spring 2018 courses
Click on course title for syllabus PDF.
The title of this class comes from Fred Moten’s 2008 article “The Case of Blackness” in which he suggests that black is, does, means, and exceeds the visual field. Taking Moten’s notion of blackness’s social chromatism to work, this graduate seminar explores Black cultural theory and its interventions on aesthetic theory. Working primarily out of anticolonial and antiracist politics, the scholars and artists we will examine take as skin, color, sound, and touch as their primary mediums in order to further understandings of antiblackness and other afterlives of slavery. Some of the scholars we will study include Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Braithwaite, Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Huey Copeland, Fred Moten, and Leon Wainwright. Paired with exhibitions like the Brooklyn Museum’s 2007 Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art and the Tate Museum’s 2010 Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, we will ask ourselves: what constitutes blackness? What is the art-historicity of black aesthetics? What radicality exists within and despite of the ongoing violence of antiblackness? These questions might lead us to further theoretical and aesthetic explorations how Blackness extends tactile, audible, and imaginary qualities to the visual field. Assignments include a key concept presentation, object-based written exercises, and a final paper.
This survey course will examine the work of artists who privilege the conceptual terrain in their practices. Between the 1950s and 1980s, the art object was famously "dematerialized" and instead transformed into a poetics of gesture, residue, or citation. This course combines lecture and discussion to navigate through various histories of New Genres from its inception to the present. We will prioritize forms of art based on elements of concept, material, time and process, including; action, language, performance, systems of light and space, installation, and video. We will trouble the disciplinary waters by paying particular attention to artists whose forms escape categorization, and whose practices shape and shift the past, present, and future tenses of ‘the new.’ Assignments include a conceptual journal, midterm examination, and short critical response essays.
The feasibility of ‘Revolution’ as a probable means for activating a more egalitarian world has lost currency today, especially among artists and critics. In 1968, to be skeptical of Revolution was, indeed, working on behalf of oppression. No history of resistance is complete without a close examination of this global year of insurrection. This course interrogates the visual history of resistance from the 1930s through 2012. Our class will pay particular attention to photography and its impact on archiving and engaging resistance to systems of oppression. Some of this material includes works by John Heartfield, Tina Modotti, Guy Debord, the Third World Liberation Front, Black Panthers, and the current Occupy movements. Though we spend several weeks on historical events, our class will visit contemporary televisual mediums, performance art, and current movements and how they constantly confront the legacy of the 1960s. We will be reading a variety of material including primary archival sources, visual theory, and historical reflections by various activists. Assignments include in-class presentations, short critical response essays, and a final individual oral examination where students will demonstrate a depth of knowledge of course materials.