Program: Electives

• The Language of Color

  Instructors: Munro Galloway and Trinie Dalton

  What language do we use to write about color in art? This course will explore the descriptive, critical and poetic terms that signify color, from prehistory to the present day. Through observation, reading, discussion and writing, we will examine the science and philosophy of color, the historical and literary development of color language, and the cultural and political significance of color in modern and contemporary art. Museum and studio visits, discussions with artists and critics, experiments in color identification and mixing, and regular writing workshops will be included. Readings will range from scientific and philosophical texts (Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Goethe, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Josef Albers) to fiction/memoir and poetry (Rainer Maria Rilke, William S. Burroughs, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, William Gass, Maggie Nelson) to contemporary criticism (David Batchelor, Yve-Alain Bois, Esther Leslie and Kathryn Tuma). Students will develop a language of color through descriptive writing, response to critical texts and subjective encounters with color in art.

• In the Process: Thinking about How Art Is Made

  Instructor: Nancy Princenthal

  Through reading essays by artists, critics and historians about the process of making art, this class will consider the importance of close attention to any given work’s material as well as conceptual qualities. Subjects will range from traditional studio practices resulting in discrete paintings and sculptures to the development of work based in ideas and realized as ephemera or in time-based media. The goal of the class will be a broader understanding of how process shapes not only physical outcome but also meaning. We will begin with two texts on Alberto Giacometti, by James Lord (A Giacometti Portrait) and David Sylvester (Looking at Giacometti). Further assigned authors will include artists Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Yvonne Rainer, Rackstraw Downes, Carroll Dunham, David Humphrey, Andrea Fraser and Frances Stark, and writers Robert Storr, Richard Sennett, David Levi Strauss and Patricia Phillips.

• Art Writing Now and for the Future

  This course will engage with the conversations, debates, opinions, and theories around contemporary visual art. Along with reading recent key texts in art criticism, we will examine reviews and essays published during the course of the semester. Students will make presentations on this material, as well as write their own short essays and articles to be discussed in class. We will also attend pertinent exhibitions and lectures. The goal of the course is to interact collectively with the most current writing and thinking on visual culture, and to attempt to anticipate future directions they might take.

• Late Modernism/Postmodernism: Critical Strategies

  Instructor: Debra Bricker Balken

  With the rise of postwar artistic movements such as the New York School, critical writing in the United States attained a certain urgency. How to define the radical new meanings of midcentury art? This class will consider the varied responses of Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Leo Steinberg, and others and how their essays and reviews either refined pre-existing formalist strategies or turned to philosophical models such as Marxism or existentialism. As their positions became increasingly entrenched in the late modernist period, a certain fallout ensued with the result that academically trained writers such Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens eventually questioned once cornerstone beliefs in originality and the artist’s subjectivity. Others, such as Michael Fried, Philip Leider and William Rubin, remained devoted to formalist criteria. In a post-modern era where little or no critical consensus prevailed, a rich, diverse body of discourse emerged that will be examined in depth through these and other key critics such as Arthur C. Danto, bell hooks, and Dave Hickey.

• Criticism and Risk

  Instructor: Michael Brenson

  I suspect that for most everyone seriously involved with art, risk is an essential and uneasy word. The best artists, critics, curators, collectors and dealers may approach risk differently, but in order to meet the challenges of art, they all know that risk is required. Without risk, there can be neither knowledge nor transformation. Uncertainty, disturbance, otherness and shock have been part of the fabric of modernity, of which each incarnation of The Contemporary, no matter how distinct, is itself part. But what a difficult word risk is! Risk what? Risk how? For what? For whom? With what objective? For a critic, the potential for risk is shaped by the publishing outlet. Risk is encouraged or suffocated by strategies of writing—including style. It goes without saying that its energies and stakes are also shaped by personality and history. This course will not fetishize or commodify risk. Through writings by artists, critics, curators and others—including you, the students—it will consider questions such as: What are risk’s forms? How do we recognize them? How does risk happen within overt and internalized systems of authorization? What role does risk play in the experience of art and writing?

• The Work of Art in the Age of Information

  Instructor: Ann Lauterbach

  
  “The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness.” —Freeman Dyson.

  In this course we will discuss some of the following questions: What is the work --the task– of art in a world given over to the near instantaneous flow of data across all boundaries of self and state? Is it still useful to think of the artist as a singular figure whose work captures a present reality, when history itself seems to be a rapidly shifting, tractionless field? How can we distinguish between subjective and objective reasons for aesthetic judgment (and is it important to do so)? Can critical thinking/writing reinscribe the criteria of meaning into the art  experience without disavowing the work of theory or rejecting the ubiquity of information and opinion? Is there a new relation to be found between critical authority and cultural/social resonance? Readings from a range of thinkers, artists and writers. Weekly short papers and one term paper.

• The Sublime and the Beautiful

  Instructor: William Benton

  This course will conduct a literary and visual examination of the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful, as one of the great dichotomies in Western theory and criticism. We will examine the sublime (Burke, Kant, Turner, Newman) and the beautiful (Bell, Greenberg, Heidegger, Habermas), as well as some of the images on which their theories are based. In addition, more recent works, including Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon and essays by Peter Schjeldahl, will be discussed.

• Against Interpretation

  Instructor: Nancy Princenthal

  A subjective overview of strategies for resisting criticism, this class will look at the perennial efforts artists have undertaken to resist the authority, and the conventional formats, of criticism. From Dada, Fluxus, and Conceptualism, to the Bruce High Quality Foundation and other collectives dedicated to rewriting art history’s curriculum (or pedagogical practice), usurping the critical role has been a recurrent motive. Because the subject is so broad, this course will be organized in part around examples of particular interest to the students who enroll. Susan Sontag’s essay will be one starting point; Sol LeWitt’s sentences and paragraphs on Conceptual art will be another.

• Artists’ Writings

  Instructor: Susan Bee

  The significant interventions that visual artists have made through art writing into the art criticism of their time is the focus of this course. It will examine artists’ writings, including journals, manifestos, letters and artist-run publications. We will concentrate on some key artists’ writings from artists who have bridged the gap between art practice, artwork and critical theory such as Wassily Kandinsky, Barnett Newman, Louise Bourgeois, Donald Judd, Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneemann, among others.

• Artists in the Present

  Instructor: Phong Bui

  Instead of concentrating on the conventional modes of interview which rely on sets of questions that apply to everyone, this course will explore different preparations and methods congenial to a wide variety of practices and approaches that artists have adapted in order to differentiate themselves. Critics need to be able to talk with artists. We’ll prepare interviews that uncover working methods and ideas. In addition, students will be exposed to many artists’ studios where works of art are made.

• Motion Capture

  Instructor: Lucy Raven

  This course will track the course of movement as depicted in still images via some of the oldest and newest forms of animation. From ancient traditions of animism and the talismanic characteristics of inanimate objects to the newest motion capture technologies and military surveillance, we will examine how we represent movement, and to what ends. We’ll read Aby Warburg and Roland Barthes, look at Muybridge and Marey, and move into ideas of montage in Eisenstein and Godard. We’ll talk about the accumulation of images as material, drones and infrared heat sensor goggles, and speculative motion capture, in an attempt to get closer to the future of images.

• Marxism and Art Criticism

  This course aims to acquaint students with significant figures and texts in the tradition of Marxist art theory and criticism. In additon to Marx, readings include works by Trotsky, Plekhanov, Raymond Williams, Simmel, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Fischer, Jameson, Althusser, Marcuse, T.J. Clark and Adorno.