THE GRADUATE CENTER
of THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
SPRING 2008 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS & PRELIMINARY READINGS w/OFFICE HOURS
If you purchase your books through http://www.gc.cuny.edu/bookshop, you will receive 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. The Methods of Research course is limited to 15 students, other lectures are limited to 20 students and seminars are limited to 12 students. Three overtallies are allowed in each class but written permissions from the instructor and from the Executive Officer and/or the Deputy Executive Officer are required.
ART 70000 - Methods of Research
GC: Tues. 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Batchen, Rm. 3421, [91905]
Office hours: Tues. 10:30- 11:30 a.m. and by appointment. Room:3408.01 ph: 212-817-8044. Email: gbatchen@gc.cuny.edu
This seminar aims to introduce its participants to art historical study at the graduate level. The class will critically examine a variety of interpretive methods associated with the practice of art history, particularly those developed over the past forty years, such as formalism, marxism, social history, feminism, semiotics, deconstruction, visual culture, postcolonialism, and so on. In that sense it will provide students with a necessarily partial typology of recent art historical practices. The class will ask participants to develop their skills in looking, researching, writing, and argumentation, four of the basic components of academic art history. However it will also take account of other common art historical practices, such as those encountered in the studio, in museums, and in galleries. In brief, the motivating principle of the class will be a single crucial question: “what is the purpose of art history?” No Auditors allowed.
Preliminary Reading
Eric Fernie, ‘Introduction: A History of Methods,’ Art History and its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995), 10-21.
ART 73000 - Topics In Medieval Art and Architecture: The Medieval Mediterranean
GC: Thurs. 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Ball, Rm. 3421, [91906]
Office hours: Thurs. 10:30-11:30 a.m.; 2:30-3:30 p.m. or by appointment. Email: jball@brooklyn.cuny.edu
The medieval Mediterranean was a lively hub of trade surrounded by varying cultures throughout the period: the Byzantines in the East, the Fatimids in Egypt, the Normans of Sicily, the Umayyads in Spain, and later the Italian kingdoms such as Venice and Genoa. Out of this mix came Christianity, the crucial introduction of books (as opposed to scrolls) and the progression toward literate society. In addition, many art forms, such as icons, whose impact went well beyond the Mediterranean, appeared. The Mediterranean also enabled the further spread of Islam itself along with its visual culture. This class will take a critical look at the idea of a pan-Mediterranean visual culture springing out of a time when the entire region from the Levant to Spain was under Byzantine control, through the beginnings of the Renaissance, when the Mediterranean hosted nearly ten different cultures. Portraiture, dress and textiles, icon painting, calligraphy are just a few art forms that become shared across the Mediterranean despite differences in religion, language, and government. The effects of the Crusades and also colonization, particularly by the Venetians, on Mediterranean visual culture will be discussed, as will the legacy of this culture in the Italian Renaissance.
Three (3) auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading (not available at this time)
ART 76010 – Topics in Late 18th and 19th Century Art and Architecture: Landscape Painting, 1750-1900
GC: Tues. 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Mainardi, Rm. 3421, [91907]
Office hours: Tues. 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Email: pmainardi@gc.cuny.edu
This lecture course will be offered in conjunction with several major exhibitions of landscape painting: Poussin and Nature, Gustave Courbet, and In the Light of Poussin: The Classical Landscape Tradition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Topics will include: the Italianate and Dutch traditions; the Sublime & Romantic landscape; the impact of travel and travel literature, markets and urbanization; Orientalist visions; plein-air painting and the Naturalist landscape; nationalism, and fin-de siècle Symbolist and Arcadian landscapes. Works studied will include paintings, photographs and prints from many European countries and the US. There will be one or more scheduled trips to exhibitions. Requirements include a paper and a final exam. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading
Before the semester begins, students should purchase and read Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (1999).
ART 76020 – Topics in Modern Art: The Lives of Things, 1909-1936
GC: Mon., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Golan, Rm., 3421, [91908]
Office hours: Mon. 1:00-2:00 pm. 4:00-5:00 p.m. Email: rgolan@gc.cuny.edu.
There was an unspoken feeling of loss over the depletion of aura by mechanical reproduction in Benjamin’s 1936 “Work of Art” essay. This course will trace some new paths and cut across the established narratives of disenchantment and alienation in the face of commodification and reification by looking at the European historical avant-garde as a succession of attempts to think through objects.
Opening with the question of the phantasmagoria offered by World Fairs, the lectures will focus on episodes such as: the Bergsonian object of Cubism; bricolage as iconoclasm and survival in collage from Picasso to Schwitters; Tatlin’s recasting of the bourgeois tableau-object into a proletarian “culture of materials;” the spell cast by Duchamp on his readymades; the Darwinian “object-type” of Purism; the encounter between Soviet Productivism and the French luxury trade at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs; the re-enchanted object/fetish of the Surrealist Wunderkammer, their counter-colonial exhibition, and the traumatic “object (re) trouvé” of André Breton in Mad Love. Five (5) auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading (buy both books)
-Kristina Kiaer, Imagine no possessions: the socialist object of Russian Constructivism, MIT Press, 2005
-André Breton, Mad Love (1937), Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1987 (translated by Mary Ann Caws, or read L’amour fou…in French!)
ART 76020 - Topics in Modern Art: Sculpture from Rodin to Bourgeois
GC: Thurs. 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Hadler, Rm. 3421, [91909]
Office hours: Thurs. 5:00-6:00 p.m.
This course will examine a century of sculptural production, including such canonical figures as Brancusi, Giacometti, Picasso, Lipschitz, and David Smith as well as Rodin and Bourgeois. While covering key artists and movements, the course will also discuss sculptural production in light of politics, theories of mass culture, gender and psychoanalytic theory. Lectures will cast a wide net, encompassing issues of public sculpture and industrial design. World War II, the cold war, space age and populuxe design will be presented in relation to a wide variety of objects ranging from Roszak’s welded post apocalyptic predators, to Wurlitzer’s l948 juke boxes with acrylic domes shaped like bomber noses, Pontiac Indian/Pilot hood ornaments, Holocaust memorials and David Smith’s war medals. The course will include a trip to the Modern Art Foundry to learn first hand about metal casting by witnessing the dramatic technique of bronze pouring. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading
Anne Higonnet, “Myths of Creation: Camille Claudel & Auguste Rodin.” In, Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, l993, pp. 15-31.
Anna C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art, l993.
Julie Nicoletta, “Louise Bourgeois’s Femmes-Maisons: Confronting Lacan.” In Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency, 2005, pp. 361-372.
ART 76030 - Topics in Modern Architecture, Urbanism, and Design: Architecture as Social Catalyst: Sixties’ Utopias, Postmodernisms, and Deconstruction
GC: Thurs., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Bletter, Rm. 3421, [91910]
Office hours: Wed. 12:00-1:00 p.m. and by appointment. Email: rbletter@gc.cuny.edu
As a background, the course will introduce the redefinition and renewal of Modernism after the war in Europe, South America, and California, together with the simultaneous hegemony of American corporate modernism, as well as Le Corbusier’s, Aalto’s, Kahn’s, and the New Brutalists’ rejection of the pre-war technocentric paradigm. It will explore in more detail the efflorescence of visionary and psychological architecture in the 60’s with groups such as Archigram, Superstudio, the Metabolists, and the Situationists. It will examine the overt questioning of Modernism by Venturi with his interest in Pop Art, the commercial vernacular, the ordinariness of the American cityscape as depicted by Ed Ruscha’s photographs, and the concept of irony and ambiguity developed in literary criticism in the 50’s. It will follow this development into Postmodernism and its differing nature in American architecture with its emphasis on historicism in contrast to Postmodernism’s meaning in other fields and European architecture. It will further cover the radical reinterpretation of Modernism by the Deconstructivists in the 90’s (Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, etc.) and its ideological underpinnings. In addition, the increasing impact of theory and feminist issues in contemporary architecture and criticism will be considered. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading
Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993).
K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 (1998).
Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980, fourth ed. 2007) [for those without much previous background in architecture]
GC: Mon., 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, Rm. 3421, [91912]
Office hours: Mon. 2:00-4:00 p.m. Email: kmanthorne@gc.cuny.edu
During the course of the semester, we work toward developing a new model for a survey course offered on the graduate level, and move away from an exclusively sequential historical approach. In order to gain multiple perspectives on art produced in the United States during the first formative century, we explore five distinct portals (or windows) on the field: (1) Historiography; (2) Traditional historical exploration of artists and works of art across time; (3) In-depth analysis of one era as case study, here focusing on the years between the Civil War and the Gilded Age (1863-1877); (4) Pan-American perspectives; and (5) General public’s perception, use, and reinterpretation of American art of this period in the light of recent academic scholarship. Here we use tools like web2, responses to exhibitions, and popular accounts of art and artists to judge its reception for a wider audience. Short student projects on the individual portals will allow students to self-evaluate and be evaluated across the semester. Participation and interaction among class members are necessary to the group dynamics and success of the class. The course serves as a useful preparation for orals. Five (5) auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading (all on Jstor):
John Davis, “The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship in the Art of the United States,” Art Bulletin 85 (Sept. 2003): 544-580.
Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: J.Q. Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Meaning of the Civil War,” Art Institute of Chicago’s Museum Studies (2001): 26-39 +101.
Kirsten Buick, “Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography” American Art 9 (Summer 1995): 4-19.
ART 77300 - Topics In American Art and Architecture: Mansions, Moguls, and Murals: Art and Culture in America’s “First Gilded Age”
GC: Mon. 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Webster, Rm. 3421, [92443]
Office hours: Mon. 3:00-5:00 p.m.
This course has two related themes: the construction of national identity through Gilded Age buildings and monuments, and the role played by industrialists and bankers, aka the Robber Barons, in the formation of American visual culture. Lectures will examine the architectural programs of the Albany State Capitol, Trinity Church, Boston (both designed by H.H. Richardson), the Boston Public Library (McKim, Mead and White), the architecture and design of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, and the Library of Congress. Designed by a new generation of European-trained artists and architects, who worked collaboratively, these publicly funded projects developed a visual language in which architecture, painting and sculpture combined to express a new sense of national purpose. At the same time, these artists and architects worked for and advised a new class of extremely wealthy Americans pejoratively called the robber barons. Over the course of the semester we will discuss the creation of their collections, the design and decoration of their houses, and the establishment of the institutions they endowed with gifts and money. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading
H. Wayne Morgan,
New Muses, Art in American Culture, 1865-1920 (Norman: Oklahoma
University Press, 1978).
Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York,
Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in the Gilded Age (New
York: Penguin Books,
2007).
ART 78500 – Topics in Art and Architecture of the Pacific: Art of the Pacific Islands
GC: Thurs. 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Corbin, Rm. 3421, [91913]
Office hours: 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and by appointment. Office number: 718-960-8882.
This course is an introductory lecture course on selected art styles in Melanesia, Micronesia, Indonesia, and Polynesia. It covers the following art-producing areas and cultures: Gogodala, Elema, Asmat, Lake Sentani, Iatmul, Abelam, Trobrian Is. and Tami art on the island of New Guinea; Chachet, Kairak, and Uramot Baining art and Sulka and Tolai art in East New Britain; Maglanggan art of Northern New Ireland and Western Solomon Is. art; New Caledonian and Fijian art; Palaun art; Dayak art in Borneo; Tahitian and Raratongan art; Marquesas art; and Hawaiian, Easter Island, and Maori art of New Zealand.
Requirements: Each student will prepare a short in-class presentation with selected bibliography on a major scholar of Pacific Island Art. There will also be a ten-page museum-based research paper, and a final exam. No auditors.
Preliminary Reading
Anne D’Alleva, Arts of the Pacific Islands (1998)
ART 79000 – History of Photography: Twentieth-Century Photography
GC: Wed. 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Batchen, Rm. 3421, [91914]
Office hours: Wed. 11:30 a.m. -12:30 p.m. and by appointment. Room:3408.01 ph: 212-817-8044. Email: gbatchen@gc.cuny.edu
The appeal of photography as an object of study is precisely that there is no aspect of modern life—from birth to death, from sex to war, from atoms to planets, from commerce to art—that is not entirely infiltrated and mediated by practices of photography of one kind or another. This is also the problem of photographic history as a discipline: how do you develop a coherent and effective method of analysis for an entity that is so ubiquitous and various? How can you speak with equal intelligence about the photograph as a thing, and about what any particular photograph is of? How can you identify the meaning of such a photograph when that meaning is largely determined by its context, a context that is always shifting and is therefore itself hard to define? Photography's refusal to stay put makes it a problematic medium to study in an art history program; it is by its very nature an interdisciplinary beast and never simply an ‘art.' This course aims to examine these questions through a close study of the history of photography in the twentieth century as it develops within a number of specific thematics, from the advent of the First World War through to the present. The class’s structure will allow for individual sessions to combine a formal, illustrated presentation with some time left for a discussion of particular images and texts. Taken as a whole, the class will look at photography as a cultural phenomenon as much as an art form, critically studying the various discursive arenas which this medium has helped to foster and redefine over the past century. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading
Joan Fontcuberta, ‘Revisiting the Histories of Photography,’ Photography: Crisis of History (Barcelona: Actar, 2004), 6-17.
ART 79500 - History of the Motion Picture: Film History I
GC: Wed. 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Griffiths, Rm. TBA , [91915], cross listed with Theater 71500/MALS 77200
Film History I provides students with an overview of precinema, early cinema and silent film, considering American filmmaking and European national cinemas. Beginning with an examination of nineteenth century philosophical toys and the serial photography of Edweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules-Marey, the course traces the development of film from 1894 through to the advent of sound in 1927. Following an analysis of early film (pre-1907), including the work of Edison, Porter, the Lumière Bros., Meliès, Pathé, and members of the Brighton School in the UK, the course takes up the major figures of Griffith, Vertov, Eisenstein, Dreyer, and Vidor, who were critical in exploring the creative possibilities of film from in the silent era. Topics covered during the second half of the course include: Weimar cinema, Soviet filmmaking, Hollywood silent comedy, American “race” cinema of the 1920s, early documentary film, and the 1920s international avant-garge. Auditors by permission of instructor.
Preliminary
Reading
Lee
Grieveson and Peter Kramer, eds., The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003).
Richard Abel, ed., Silent Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
Antonia Land with Ingrid Perez, Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (London: Vreso, 2006).
ART 80010 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Art History: Theatre & Theatricality in Renaissance Art and Architecture
GC: Mon. 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Saslow, Rm. TBA, [92346], Cross listed with Theater 85200
Office hours: Mon. 4:30-6:00 p.m. or by appointment. Email: jsaslow@gc.cuny.edu
"All the world's a stage" wrote Shakespeare, and all the arts of the early modern era were profoundly imbued with metaphors, images, and techniques of the theatre. This lecture course will examine the interrelations between the performing and visual arts from ca. 1300-1750, when dramatic performance and the buildings to house it developed the forms we know today. In tandem with literature and architecture, painting, sculpture, and graphic art explored theatricality through naturalistic narratives that aimed to involve the viewer as if they were dramas, with the picture frame assuming the same role as the proscenium.
From sacred drama performed in or around churches like Giotto's Arena Chapel, through the court masques and operas of the Baroque, to the emerging commercial popular theatre of Hogarth's London, this course ranges in scope from literal to metaphorical: from theatre “proper" (spaces dedicated to performance) to the ephemeral art of festival and pageant, to architecture and decoration that aimed to theatricalize other activities, and to theatricality as subject matter and metaphor in the visual arts.
In addition to providing a chronological overview, the course will emphasize several broad interdisciplinary themes: secularization, patronage, political uses of theatrical self-display, and theatre as material culture (the intersection of art and technology). While designed to meet the needs of students in Theatre, Art History, and Renaissance Studies, the course will also cut across these fields: for however academia may categorize them today, in Renaissance culture the art of theatre and the theatricality of art were inextricable. Course requirements: Regular attendance and weekly readings. Choice of a final examination or a research paper (ca. 15 pages) on a topic approved by the instructor; interdisciplinary research encouraged. Auditors permitted (depending on classroom space).
Preliminary Reading
Oscar Brockett, History of the Theatre, 9th edn., chaps. 5-9.
ART 83000 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Medieval Art and Architecture: The Cult of Saints in Medieval Art and Society
GC: Tues., 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Profs. Head/Hahn, Rm. 3421, [91916], Cross listed with MSCP 80500 & HIST 70600
Office Hours: Prof. Head, Tues. 3:30-5:30 p.m. Email: thead@hunter.cuny.edu. Prof. Hahn: by appointment. Email: chahn@hunter.cuny.edu
Using interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, we will examine the cult of the saints in medieval Europe. As respectively an art historian and a social historian, we will particularly examine the interplay of images and architecture, on the one hand, with texts and social practice, on the other. We will begin with an introduction to methodology in the research of medieval hagiography in a cross-disciplinary manner. We will then explore such topics as the shrines of martyrs and early medieval saints, the place of relics and reliquaries in the cult of the saints, hagiographic narratives both visual and textual, canonization of the saints, and the impact of royal status and gender on concepts of sanctity. Emphasis will be placed on students’ research projects, which will be presented in preliminary form for group discussion in the last weeks of the semester. The course will consist of (a) an introductory week; (b) ten weeks of reading and discussion, involving approximately 200-250 pages per week; (c) three weeks of student presentations of their research projects. Auditors by permission of instructor.
Preliminary Reading
Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography. Norwood, Pa. : Norwood Editions, 1974. (available in libraries and on-line);
Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c1981. (available electronically from the library and easily for purchase).
Thomas Head (ed.), Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology. New York : Routledge, 2001.
ART 85000 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Italian Renaissance and Mannerist Art and Architecture: Michelangelo and his World
GC: Mon., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Saslow, Rm. 3421, [91917]
Office hours: Mon. 4:30-6:00 p.m. or by appointment. Email: jsaslow@gc.cuny.edu
This seminar will examine in depth the life, work, and social context of one of the most influential artists of the western tradition. In his seven-decade career, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) worked in painting, sculpture, architecture, and poetry, and was the first artist to receive the epithet “divine,” a landmark in the development of the modern artist as a unique, inspired genius. Lectures will outline his achievements and their relation to the changing society of the High Renaissance, Mannerism, and Counter-Reformation, with special attention to issues of patronage, personal expression, the interrelation of literature and the visual arts, and psychobiography, particularly the artist’s conflicted response to his own homosexual desires. We will also examine the historiography of the artist from Vasari to modern critics, and the role he has continued to play in western culture and the homosexual imaginary down to the present.
Course requirements: Regular attendance and weekly readings. Seminar report of 35-40 minutes on a topic to be developed with instructor’s approval. Auditors permitted (depending on classroom space).
Preliminary Reading
Michelangelo: Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo, 1983/reprints
ART 86020 - Seminar: Selected Topics Modern Art: Giorgio de Chirico and Metaphysical Art
GC: Tues. 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Braun, Rm. 3421, [91918]
Office hours: Tues. 4:00-5:00 p.m.
Critical to the development of modernist and postmodernist styles and strategies, De Chirico is also key for appraising recent theories and methods of art history. Like his cohorts Picasso and Duchamp (who observed his work closely), De Chirico had a profound influence over much of twentieth century art. By contrast to these other two artists, however, the interpretative literature on de Chirico is still relatively small. In this seminar, students will have the opportunity to conduct independent and original research projects culminating in an oral presentation and a substantial written paper. Prof. Braun will lead the seminar with a series of formal lectures (and assigned readings) for the first half of the term, to be followed by the presentations.
Topics to be covered include the development of de Chirico's style and iconography in the Paris and Ferrara periods; the formative influence of symbolism, Nietzsche, and linguistics; his relationship to Apollinaire, Picasso, and the Parisian pre-war avant-garde; the aesthetic of "displacement;" Peircian semiotics its applicability to de Chirico's work; the role of the mannequin figure and of mapping; De Chirico's metaphysical painting and its legacy in Magic Realism and the Valori Plastici movement in Italy (Morandi, de Pisis, Carrà, Sironi, and others); his influence on Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit, Surrealism, and American art between the wars; de Chirico and photography; de Chirico and Fascist and post-modernist architecture; de Chirico and the experience of the modern city; de Chirico’s problematic relationship with the Surrealists and their Freudian interpretation of his work; de Chirico’s late work; forgeries and strategies of the copy, appropriation, and pastiche; de Chirico's writings and literary oeuvre; his creative partnership with his brother, Alberto Savinio; the historiography of the de Chirico literature; de Chirico and contemporary art (the Situationists, Arte Povera, Guston, Warhol, Koons, and others). Electronic reserve will be set up for weekly readings. Reading knowledge of French or Italian or German recommended. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading
Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico: the Metaphysical Period
1888-1919, New York: Bullfinch, 1997
Braun, Emily, De Chirico and America, New York and Turin: Hunter College
and Umberto Allemandi, 1996.
ART 86030 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Modern Architecture, Urbanism, and Design: The Museum as Social and Cultural Artifact
GC: Wed. 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Bletter, Rm. 3421, [91919]
Office hours: Wed. 12:00-1:00 p.m. and by appointment. Email: rbletter@gc.cuny.edu
The course will deal with the rise of the museum as a separate architectural and cultural entity in the nineteenth century, its mirroring of changing concepts of history, its role as a didactic instrument in public education and manipulation, as well as concepts of the museum as an empty vessel, or as a producer of culture. It will also cover the rapid proliferation of the art museum in the late twentieth century in contrast to other museum types; the place of the museum in its generally urban context, the centrality of commercial forces in recent museum design; the process and meaning of exhibition design and evaluation; and the political organization of museums and related social questions. Five (5) auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (1992).
Ivan Karp, et.al. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (1991).
ART 86040 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Modern and Contemporary Memorials, Artistic Strategies and Audience Response
GC: Wed. 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Senie, Rm. 3421, [92339]
Office hours: 1:45-3:45 P.M., or by appointment. Office number: (212)-650-7430
This course will consider the history of modern and contemporary memorials since WWII in terms of commissioning methods and intentions, built solutions (both works by artists and entire museums), and audience response (including spontaneous memorials and issues of controversy). There will be meetings with directors of public art programs who commission memorials. Students will observe actual memorials in the city, engage their immediate audience, and analyze the range of responses. Throughout the course we will be considering the ways memory is framed and experienced. Five (5) auditors permitted but they may be required to do one assignment involving audience response.
Preliminary Reading
Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
Constructions of Memory, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 1999 issue
ART 86040 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Issues of Identity in Contemporary Art
GC: Thurs. 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Chave, Rm. 3421, [91920]
Office hours: Thurs. 4:00-5:00 p.m.
Focused especially on issues surrounding ethnicity, ‘race’, and transnationalism (or ‘cosmopolitanism’), this course will be organized thematically and--with a view to contemporary art practices and discourses--will address topics such as: eurocentrism/whiteness/masculinism; blackness, ‘primitivism’, and cultural stereotype; voluntary border crossing: multiculturalism, hybridity, tourism; involuntary border crossing: exile, displacement, diaspora; alterity, exoticism and the cultural politics of the gaze; ethnicity, performativity, and artistic self-representation; Buddhist influence in contemporary art; feminism and postcolonialism; and utopic initiatives: intercultural collaboration. Auditors permitted.
Preliminary Reading: Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Introduction: Making Conversation,” in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 2006, xi-xxi
Homi Bhabha, “How newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation,” in The Location of Culture, 1994, 303-337+
ART 86040 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Contemporary Art: Contemporary Art in a Global World
Asia Society (725 Park Avenue at 70th): F, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Gamble Room, 8th Floor, 3 credits, Profs. Genocchio/Chiu, [92342]
Office Hours: Benjamin Genocchio – by appointment. Email:genocchio@nytimes.com:
Office Hours: Melissa Chiu – by appointment. Email: MelissaC@AsiaSoc.org
In the past two decades, the belief that contemporary art could only be produced in Europe and the United States has been discredited. World-recognized contemporary artists now arise from places such as Korea, Japan, China, Brazil, Indonesia, Peru and Colombia. This seminar will examine the shift toward a global contemporary art scene and the subsequent development of a global marketplace through a series of seminar sessions that focus on art and artists from Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. Specific contributing factors such as the proliferation of biennales, art fairs and the development of the New York art gallery and auction scenes will be discussed, along with theoretical frameworks encompassing multiple modernities and center/periphery models which are key to an understanding of these historical cultural shifts. Museum curatorial practices will also be addressed and field visits will be an important part of this class, informing a seminar discussion each week and a final research paper. No auditors allowed.
ART 87000 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture: Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, from Pre-Columbian to Colonial
GC: Wed. 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Quinones-Keber, Rm. 3421 [91921]
Office hours: Wed. 12:30-2:00 PM and by appointment. Email: equinones-keber@gc.cuny.edu
This seminar focuses on the transformation of the Aztec (Mexica) capital of Tenochtitlan in Mexico and the Inca capital of Cuzco in Peru into colonial cities. The two capitals were dynamic artistic as well as political and religious centers for their respective empires. Their early capitulation, in 1521 and 1534 respectively, to Spanish military forces belies the vibrant aspects of indigenous life, ideology, and cultural expression that continued into the colonial (viceregal) period, which terminated with independence in the early 19th century. Introductory lectures will explore the intersection of indigenous and imported European and Asian art forms, techniques, and styles in the creation of the distinctive “colonial” art produced in each city (for example, casta painting in the renamed Mexico City and the Cuzco school in Cuzco). Oral and written seminar reports will explore the singular forms of art and architecture generated in colonial Mexico City and Cuzco. Other requirements include weekly readings, written responses, and discussions. Three auditors permitted, but they will be expected to do all readings and participate in discussions.
Preliminary Reading
Instead of preliminary readings, student should view the collections of Aztec and Inca art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.
ART 89500 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Film Studies: Sound in Film: The Wor(l)d in Pieces
GC: Fri. 11:45 A.M. -1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Dolan, Rm. TBA, [91924], Cross-listed with THEA 81500 & FSCP 81000
This course will examine the long evolution of sound in film through the early 1930s. We will begin with an extended examination of ongoing experiments in synchronized sound film from the 1890s through the early 1920s (e.g., Gaumont’s Chronophone films, Oskar Messter’s shorts), as well as a consideration of the sounds that normally accompanied film production and exhibition during the so-called “silent” era. The bulk of the course, however, will be focused on the adaptations to sound made by industries and artists throughout the world during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Students will complete one major assignment for the class, a 20-25 page research paper on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor. Each student will meet individually with me one month before the end of the semester to discuss his/her final project, and proposals for the final papers will be due two weeks before the end of the semester. Papers should involve substantial original research and should display both mastery of issues covered in the class and the ability to apply course concepts to the paper topic. Auditors by permission of instructor.
ART 89500 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Film Studies: Captured Bodies, Migrating Spirits: Slavery & Its Historical Legacy in the Cinemas of the Americas
GC: Mon. 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Carlson, Rm. TBA, [91923], Cross listed with FSCP 81000
The course will investigate the ways in which New World slavery and its historical consequences have been represented by the cinema. The course will take a hemispheric approach viewing works from Brazil, Cuba, Martinique, the United States, and elsewhere. The focus will be a comparative analysis of the storytelling forms used to render the three historical stages common to all slave owning cultures of the Americas. First is the extensive plantation system and resistance to it from within and without. Second is the unstable agrarian period following the abolition of slavery. Finally, what follows are the massive migrations to urban industrial economies.
Students are expected to attend all classes and screenings. All absences must be explained to the professor by email. As for requirements, students will write a brief (5-7 page) analytical essay and a longer (15-20 page) research paper. Details of the assignments will be discussed in class. Auditors by permission of instructor.
ART 89500 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Film Studies: African Cinema, North & South
GC: Wed. 2:00-5:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Hitchcock, Rm. TBA, [91925], Cross listed with Theatre 81500/FSCP 81000
This course will focus on particular examples of African cinema that demonstrate both the interventions and the contradictions of its art in recent years. In addition, we will consider the creative schisms between cinema of sub-Saharan Africa and that of North Africa (the films of the latter are too often elided in an understanding of continental expression). The class will investigate to what extent an African visual style is possible as a distinctive aesthetic (north and south, and given the vastly different cultural histories of the continent) along with the necessity to “Africanize” and transform cultural codes associated with Western technology and expansion. Profoundly dialogic, African cinema tends to project an answerability (responsibility) according to a complex set of micro and macrological contexts. Finally, we will also come to terms with the impact of new technologies on African film form and substance, particularly video and digital video. Course requirements: class presentation and a final paper of 20-25 pages (visual extras optional). Auditors by permission of instructor.
ART 89500 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Film Studies: Constructivism & Cinema: The Films of Pudovkin Eisenstein & Vertov
GC: Tues. 4:15-7:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Liebman, Rm. TBA, [91926], Cross listed with Theater 81500/FSCP 81000
This course will focus on the complex artistic and ideological relationships between selected films and theoretical writings by Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov and many central cultural movements and spectacles in the Soviet Union during the first decade after the revolution. Films to be analyzed in detail will include Eisenstein’s Strike [1924-25], October [1927-28] and The General Line (Old and New) [1928], Pudovkin’s Mother [1926] and The End of St. Petersburg [1927], and Vertov’s Kino Glaz [1924], One Sixth of the World [1926], The Eleventh Year [1928], The Man with a Movie Camera [1929] and Enthusiasm [1931]. These works will be examined in the light of aesthetic debates among the Constructivists and Productivists, including Rodchenko, Gan, Arvatov, the Vesnin Brothers, the Stenberg Brothers, Malevich and Tatlin in the visual arts, as well as literary and theatrical artists and critics such as Trotsky, Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, Tretyakov, Mayakovsky, and Meyerhold. Readings will include primary texts by all of the names mentioned, as well as select secondary sources. No auditors allowed.
Preliminary Readings:
Student intending to take my "Constructivism and Cinema" class next Spring might first look at Christina Lodder's classic study Russian Constructivism (Yale U.P.) Those unfamiliar with film writings can start looking at Dziga Vertov, Kino Eye (California), introduced by Annette Michelson. The first volume of Eisenstein's Writings on Cinema, 1922-1934 (Indiana/BFI) would also be helpful to look at ahead of time. Bowlt's anthology of writings by Russian artists is another title.