Graduate Courses in Art History 2018-2019

This seminar explores key art historical methodologies, historiographies, and critical debates in the field. Approaching art history as a set of interrelated practices, it is designed to build and refine the primary critical skills of the discipline—both practical and theoretical. In first half of the term we will devote particular attention to the art of compelling and argument-driven visual analysis, strategies for framing arguments, as well as grant writing (drafting, revising, and assessing grant applications). The second half of the semester turns to a selection of thematics— from Riegl’s Kunstwollen to the ubiquitous problematic of iconoclasm—that cut cross across periods, geographies, and specializations of Art History. At its core this seminar is intended to prepare students for a productive and engaged graduate career by examining a capacious set of intellectual debates.

Performing the Face: Moving Boundaries of Vision and Society in Middle-period China
As an effort to understand complex visualities of classical China, this seminar examines some of the largely ignored aspects in visual epistemology in the middle-period (9th-14th centuries). Against the background of the cultural phenomenon that emotional expressions in visual representations were generally demure, a series of pictorial and sculptural rendering of figures with distinctive facial expressions emerging during this time period is recognized as significant visual cues that reveal practices of looking and visualities in general. The seminar draws on historical and conceptual dimensions of how such “making” of faces was shaped as a medium through which complexly interwoven texture of certain social, cultural, and religious interests of the middle-period Chinese can be accessed. The commonality in such interests was one’s attitudes toward defining, making, and remaking of boundaries that derived from the shifting landscape of social classes, religious beliefs, as well as of image making itself. Focusing on a spectrum of linkage between the represented facial expressions and senses of boundary making, the seminar explores several distinctive modes of representation. Each mode reveals particular practices of seeing revolving around various sites of social and religious encounters, ranging from spaces of commemoration or worship (such as monastery or tombs), through street corners (shared by commoners and literati alike), to the world of animals.

Not available.

Monument and Movement in the Global Middle Ages
Medieval buildings are, generally speaking, immovable, yet movement is integral to understanding their functions and resonances. This seminar focuses on the movement of individuals, materials, made objects, and ideas in and across space, from Early Christianity to the Late Middle Ages. Following introductory meetings that address broad, disciplinary questions, such as how time-based periodization has affected the study of the medieval and Early Modern eras, we will turn our attention to the interrelated themes of space, mobility, and connectivity. Discussion topics will include pilgrimage and crusading, the experiential dimension of buildings, the transfer of meaning(s) from architectural prototypes to their copies, the spread of designs through models and drawings, the use of portable objects inside buildings, and their circulation from place to place through trade, gifting, and theft. The course will also include a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to see Resplendent Illuminations: Books of Hours from the 13^th to the 16^th Century in Quebec Collections.

The field of Slavery Studies is dominated by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and others and even boasts stellar contributions from the human sciences. Despite the plethora of art and visual culture that was produced within the 400-year period of Transatlantic Slavery, art historians have arguably been one of the last groups of scholars to contribute to this important field. Drawing upon art historical and other literature, this course seeks to explore the role of art and visual culture in Transatlantic Slavery. Focusing mainly on the British Empire, but with some attention to the Danish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish Empires, the course will explore the nature of slavery and the experiences, productions, and representations of the enslaved, the indentured, and the slave owning classes in both tropical (slave majority) and temperate (slave minority) sites. The complexity of identities and social interactions of different populations will be explored across various types and media of “high,” “low,” and popular art and visual culture, within the spectrum of abolitionist and pro-slavery intentions.

For the completion of thesis research.

Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.

Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.

ANIMAL/MEDIA
Recent years have seen the emergence of animal studies as a new field of study. This field has emerged alongside and often in dialogue with new theoretical approaches in feminism, media studies, and science and technology studies — such as affect theory, new materialisms, speculative realism, actor network theory, to name a few. Animal studies and these theoretical approaches are coeval but not coterminus: there are points of contention as well as significant overlaps. This seminar aims to introduce animal studies in the light of such theoretical shifts, with attention to three issues in particular. First, we will consider some ways in which nonhuman animals have entered into the study of different media and technologies, with an eye to how such concerns about animals may (or may not) transform received paradigms in media and technology studies. Second, we will take up debates about evolutionary theory, to consider how the resulting “new materialisms” affect our understanding of genealogy and the writing of history, and to consider their ethical and political challenges. Third, then, what are the implications of the ‘conscientiousness’ associated with animal studies for media studies?

Advisor approval required.

Early modernity was a period characterized by the massive migration of peoples worldwide as a result of religious conflicts, expanding trade routes, colonization, slavery, and missionary activities, among other historical factors. Explanatory narratives of colonialism, empire building, and religious conversion—of center, periphery, and globalization—have been under revision in recent years in order to nuance our understanding of what were immensely complex and multi-faceted phenomena. Almost all of the course readings have been published within the last 5 to 10 years, which indicates the urgency of this burgeoning field of investigation. The seminar accordingly will shift the focus from governing regimes and institutions to ways in which creative forms and practices were intertwined in the dynamics of materiality and early modern globalism and to a consideration of how processes of world-making are historically connected with globalization’s devastation of worlds. Such a proposition attends to the experimentation that activated and responded to the circulation of people, materials, artefacts, and motifs across borders and bodies of water; and it investigates these interactions as constant, on-going practices that could be inherently contradictory. The focus on art—on producing and engaging with it from multiple perspectives—foregrounds new and often unanticipated ways of crafting and understanding an increasingly interconnected world. It aims to move us away from what we think we already know, and to be open to what we might find. A central question of the seminar is how the ‘global turn’ challenges the methodologies of art history.

The seminar is connected to the Making Worlds initiative, a five-year project based at McGill University and supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Making Worlds is developing an historical understanding that will contribute to contemporary debates about the effects that living in a transcontinental world has upon forms of creativity, identity, and practice. Developing a new collaborative model of graduate and faculty research in the humanities is central to the approach and our membership includes professors and students from the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of East Anglia, the University of British Columbia and McGill. For project information and events, see: https://www.makingworlds.net/

Seminar Content and Objective:

Consider Ursula Biemann’s Acoustic Ocean (2018)—a search for the sonic ecology and biodiversity of deep marine life using sensorial technologies that activate the interconnection between human, marine, machinic, organic, climatic and digital elements; Nadia Myre’s Orison project (2014), in which a suspended fishing net rises and falls at the rhythm of breathing, suggesting the gestures of collecting and letting go, of capturing, altering and transmitting objects of the sea—to create a space of negotiation between water and land, Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures; Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017), a film on the global movement of refugees amidst the proliferation of walls; and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (2017), a virtual reality environment inviting viewers to experience from within the trauma of Mexican refugees attempting to cross the US-Mexican border. These environments are of a special kind. They rely on artworks functioning not only as representations but also materialities in relation to which performers, spectators and objects spatially coevolve. They rely on artworks initiating affectivities to sustain the performers’ and spectators’ receptivity to their environments. They orient human/nonhuman interdependency as a modality for mutuality, livability and accountability.

This seminar examines contemporary art’s engagement with coexistence—the state, awareness and practice of existing interdependently. It examines human/nonhuman coexistence as a response to two specific albeit related crises of the 21^st century: the environmental and refugee crises. Art shows these crises to be amongst the most urgent conditions of our times, where the eradication of the “other” (nature, the wandering migrant) is taking place. Contesting that eradication, artists have elaborated a variety of aesthetic strategies that uphold coexistence not so much as a living-together than a human/nonhuman relation in need of reinvention and looping—a challenge, a difficulty, a conflict even an anxiety, but also a possibility for life-enhancement. Focusing on 21^st-century artistic practices based in the West and attentive to their cultural diversity, the seminar asks: “How is art performing coexistence(s)?” and “What are the possibilities of this aesthetics, i.e., how does it generate new modes of perceiving, knowing and relating?” Its main claim is that art is transforming its processes (be them paintings, sculptures, installations, situations, textile, performance or media art) into environments to set into play the coevolution of humans and nonhumans as the central operation of coexistence. Coevolution becomes the very operation by which life-enhancing forms of interdependency are probed to depress the impulse of eradication sustained by environmental and refugee crises. Artists whose work will be considered include: John Akomfrah (UK), Ursula Biemann (SUI), Edward Burtynsky (CA), Carolina Caycedo (UK and CO, Los Angeles-based), Francisco Huichaqueo (CL), Pierre Huyghe (FR), Alejandro González Iñárritu (MX), Bouchra Khalili (MA, Berlin-based), Angela Melitopoulos (DE), Olu Oquibe (NG, Connecticut-based), Nadia Myre (member of the Algonquin First Nation of Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg), Tomás Saraceno (AR, Berlin-based), Sasha Waltz (DE), and Ai Weiwei (CN, Berlin-based).

Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.

Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.

Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.

Directed reading.

Drawing inspiration from Seneca historian Arthur Parker who described First Nations wampum as an “ancient archive” for Indigenous peoples in 1916, this seminar investigates wampum, beadwork, and other arts practices as archives both ancient and living. Throughout this course we will engage with scholarship on materiality, visual sovereignty, art institutions, and the embodied practice of historical and contemporary Indigenous artists. Our readings include a mixture of art history, materiality studies, and archival theories. We will make site visits to the to think about the competing sovereignties of Indigenous cultural belongings and artworks within colonial art institutions and to encourage sustained respectful engagement with material things for Indigenous and Settler communities.