Fall 2021
ARTH 502 (CRN 7728) (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art and Architectural History
Risk, Value, Accident: Art and the Actuarial Imagination
Fri, 08:35 AM-11:25 AM
Arts W-220
“Art insurance is huge business,” so one recent art-market commentator observes, “and not least now that artworks move around the world in far greater volume and frequency than ever before.” Insurance indeed exerts pervasive influence upon contemporary art. It is a requirement for art’s circulation, a judge of monetary value, an arbiter of the conditions of display. But, how has insurance come to occupy such a central position in the arts? Where, when and why have artists and architects made technologies of risk key to their enterprises? Art history possesses few working narratives of how insurance has ramified through the visual arts and architecture on its way to literally underwriting their conditions of contemporary possibility. This seminar aims to advance such a critical history. Introducing the general problematic, we will work through a sequence of cases as we aim to build a provisional genealogy of insurance’s crossings with art, architecture, the market, and the museum. Along the way, we will examine where and how insurance has penetrated into the texture of modernity, shaping the nature of subjectivity, the role of the state, the value of human life (both enslaved and “free”), among other considerations.
ARTH 600 (CRN 2204) (3 credits)
Advanced Professional Seminar: Anti-colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues in Art History and the Humanities
Prof. Christine Ross
Mon, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
FERR 230
This seminar provides a critical introduction to some of the major writings in the field of anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies, from the mid-twentieth century period of decolonization to the present. It focuses on the theoretical and methodological debates which have informed the field’s evolution and its main objects of contention: imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism, the coloniality of being, decolonization, as well as what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler has called the tenaciousness of the histories of colonialism in the present—the “strange” (that is, not straightforwardly identifiable) continuity between the colonial past and present, its inherent racism and necropolitics. These studies have significantly influenced (although perhaps not significantly enough) the art historical study of art and art institutions of societies that have arisen from colonial rule; they also offer and renew analytical tools to analyze them. Special emphasis will be given to the theoretical dialogues that have grown around these studies. Starting with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1952) and Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978), we then turn to some of the contemporary developments and questioning of these major readings, notably the Subaltern Studies Collective and the decolonial option, and their expansion within the fields of Black studies, Indigenous studies and environmental studies. These perspectives will be typically discussed in relation to specific artworks and institutions.
ARTH 630 (CRN 2205) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 1
ARTH 653 (CRN 7730) (3 credits)
Topics: Early Modern Visual Culture 1
Early Modern Art, Technology, and the Natural World
Dr. Victoria Addona
Tues, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
FERR 230
Commenting on the numerous inventors from across Europe who tried their hands at inventing a perpetual motion machine, Leonardo da Vinci had little to say: “O fools”. Whether ambitious or indeed rash, early modern artists, architects, and engineers earnestly developed machine innovations to transform, replicate, and even surpass nature’s immaterial forces: from mills and lifting devices, to automata and theatrical apparatuses. While historians of science and technology have charted the social and political contexts that motivated early modern technical invention, art history has more reluctantly explored intersections between mechanics and aesthetics. This seminar aims to reframe canonical themes of early modern art – virtuosity, classicism, humanism, mimesis, enargeia – by considering the rise and impact of mechanical thought and experimentation on artistic theories and practices. Drawing on contemporary media theory and eco-critical approaches, we will pay particular attention to the ways that technological inquiry shaped changing attitudes to the natural world, and the roles played by human actors in managing, imitating, and controlling its forms and phenomena.
ARTH 698 (CRN 1984) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 1
For the completion of thesis research.
ARTH 699 (CRN 2208) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 2
Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.
ARTH 701 (CRN 1544) (0 credits)
Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam
Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.
ARTH 725 (CRN 2209) (3 credits)
Methods in Art History 1: From Indigenous Feminisms to Settler-Colonial Art History: Ethical Scholarship and Contemporary Indigenous Art
Julia Skelly
Wed, 2:35 PM-5:25 PM
Arts W-5
While this course is usually taught by Indigenous art historian Gloria Bell, this term we will consider the different subject positions and ethical responsibilities of Indigenous scholars and white settler scholars who write about contemporary Indigenous art. We will read scholarship by art historians such as Claudette Lauzon that draws on white feminist theorists (such as Elizabeth Grosz and Margrit Shildrick) to examine the 2002 performance Vigil by Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore, as well as scholarship by Indigenous scholars that engages critically with the very possibility of Indigenous feminism(s). We will also consider New Zealand scholar Damian Skinner’s ten propositions for settler-colonial art history, thinking about our own subject positions, blind spots and privilege as art historians of different races and backgrounds. In attending to the field of queer Indigenous studies, we will examine the work of Kent Monkman. We will also discuss the problem of academics, artists and filmmakers (among others) performing Indigeneity, as well as ongoing debates about the decolonization of institutions including the museum and the university. The scholarship of Métis artist and scholar Sherry Farrell Racette will be particularly important for our examination of contemporary Indigenous photography, performance and art that employs “craft” materials.
Key words: Indigenous art, performance, photography, craft, textiles, beading, feminism, queer theory, settler-colonial art history, decolonization, ethics, museums.
Winter 2022
ARTH 501 / EAST 501 (CRN 1719) (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture: Matters of Making in Classical Chinese Art
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Tues, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Arts W-5
One of the most persistent challenges in approaching the classical art of China derives from the modern viewer’s tendency to divorce the image from its material components and their workings in the creation process. Reduced as the static aesthetic field of form, style, and/or motif, the image's material roots are often taken for granted as if they simply existed, awaiting and ready to be used by the image-maker. The artist's creating hand, however, is always commanded by the materiality of matters, be it bronze, jade, wood, stone, clay, paper, silk, ink, or water.
This seminar surveys some of the most fundamental matters and substances recognized, adopted, and maneuvered by image-makers in traditional China. We will pay close attention to each material's specific ways to respond to technical and ecological conditions, as well social contexts in specific moments of history. By encouraging organic relations between the matter, the maker's hand, and the materialization of their workings, the seminar provides a venue for exploring dynamic roles of the matter as active participants in the image-making that goes beyond the stylistic or iconographical dimensions.
Supervisor approval required.
ARTH 630 (CRN 1721) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 1
Supervisor approval required.
ARTH 647 (CRN 1722) (3 credits)
Topics: Renaissance Art & Architecture 1
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Tues, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
LEA 517
This seminar examines the revival of pagan antiquity in Renaissance Italy, in particular the ways that it fostered new modes of understanding and representing the relationship between human and supernatural, art and eroticism, vision and pleasure, and desire and imagination. The course pays special attention to the depiction of human and non-human bodies, and connections between mythology, sexuality, materiality, and natural history during a period of profound and daring experimentation with the forms of pictorial expression, but also one characterized by censorship and repression. Within this broad framework, focus falls in particular on mythological paintings that address the topos of transformation in relation to the Renaissance reception of antiquity, in particular Ovid’s 15-book epic poem, Metamorphoses (AD 3–8), which is sometimes referred to as the “pagan bible.” The seminar is inspired by significant recent contributions to art-historical research in this area, including books by Jill Burke, Patricia Rubin, and James Grantham Turner, and by the organization of several museum exhibitions: The Renaissance Nude (2018); Giulio Romano: Art and Desire (2019–20); and Titian: Love, Desire, Death (2020–21).
ARTH 661 (CRN 1723) (3 credits)
Contemporary Art and Criticism 2: Art for Coexistence - Contemporary Art’s Response to the so-called “Migrant Crisis”
Prof. Christine Ross
Mon, 8:35 AM-11:25 AM
Arts W-220
This seminar examines contemporary art’s response to the alleged “migrant crisis.” Focusing on European and North American artistic practices, it asks: what is art’s original contribution to the understanding of that “crisis” and why is this contribution critical to the development of the 21st century? The answer to this twofold question can be encapsulated in a single yet multilayered term: coexistence—the state, awareness and practice of existing interdependently. Art discloses migration not so much as a crisis than an interaction between two counterforces: the influx of displaced people and the imperiling reception of these displaced people; art is also searching for ways to transform that relation.
The seminar’s main claim (to be discussed and investigated) is that contemporary art is uniquely attentive to the dark and potentially more luminous interdependences shaping migration today—the interdependences between citizens-on-the-move of some of the poorest, most colonially-damaged and politically unstable countries worldwide (parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America) and affirmed citizens of some of the wealthiest economies and democracies worldwide (Europe and North America), between these migrating beings seeking asylum and Europe’s and North America’s increasing refusal to grant them asylum, as well as the interdependencies structuring the internal displacement of people within specific countries in Latin America and North America. Art explores coexistence not as a living-together or a cohabitation but as what intellectual historian Mira Siegelberg designates as a “political organization of humanity,” that turns exodus into a process of exclusion, marginalization and latent elimination of 1% of humanity (1 in every 97 people worldwide). Challenging that relation, art invents a set of interconnected calls for coexistence: the call to historicize, to become responsible, to empathize, to story-tell; in these calls, viewers (primarily, though not exclusively, from Europe and North America) are interpellated as participating in the dynamic forces of migration, both its “necropolitics” and its struggle for equality.
The artistic practices examined in the course include installations, performances, video works, webcasts, digital platforms and alarm phones, counter-monuments, sculptures, graffiti, photographs and paintings, rescue boats and forensic investigations. Focusing on the work of Banksy, Undocumented Migration Project, Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, Binta Diaw, Richard Mosse, Laura Waddington, Florian Schneider, Forensic Oceanography, Teresa Margolles, Guillermo Galindo, Kader Attia, Ai Weiwei, Tania Bruguera, Bouchra Khalili, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Isuma, Olu Oguibe, Stan Douglas and DAAR ((Decolonizing Architecture Art Research), the seminar investigates these artistic practices by establishing a dialogue between art and key texts in the fields of political philosophy, postcolonial, decolonial, Black and Indigenous studies, and the critical field of refugee and migrant studies (including writings by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Jürgen Osterhammel, Tiffany Lethabo King, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Jacques Rancière, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Thom Davies and Arshad Isakjee, Ann Laura Stoler, Christina Sharpe, Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek, Didier Fassin, Étienne Balibar, Georges Didi-Huberman, Iris Marion Young, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Judith Butler, Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Mark Kalluak and Dylan Robinson). Its ultimate claim is that contemporary art is inviting us to unlearn our preconceptions and assumptions about the refugee or migrant “crisis.” Unlearning is about learning so see migration more critically, more disobediently and as transformable.
ARTH 699 (CRN 1725) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 2
ARTH 701 (CRN 1354) (0 credits)
Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam
Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.
ARTH 714 (CRN 1726) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 2
Supervisor approval required.