Lacan to reading works of art. We consider the meaning of imagery from several points of view, including the artist's biography and the cultural context, and we will also read works as texts in their own right. The psychoanalytic method will be compared with other methods such as formalism, iconography, post-structuralism and semiotics. Students will give a seminar report relating the psychoanalytic method to a 19th or 20th century artist or theme of their choosing. Auditors by permission of instructor. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 80100 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Art History: Women and Salons, 18th to 20th Century
GC: Tue., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Braun, Rm. 3416, [40562]
This research seminar would be organized in conjunction with an exhibition I am curating with Emily Bilski on Jewish Women and Salons for the year 2003. For the purposes of the seminar, we will be covering women and salons in general, and not just Jewish figures. Though a specialized subject, it will cover a broad terrain, from the 18th to the early 20th century, and France, Germany, Austria, England, Italy, America, and possibly Latin America. Research will be interdisciplinary, since many of these salons were centers for developments in music, literature and politics, as well as the visual arts. We will begin with introductory lectures, weekly readings and discussions. Some subjects to be considered are: the definition of a salon; changing context over time and among nations; issues of class, gender and social empowerment; the role of women as patrons; the salon as social performance (including issues of dress, décor, and decorum); and the demise of the salon in the 20th century. Students will be researching the salons of individuals such as Henriette Herz, Fanny von Arnstein, Rahel van Varnhagen, Amalie Beer; Adele Bloch-Bauer, Bertha Zuckerlandl, Misia Nathanson Sert, Mme. Guillaume Beer and Mme. Genevieve Straus (who were both featured in Proust) Gertrude Stein, Salka Viertal, Florine Stettheimer, Anna Kuliscioff, Margherita Sarfatti and others. We will be reading key texts on the subject from Goncourt's The Woman of the Eighteenth century to Lougee's Women, Salons and Social Stratification in 17th century France to Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

The grade will be based on a research paper to be presented in class and in written form. French, Italian, or German required. No auditors allowed. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 80300 - Seminar: Selected Topics In Non-Western Art: Mesoamerican Manuscripts
GC: Thurs.11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Quiñones-Keber, Rm. 3416, [40563]
The increasing publication of painted manuscript facsimiles ("codices") and commentaries has made the study of Mesoamerican manuscripts one of the most active research areas in Pre-Columbian art. This seminar focuses on surviving pre-conquest and 16th-century copies produced by such groups as the Mayas, Aztecs, and Mixtecs. Initial lectures will survey the surviving corpus and consider such questions as the range of content (history, genealogy, myth, ritual, religion, cosmology, calendrics, etc.), modes of representation, the production of meaning, the interplay of image and text, and the effects of the Spanish conquest (1521) on indigenous cultural expression. Requirements include critiques and discussions of readings and a seminar report/paper. Readings are in English (and Spanish for Pre-Columbian majors). Auditors permitted, but they are expected to attend regularly, do the readings and contribute to discussions. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 81500 - Seminar: Selected Topics in European Art and Architecture, 1300-1750: Florentine Mannerism: Pontormo, Rosso, and Bronzino
GC: Wed., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Cox-Rearick, Rm. 3416, [40564]
Students in this seminar will investigate the late Renaissance style in painting, sculpture, and architecture known as Mannerism (ca. 1520-70). Although Mannerism became widely diffused, its birthplace was central Italy, particularly Florence, and its main expression was in painting and drawing. Hence the seminar will concentrate on the oeuvres of the three major Florentine Mannerist painters: Pontormo and Rosso, who belonged to the first generation, known as primo manierismo, and Pontormo's pupil Bronzino, the major expondent of la Bella Maniera in the mid-16th century.

A seminar on this subject is timely, for Florentine Mannerism is by no means a closed subject. Stimulated by the 500th anniversaries of the births of Pontormo and Rosso in 1494, scholars published much new research in the 90s--as for example, important monographs on Pontormo (Costamagna, 1994) and Rosso (Franklin, 1995), and a major exhibition in Florence (L'Officina della maniera, 1996). These and other new publications will provide a basis for a revaluation of the work of these artists and of Florentine Mannerism.

Students in the seminar will review the historiography of Mannerism--a 20th-century phenomenon which reflects changing trends in art history, as well as current discourses about the subject. Another emphasis in this course will be on the graphic work of these artists, whose drawings will be studied in visits to the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Morgan Library. Recommended prerequisite: a survey course in Italian High and Late Renaissance art. Reading knowledge of Italian is desirable but not required. No auditors allowed. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 85600 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Modern Architecture: Architecture and Mystery
GC: Tue., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Murphy, Rm. 3416, [40566]
The seminar will open up investigation of an under-examined dimension of modern (18th-20th century) architectural culture: the relationship between architecture and the experience of mystery. The relationship will be approached from two directions. On the one hand, we will look at the role of architecture in the literary genre of mystery, from eighteenth-century Romanticism onward. On the other, we will look at the work of architects and builders whose work provoked mysterious, destabilizing sensations. The architectural work of interest will be that which works against modernist biases towards transparency and rationality. Instead, we will interest ourselves in those buildings-by professional architects as well as amateurs-that conversely aimed at opacity, confusion, and sensation.

The semester will be divided in roughly three sections and during each phase the seminar will run slightly differently. During the first weeks, the instructor will lecture in order to provide historical and conceptual background for subsequent discussions, and will focus on the late eighteenth century. We will also explore local research resources, including the Morgan Library and the New York Public Library. The second part of the seminar will be devoted to group discussions of relevant books and articles drawn from a variety of disciplines. The emphasis will on reading entire books, rather than numerous articles or excerpts. For example, we will read Karen Halttunen's Murder most foul: the killer and the American Gothic imagination (1998) and Anthony Vidler's The architectural uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely (1992). The final third of the semester will be given over to presentation of student research and to attendance at the "Architecture and Mystery" symposium (May 4, 2001). Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 86000 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Abstract-Expressionism - The New York School in the 1940s
GC: Tues., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Hadler, Rm. 3416, [40725]
This course focuses on the rise of Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1940s situating the artists in their historical and cultural milieu. Major artists such as Pollock, Gorky, Rothko, de Kooning, and Krasner will be studied. Key revisionist texts will be examined. Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 86000 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Public Art, Public Response & the Issues of Controversy
GC: Wed., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Senie, Rm. 3416, [40567]
This course will consider the history of contemporary public art in terms of defining and evaluating public response, especially when it takes the form of controversy. There will be meetings with the directors of various public art programs: Percent for Art, MTA transit art, the Public Art Fund, and Creative Time. Students will observe actual works of art in the city, engage their immediate public, and analyze the range of responses. Term projects may take the form of case studies, developing methods and criteria for gathering public response, considering the presentation of public art in the media, or any other topic that pertains to the primary frame of the course. Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 86600 - Seminar: Problems in Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism: From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Post-World War II Developments in Architecture
GC: Wed., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Bletter, Rm. 3421, [40797]
This course will begin with the redefinition of Modernism in the post-war period: its renewal in the architecture of California, the simultaneous hegemony of American corporate modernism, and the rejection of an earlier technocentric model by Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, the Situationists, and the New Brutalists. It will continue with the overt questioning of Modernism by Robert Venturi and his interest in Pop art, the commercial vernacular, the ordinariness of the American cityscape as depicted in Ed Ruscha's photographs, and in the concept of ambiguity developed in literary criticism. It will follow this development into Postmodernism and its differing nature in American architecture in its emphasis on historicism compared with Postmodernism's meaning in other fields. It will also cover the more evolutionary approach to a changing Modernism in Europe in the work of such architects as James Stirling and Aldo Rossi, and the more radical reinterpretation by the so-called Deconstructivists in the nineties (Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhas, etc.) and their theoretical underpinnings. The increasing impact of theory and feminist issues in the consideration of contemporary architecture will be examined, as well as the relationship between developments in architecture and contemporary art. Requirements: oral presentation and term paper. Auditors permitted. Permit students by permission of instructor and Executive Officer or Deputy Executive Officer.

ART 89500 - Seminar: Selected Topics in the History of the Motion Picture: Avant-Garde Film & Video
GC: Wed., 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Boddy, Rm. TBA, [Cross-listed with Theatre 81500], [40568]
This course offers an historical and stylistic survey of independent film and video making in the postwar United States. After identifying significant precursors and contexts for avant-garde filmmaking in early twentieth century European modernist movements, the course examines several related issues through screenings and close analysis of a variety of film and video texts. These topics include the relation of avant-garde film and video culture to aesthetic movements in contemporary American painting, literature, and performing arts; the relation of independent film and video making to the institutions of Hollywood and the television industry; the role of emerging electronic technologies in the avant-garde; and the contributions to an understanding of avant-garde film by contemporary theoretical work in feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and cultural studies. This course requires no previous experience in film studies, and students from a variety of academic backgrounds are welcome. Auditors by permission of instructor

ART 89500 - Seminar: Special Topics in the History of the Motion Picture: Theories of the Cinema
GC: Thur., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Shohat, Rm. TBA,[Cross-listed with Theatre 81600], [40569]
This course will provide an overview of classical and contemporary film theory. Writers, whose contributions to the field will be examined, include Eisenstein, Arnheim, Epstein, Balazs, Bazin, Merleau-Ponty, and Kracauer, among the earlier figures, and such contemporary theorists as Metz, Mitry, Baudry, Mulvey, Heath, and Carroll. Questions about the structure and function of the filmic "text," the nature of cinematic representation and film spectatorship raised by various schools of thought, including phenomenology, Marxism, semiology, psychoanalysis, and feminism will be considered. Although attention is largely on primary theoretical writings, secondary texts and films that help to contextualize specific theories will be used as well. Auditors by permission of instructor.

(SEE ALSO)
THEA 81500 - Seminar: 2001, A Space Odyssey: Cyborgs and Cultural Identity
GC: Tues., 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Hitchcock, Rm. TBA, [40331]
Science fiction film and literature have conventionally explored the theme of what makes a human human. The cyborg builds and bends such conventions by denoting that contestable terrain between the human subject and technoscience. Rather than explore cyborgian space as a simple opposition between humanism and techno-superhumanism, this course will examine key films (and several examples of literature and theory) not to establish the contours of a genre, but to critically engage the mode of narrativity that cyborg films conjure.

The course will begin with several definitions of the cyborg which we will consider alongside significant early representations (Shelley's Frankenstein, Lang's Metropolis, and a few salient clips from Bride of Frankenstein).

Next, we will analyze the components of early Cold War Cyborgania (Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Stood Still) and its relationship to the cyborg of the nuclear apocalypse (Terminator and its myriad "progenies").

The third topic, the cyborg and capital, could easily be a course in itself, but we will restrict ourselves to the alien and alienation in the Alien series and the trenchant dystopia of muties and replicants in Blade Runner--the touchstone of the cyborganic intellectual--(and its contrast with Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Gibson's Neuromancer). These readings will connect to the no less important problem of engendering the cyborg --a space, in particular, where feminist theory and fiction have been a good deal more radical than most high-profile film narratives (alongside the plethora of significant criticism in this area--Haraway, Balsamo, Wolmark, etc.--we will read at least one feminist sci-fi novel, Russ's The Female Man or Piercy's He, She, and It for instance). A fifth case study on cyborg narrativity will feature memory and the fate of history (the memory chip/clip as the memorial to the death of Time in Total Recall, but also the time/space reversals of cyborgania in Twelve Monkeys or The Matrix). Auditors by permission of instructor.