Undergraduate Courses in Art History 2017-2018

This course introduces students to a range of issues concerning hacking, openness, and anonymity in science and technology though the angle of controversies. The class takes a broad view of the meanings of hacking, openness, and anonymity and includes, among other topics: the rise of the ethic of openness in science, debates over access and intellectual property law, body modification and disability, the role of new technologies in expanding the scope of state surveillance as well as opening up new possibilities for exposing state secrecy.

This class uses the angle of controversy to introduce students to various academic and popular approaches to the social scientific and humanistic study of science and technology. The class draws on classic academic works in diverse fields, such as the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, and bio­ethics, while also integrating a broad base of engaging and accessible material (editorials, national policies on science, legal regulations, and scientific controversies to name just a number examples) that educate as well as evoke critique and transformation of the complex contemporary practices, methods, and politics of science and technology.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course offers a critical survey of modernity in culture and modernism in art since the French Revolution, following a chronological timeline and primarily – but not exclusively – focused on North America and Western Europe. Students will be acquainted with major artists and artworks, movements and styles in art production as well as key intellectual tendencies that have informed the production of art as well as the methodology of art history. In addition to introducing major artistic figures and trends, this course will examine art as part of the wider field of visual culture and in relation to the social, political, cultural, and technological shifts of the last two centuries, paying attention to the ways that art and visual culture have both reflected and defined what it means (or meant) to be “modern.” 

ASSIGNMENTS AND EVALUATION:
1. Visual analysis project 15%
2. Midterm 20%
3. Research paper 30%
4. Final Exam 30%
5. Participation 5% 

Not available.

This course provides a historical overview of East Asian art and visual cultures from early dynastic times (ca. 5th century BCE) to the 21st century. Focusing on shared cultural foundations, we will mainly discuss China, Korea, and Japan. The course will be structured around several important themes such as funerary, Buddhist, landscape, and literati arts, each of which will be dealt with in chronological order, generally following the order of China, Korea, and Japan. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think about both the overarching characteristics and more particularly local and temporal variations in East Asian art.

Requirements and Evaluation
1) Museum visit and writing assignment (10%)
2) Two closed-book, in-class tests : 30% for the first text; 40% for the second test.
3) Writing Assignment (20%) 

This lecture course provides an introduction to the visual arts and architecture of the “long” eighteenth century. Focusing primarily upon developments in Britain, France and their North American colonies, we will consider key issues of the period including competing conceptions of the public for art, claims for modernity against established traditions, and the agency of art in negotiating the politics of class, race, gender and distance within and between industrializing, imperial states. Exploring the dynamic, evolving encounters between visual art and Enlightenment science/technology will be a central concern throughout the lectures and readings.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS
20%) mid-term examination (Oct. 12, in class)
35%) term paper (due in class November 28)
25%) final examination (TBA, during final exam period)
20%) participation (participation includes attendance, performance on any in-class assignments or quizzes)

Course Description: This course will examine the production of contemporary Indigenous artists in Canada from the 1990s to the present. The course is divided thematically, rather than chronologically, with weekly topics addressing significant aspects of Indigenous art and culture in Canada today. A diverse range of contemporary art practices – including painting, drawing, photography, film, performance, installation and new media art – will be considered in relation to key aspects of the cultural, political and social lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Much of the work examined reflects and responds to the continuing legacy of colonization and successive Canadian governments’ policies of assimilation and segregation. Artists, artworks and exhibitions examined will therefore be both historically and contemporarily contextualized. We will discuss the impact of the Indian Act, the Indian Residential School System, the establishment of Reserves and ongoing conflicts surrounding Indigenous sovereignty, “status” and territorial rights, as well as the representation of Indigenous identity in art, popular culture and news media. Additionally, we will engage with artistic responses to celebrations of Canada’s 150th birthday and Montreal’s 375th, the recent recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, land claims, protest movements and current events related to the theme of the course. In addition to the artists discussed in class, students will be shown a number of documentary and narrative films by Indigenous producers and directors and are expected to attend local exhibitions of Indigenous artists.

Evaluation

Critical Exhibition Review, 15%
3-4 pages, typed, double-spaced, with all references and bibliography in consistent citation style Due in class on Friday, October 6th Students will be required to attend and critically engage with at least one exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art. Students will be provided with a list of appropriate exhibitions taking place in Montreal and are encouraged to consult with the instructor if interested in writing about an alternative current or recent exhibition.

Research Paper Proposal, 5%
1 page, typed, double-spaced and including tentative bibliography Due in class on Friday, October 20th Students are asked to propose their own paper topic relating to one of the weekly themes of the course and engaging with one or more works of contemporary Indigenous art. Artworks not covered by the class are welcomed. The paper proposal must include a thesis statement or hypothesis, a brief outline of the intended argument and a bibliography of at least three academic sources. Students are welcome and encouraged to discuss potential topics with the instructor prior to submitting their paper proposal. The paper proposal will be returned with feedback within two weeks.

Critical Film Response, 20%
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner 3-4 pages typed, double-spaced, using at least two additional sources and a bibliography in consistent citation style Due in class on Friday, November 3rd

Research Paper, 30%
7-9 pages typed, double-spaced, with footnotes or endnotes, bibliography, images and image captions in consistent citation style. (*Please note, bibliography and images are IN ADDITION to the 7-9 page essay). Due in class on Friday, December 1st Final Exam, 25% Take-home. Essay format. Students will have one week to complete the assignment after exam questions are distributed.

Participation, 5%

Not available.

Course Description:
Seasoned art historical narratives characterize the emergence of French Realism and Impressionism as a rupture with tradition. This course reexamines the relations between Realism, Impressionism, and their historical precedents; by charting the key moments in the history of nineteenth-century art in relationship to “traditional” and established practices and models, this class explores the stylistic, socio-political, and philosophical factors which determined the production and reception of art in modernity. In doing so, this course teaches a general overview of nineteenth-century French art using several theoretical lenses and methodological approaches, such as formalism and social art history. We will examine select artworks produced chronologically, particularly those made between 1840 and 1880; our discussions will be grounded by an emphasis on art as both derivative of—and reactionary to—preceding artwork. By analyzing the dialogue among select art objects, students will question how artists and their audiences deployed particular representational strategies dependent upon a recognizable relationship to precedent (whether emulation or refutation or both) to communicate particular ideas about realism(s), impressionism, and the relationship between these movements, as well as concepts including modernity, the modern, and Modernism. Through primary and secondary sources including writings by artists, critics, historians, and theorists, we will investigate how the complex relationship between artworks manifested in critical appraisals, theories, and modes to historically contextualize modern art, such as its relationship to vision, observation, spectatorship, politics (national, international, identity), the relationship between “high” and “low” art forms, the shifting demands of artists and artistic labor, and the expansion of what counts as an art object. While our approach is circumscribed by objects that most obviously comment on precedents, the course aims to present a multi-vocal account of nineteenth-century French art. Above all, we seek to critically examine the way realism and impressionism operate as categorical tools within art historical scholarship.

Methodology: This course adopts an object-based approach to teaching students the rudiments of art historical and visual culture analysis. In its entirety, the class seeks to answer how artworks exist in dialogue. Each class is organized according to a thematic unit. Constructing thematic cohesion through which to consider the vast amount of knowledge provides an introductory and easily digestible entry point to the history of modern art.

Aims: This course provides students with the tools to analyze, describe, and contextualize historically visual objects with reference to subject matter, style, materiality, and exhibition practices. Through a chronological survey, this class teaches a basic overview of nineteenth-century French art, the characteristics of key historical movements, and how to recognize/discuss period styles.

Method of Assessment: Students will be expected to one visual analysis (15%); an annotated bibliography (20%); an in-class midterm (30%), and a research paper (35%).
 

This course will consider the work of female artists who were, and continue to be, positioned as ‘other’ in relation to male modernists. The theoretical framework for the course will be Mary Russo’s concept of the ‘female grotesque,’ a figure who exceeds gendered norms and expectations. Russo notes that the act of exceeding norms has inherent risk, and we will consider the ways in which female artists have exceeded gendered boundaries, as well as the risks and rewards that have accompanied these ostensible excesses. We will also discuss feminist art-historical scholarship that has set out to recuperate women artists, in addition to deconstructing the (masculine) discipline of art history. Issues of race and sexuality will also be central to our discussions. Throughout the term we will consider how the theoretical frameworks of ‘risk’ and ‘excess’ are productive (and/or limiting) for the study of women artists. Readings will focus primarily on female artists working in France, Mexico, Canada, the United States and Germany.

Evaluation
Short response paper (3-5 double-spaced pages) -- 20%
Final essay (max 8 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography) -- 40%
Take-home exam (3 short essays, max 3 double-spaced pages each) -- 40%

Not available.

This is an advanced seminar on art historical methods intended for Honours Art History students in
their final year at McGill. The course will focus on the question of how we think about art (what is
art? how do we evaluate something we think of as art? where do the models for understanding and
even defining art come from?) The ultimate goal of the course is for students, by questioning the
history of how the idea of “art” came to be, to gain a fuller understanding of art history, the
discipline that reciprocally defines and constructs art. To focus our discussion, we will trace key
historical and methodological issues with special attention to those that inform current questions,
approaches, and practices. Beyond this, the seminar also focuses on the special skills it takes to be
an art historian including grant writing, producing publication quality original research, and
mastering oral presentation and the description and interpretation of artworks in the classroom and
museum environment.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS/ METHOD OF EVALUATION:

ARTH 400
1. Participation, including discussion leader, MBAM presentation 40%
2. SSHRC application proposal draft 20%
3. Proposal of Research Paper, Initial and Final Research Paper Presentations 40%

ARTH 401 (PAPER)
4. Research Paper 100%

This course will critically engage with the following questions: what exactly is ‘global contemporary art’ and why is this field of study only relatively recently being attended to by art historians? Rather than a coursepack we will read three recent books on contemporary art and globalization to illuminate how a range of scholars and artists are approaching the field. For part of the course we will pay particular attention to women artists and globalization. For the final essay students will choose a topic that fits their own definition of ‘global contemporary art.’ One of the objectives of the course will be to engage with how scholarship on global contemporary art, or art in the ‘global world,’ is different from scholarship on plain old ‘contemporary art.’ What are the themes, issues or problems that keep cropping up? And how, as scholars, might we draw on art-historical scholarship to think about and ‘understand’ what is currently happening politically around the world?

Evaluation
Attendance and participation -- 10%
Short essay/presentation on a selected reading -- 20%
Seminar presentation -- 30%
Final essay -- 40%

What kinds of imageries looked “realistic” to the eyes of the Chinese before modern times? What did “the real” mean to them? This seminar surveys and analyzes complex ways in which the sense of the real in the visual field was developed, contested, and changed throughout Chinese history. Beginning with the basic understanding of both historical and conceptual dimensions of the real in visual representation, the seminar examines a series of selected images in diverse mediums (including painting, sculpture, and architecture) that intersected at various philosophical and religious traditions (i.e., Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist) along with some of the key terms and concepts that constituted the epistemology of the real. While largely following the chronological order, special attention will be paid to the middle period (9th-14th centuries) during which a set of defining and lasting concepts and practices of the “realism” in the pictorial art was formulated.

Grading: Presentation 20%; discussion 30%; proposal 10%; paper 40%

Supervised independent research on an approved topic.

Not available.

Please visit: https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/undergraduate/ugrad/internship

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

This course is a thematic introduction to the discipline of art history. Through lectures, group discussions, field trips and in-class exercises, students will engage with various critical perspectives that have challenged the dominance of the “Pyramids to Picasso” chronological survey of art. The objective is to help students develop: 
- skills of visual analysis and critical thought
- the ability to recognize the art of different periods and styles and to understand how they relate to each other and to the broader social and historical context
- an understanding of the history of the discipline, as well as the complexity and diversity of current debates

Students will thus have the opportunity to learn from the selected parts of the canon while developing an awareness of the canon's limitations. The course provides a fundamental knowledge base in Art History that will ground future studies. This base comprises both factual information and analytical ability.
Note: Students must come to class prepared to discuss the readings. 

ASSIGNMENTS AND EVALUATION
Field Trip Study Questions 1 - 5% - Due Tuesday January 30
Field Trip Study Questions 2 - 5% - Due Tuesday February 27
Unit 3 Quiz - 10% - Thursday March 22
Exploratory Essay:
- Part 1 - 20% - Due Thursday March 1
- Part 2 - 30% - Due Thursday April 5
Final Exam (take-home) - 30% - Due Thursday April 19 10:00am

This course will examine a broad range of art produced from 1945 up to the very recent past. While addressing major movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, readings and lectures will also address feminist art, performance art, Indigenous art and queer art. Critical methodologies such as postcolonialism, feminism, affect theory and queer theory will be discussed and employed. 

Evaluation
Midterm take-home exam (3 short essays, max 3 double-spaced pages each) 30%
Final take-home exam (3 short essays, max 3 double-spaced pages each) 30%
Final essay (max 6-8 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography) 40%

Course Description: Visual imagery was mobilized in inventive and forceful ways in the seventeenth century. This course will examine the functions and uses of visual forms within an ever-shifting context that includes tensions between absolutism and capitalism, religious battles about the image, colonial expansion and violence, the growth of cities, and the exchange of new forms of knowledge.

Course Requirements: Attendance at lectures and class discussions is mandatory. If you have to miss a class, be sure to get notes from a classmate and review the images (on MyCourses) that were discussed in class. Please don’t leave the room during lectures unless absolutely necessary and please let me know beforehand.

In-class test 1:                20%      Wed. Feb. 14, in class
Visual Analysis:               10%      Fri. Feb. 2
Annotated Bibliography:  25%      March 14
In-class test 2:                30%      Wed. March 28, in class
Pop Quizzes:                   10%
Participation:                     5%

Course Description
Why does the art historian need “methods”? What are methods? How do our methods enable and constrain the kinds of artifacts we study and the questions we ask of them when writing histories of art? This lecture course introduces key issues in art-historical methodology by exploring the following propositions: 1) “method” is not equivalent to “theory”; 2) questions of method are fundamentally questions of evidence; and 3) if they are matters evidence, then questions of method cannot be asked outside of the context of art history’s knowledge-making infrastructure (its media, institutions and publics, among others). Featuring several guest lecturers able to illuminate specific facets of the discipline’s evidence-building past and present, this course will trace an intellectual genealogy and broad historiographical overview of knowledge-producing techniques that now inform research practice in art history. 

Course Requirements
25%) mid-term examination (February 26, in class)
35%) term paper (April 16, due in class)
25%) final examination (TBA, during final exam period)
20%) participation (includes attendance and any in-class assignments)

Withdrawing from formalist approaches to traditional media like painting and sculpture, and seeking to bridge art and life, contemporary art from the 1960s on invented a variety of forms and aesthetic strategies that questioned the autonomous and commodity status of the art object, its institutionalization, its visuality and spatiality, as well as the spectator’s perceptual response to the artwork. These forms and strategies were often thought out as a way to participate in the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, the civil rights movement, feminism and the struggle for gay and lesbian equal rights; but they were also a way to think aesthetics politically. They included: practices of dérive and détournement, assemblages, the appropriation of everyday objects and the devising of “specific” objects, happenings, scored events, non-dance performances, linguistic propositions, the combination of popular culture and so-called high art, earth interventions, “poor” aesthetics, televisual art, expanded media, and much more. This course examines the history of these artistic developments from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Following a roughly chronological order, it investigates some of the main art movements and practices that shape that history: Situationist International, Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Land Art and Arte Povera, happening and performance art, institutional critique, feminist art, activist art, and postmodernism. The course focuses on the study of North American and Western European art but attends to its cultural diversity and expands the Western paradigm when possible. Throughout, it addresses issues of gender, race, nationality, sexuality and posthumanism. 

The visual arts at the moment seem to hover at a crossroad that may well turn out to be two roads to one place, though they appear to have come from two sources: art as idea and art as action. In the first case, matter is denied, as sensation has been converted into concept; in the second case, matter has been transformed into energy and time-motion.
– Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art” (1967)

This course, which focuses primarily (but not exclusively) on the European and Anglo-American art world of the last 50 years, offers a survey of art works which either do not take the form of physical objects or in which, to borrow Lucy Lippard’s words, “the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious, and/or ‘dematerialized.’” Lippard offered these words as a definition for conceptual art. Accordingly, this course is focused on the emergence of conceptualism in the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as its precursors in earlier twentieth-century art, its various legacies and offshoots, and its lasting impact on contemporary art up until the present.

Beyond simply relating to a specific art movement however, this course posits that it is possible to chart a history of contemporary art as a whole (or at least a major stream within it) through the heuristic of immateriality. Key to this trajectory is the passage from the notion of art as primarily based in the formal, visual qualities of discrete objects to the notion of art as a system of information, discourse, institutions and social relations in which physical objects play a contingent, rather than necessary, role.

Moreover, this course ties the development of dematerialization in art to larger shifts in culture, technology, and economics. First, this course argues that the effects of dematerialization in art are constitutively related to the transition from an understanding of art of the present as “modern” to the understanding of such art as “contemporary” via the theorization of postmodernism. The rise of critical theory also correlates to the growth in professionalization and the adoption of academic discourse within the art world – that is, a situation in which art is mediated primarily through language. Immateriality in art has also paralleled the emergence and widespread influence of digital technologies and the theorization of the so-called “information society.” Finally, artistic dematerialization is also profoundly related to broader shifts in the capitalist economy towards globalization, outsourcing, services and flexibility – in other words, the constellation of developments that are often brought together under the heading of post-Fordism or post-industrialism and theorized in terms of “immaterial labour.”

We will examine how art production, particularly from the late 1960s onwards, shifts away from a focus on the craft of specific media (painting, sculpture) towards a post-medium, post-studio, or research-based practice (“practice” itself being a key term of contemporary art) that might equally employ crafted or readymade objects and images, installation, performance, video, digital media, or various combinations thereof.

We will also examine how value and authorship are assigned to works that are ephemeral, reproducible, experiential, or collaborative – a process that is intimately related to the political implications of immaterial art. For many first-wave conceptual artists, immaterial works presented a way to escape from the ethical compromises represented by established museum and market relations. In the intervening decades, immaterial forms have often been hailed as essentially non-commodifiable and enlisted towards activist ends, even as artists have also developed novel ways to package and promote their performances, videos, photographs, installations, and personas. Moreover, a number of recent commentators have pointed out how immaterial artistic practices actually parallel recently dominant forms of capitalist exchange: the provision of services, the marketing of experience, and the management of information. This course will proceed with an eye to these issues.

This course will critically examine the concept of addiction as it is represented in visual culture, including eighteenth-century graphic satire, nineteenth-century medical photography, paintings, video art, performance art, and twentieth-century film. We will consider a wide range of visual material in order to tease out gendered, classed and raced ideologies related to addiction and addicted individuals. In examining art produced from the eighteenth century to the present against films produced in the late twentieth century, we will establish how beliefs about individuals who consume alcohol and drugs have been constructed through visual culture, while also identifying beliefs that have remained relatively consistent from the mid-eighteenth century, when British artist William Hogarth produced his famous engraving Gin Lane (1751), up to and including the present day. Readings will be drawn from a range of disciplines, including art history, film studies, policy studies, cultural studies, and addiction studies. We will be watching and discussing two or three films in this class. 

Evaluation
Midterm (two compare and contrast essays) – Thursday February 22nd           30%
Take-home exam (3 essays; max 3 double-spaced pages each)                      30%
Final Essay (max 8 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography)             40%

Art, Ancestors, and Gods: Ritual Art of Traditional China

In classical East Asia, ancestors and deities were a vital component of art-making. Many of the most innovative and impressive works that exist to us today were created for ritual activities in their honor.Focusing on China, which gave a foundation for the long-lasting tradition while in conversation with its neighboring cultures, this seminar examines major sets of images, objects, and spaces constructed around the worshiping of ancestors and deities from the sixth century B.C.E to the eighteenth century. Throughout the course, students will familiarize themselves with the basic concepts and historical developments of the art of worship in two main religious arenas: funerary and Buddhist. While maintaining the formal boundary between the two categories, students will also investigate their significant overlap by identifying and analyzing their shared cultural logic of ritual and visual practices. Key questions to be considered include: How did artists translate religious ideology into visual forms? How do static objects connote movement and animation? What are the connections between ritual objects and the visual culture of everyday world?

Art Criticism is thought to be in crisis: according to James Elkins, it is more volumous and more widely distributed - and yet less seriously considered - than ever before, and Boris Groys argues that its pronouncements bear no weight, only the fact that it is written (or not). Judgement, evaluation and critique have nearly disappeared from its columns altogether in favour of new exploratory writings, which is indicative of this identity "crisis." But this shift is also indicative of the passion and commitment with which writers are continuously questioning and invigorating the practice of art criticism. Seen in a positively light, as David Levi Strauss suggests, the concept of crisis is in fact necessary to art criticism in order for it to avoid ossifying into method.

Although few academic departments teach or even read art criticism, its agility and pervasiveness make it an important site for articulating the intellectual and artistic concerns of today. As the first draft of history, art criticism is provisional, and its subsequent impact on how later historians will pick up their work is hard to gauge. What we do know is that, for now and for then, the rigour and insight art critics bring to their work is serious thought in the active tense.

This seminar is an opportunity for students interested in the practice of writing about contemporary art to work through some of the key debates in art criticism today and to develop their own approach, position and voice. Our entry point will be a series of discussion questions that will test our own assumptions and convictions about what criticism is and what it does. Through in-class writing exercises, presentations and debates, students will gain practice thinking on their feet and articulating their opinions.

The success of the class depends on the quality of our discussions. Students must come to class prepared to discuss the readings assigned for that week. Your grade depends in large part on class participation.

EVALUATION AND ASSIGNMENTS
Participation
- class discussions 10%
- introduction of a reading/discussion topic 15%
- written responses/journal 10% Due weekly; resubmit April 16
Assignment 1: Review (500 words) 10% Due January 29
Assignment 2: Review (500 words) 10% Due February 19
Assignment 3: Essay (2000 words) 30% Due March 26
Assignment 4: Article (750-1250 words) 15% Draft: due April 12, by email Final: due April 19, hard copy

American artist Bill Viola (1951-) is internationally recognized as one of the leading pioneers of video art. His work has been pivotal to the establishment of video as a fundamental form and media of contemporary art. For over 40 years, he has created videotapes, works for television broadcast, video performances and installations, sound environments, electronic music performances and digital video. Although his work has unfailingly addressed the spiritual themes of life, death, birth and re-birth, his early work is especially known for its exploration of human and nonhuman perception—its electronic unsettling of the viewer’s perception of the image and consciousness of time. This exploration entailed the development of innovative techniques, including: jarring edits, the clashing of scales, conflicts of sound and image, the filming of hallucinating natural phenomena, slow time, extreme slow motion, and the spatialization of screens inviting the viewer to perceive while moving in the environment. Since the mid-1990s, however, the disquieting of human perception has progressively retreated behind the spiritual and religious dimensions of art—dimensions that support contemporary art’s growing reinforcement of experiential and immersive receptions of the artwork. This seminar takes advantage of the ongoing solo exhibition of Viola’s latest works—Bill Viola: Naissance à rebours organized by DHC/ART—to revisit his oeuvre. It asks three questions: “Is there a rupture between Viola’s early and more recent video works?”; “How does his work articulate a religious turn (what does the religious turn consist in)?”; and “Does the religious turn cancel any possibilities of developing other (non-religious) readings of Viola’s latest works?” To address these questions, the seminar historicizes and examines some of the prevalent dimensions of Viola’s artistic practice: cybernetics, anti-television, expanded media, time, embodiment, phenomenology, affect and gesture, the sublime, spiritual life, immersion and elemental media.

‘Skin, in this movie, creeps and crawls, it is the most fragile of covers and also the most sticky. Skin becomes a metaphor for surface, for the external; it is the place of pleasure and the site of pain; it is the thin sheet that masks bloody horror. But skin is also the movie screen, the destination of the gaze, the place that glows in the dark, the violated site of visual pleasure.’
- Judith (Jack) Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 165.

Art historians have been implicitly talking about skin as long as they have been talking about representations of the human body. The nascent field of skin studies brings skin into high relief, and some art historians have begun to interrogate skin as a signifier, a surface, a boundary and an object of study in and of itself. This course will draw on readings from a range of disciplines in order to illuminate some of the ways that skin has been critically discussed. Texts by art historians concerned with both historical and contemporary art will be read, as well as work by scholars concerned with race (including both blackness and whiteness). The objective of the course will be to demonstrate the wide range of ways we can discuss and examine skin as art historians, as well as illuminating the various methodologies and theoretical frameworks that may (or may not) prove productive in art historical texts that are concerned with skin either in visual culture or lived experience.

Evaluation
Attendance and participation 10%
Short essay/presentation on a selected reading 20%
Seminar presentation 30%
Final essay 40%

Supervised independent research on an approved topic.

Ornament
​This seminar looks to the edges of early modern art and architecture (c. 1500–1700), at marginal and minute decorative details that ornament the main work. Often dismissed as meaningless, non-functional, liminal, subversive, irrational, monstrous, or inferior, ornament has been sidelined in the history of art. By looking at the overlooked, we will investigate how the characteristics of ornament open up insights about the mobility and agency of images, about processes of metamorphosis, creative energy, memory, pleasure, and power. A key interest is the global circulation of motifs across cultures in the early modern world and the ability of ornament to unsettle boundaries and borders.

Method of Evaluation:
Class participation and reading responses   25%
Class presentation / discussion leader         20%
Museum presentation                                  15% (April 6)
Paper Proposal                                               5% (due Feb. 9)
Oral presentation of research topic               15%
Written research paper                                  20% (due April 6)

Not available.