Fall 2022
ARTH 501/EAST 501 (CRN 1314) (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture: "Other" Art in Chinese Past
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Wednesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-5
What makes art official? What does it mean for art to be considered unofficial? Such fundamental questions in art’s position in society occupy this seminar, which centers upon China. We will explore how certain art practices became socially sanctioned while others did not. While our inquiries will begin from antiquity, our main focus will be upon middle-period China (9th-14th centuries). This was an era of remarkable changes, of shifting paradigms in socioeconomic structure, ecology, knowledge production, boundaries of religious realms, and cultural diversities. Changes in the ways of seeing here were intertwined with many such shifts, often disguised as visual interests only, such as the renewed pursuit of “lifelikeness” or “spirit-likeness.” In the seminar, we will examine artistic modes shaped by tension between “official” and “unofficial” cultural understandings, between the classical and the contemporary, between orthodox and unorthodox, and between text and image.
ARTH 502 (CRN 1315) (3 credits)
Advanced Topics in Art and Architectural History: Art Under Liberalism
Prof. Matthew C. Hunter
Tuesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
“Live dangerously”: that, as Michel Foucault declared in 1979, could be the motto of classical liberalism. As Foucault’s pithy formula suggests, liberalism signals more than an ideology of free markets and individuals. But, what does it entail? How does liberalism’s danger relate to the precarity of contemporary neoliberalism? And by what methods (i.e. steps and procedures of knowledge-production) can we reconcile liberal discourses and values with specific imaging technics, spatial typologies or other configurations of the visual? Open to advanced undergraduates and to graduate students alike, this seminar examines the conditions of art and architecture under liberalism, from the later eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. Guided by recent historiography while drawing on period liberal voices and their critics, we will examine what liberalism has been taken to entail and how it has shaped the making, beholding, commerce and possibilities of art and architecture. Through focus on specific places and institutions—the prison and the dockyard, the national gallery and the insurance office—we will consider shifting figurations of the liberal self’s race, gender and politics in eras of slavery, revolution, and imperialism. In so doing, the seminar aims not only to enliven studies of JMW Turner, Robert S. Duncanson, and other artists, but to sound possibilities for different, critical histories of modern visual production and its built environment.
ARTH 600 (CRN 1316) (3 credits)
Anti-colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues in Art History and the Humanities
Prof. Christine Ross
Monday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
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, colonization and 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 texts, 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 1317) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 1
Directed reading.
Prerequisite: Instructor's approval required.
ARTH 698 (CRN 1318) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 1
For the completion of thesis research.
ARTH 699 (CRN 1319) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 2
Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.
Prerequisite: Advisor approval required.
ARTH 701 (CRN 1320) (0 credits)
Ph.D. Comprehensive Examination
Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.
ARTH 714 (CRN 1321) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 2
Directed reading.
Prerequisite: Advisor approval required.
ARTH 725 (CRN 1322) (3 credits)
Methods in Art History 1:
Ancient and Living Archives: Indigenous Materialities, Eternal Sovereigns, and Cultural Belongings
Prof. Gloria Bell
Tuesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-5
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 and technologies 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 art institutions to think about the competing sovereignties of Indigenous cultural belongings and artworks within colonial art institutions and to encourage sustained respectful engagement with cultural belongings being artworks for Indigenous and settler communities.
Winter 2023
ARTH 618 (CRN 1188) (3 credits)
Art History - 1400-1900 1: Matters of Making in Classical Chinese Art
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Tuesday, 8:35 am-11:25 pm
ARTS W-220
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, gold, lacquer, 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.
Cross-listed with EAST 503.
ARTH 630 (CRN 1189) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 1
Directed reading.
Prerequisite: Advisor's approval required.
ARTH 647 (CRN 1190) (3 credits)
Renaissance Art and Architecture 1: Materiality and the Senses in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Friday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
This seminar seeks to collapse methodologies used for study of so-called fine or high arts (painting, engravings/etchings, sculpture, architecture) and decorative or luxury arts including performative work (furniture, textiles, ceramics, metal-ware, glassware, banquets, triumphs) through an object-based approach that enlists the speculative reconstruction of sensory experience. We will read important recent work on the cultural history of the senses and the somatic experience of art, while also engaging critically with major grant-funded experimental history projects such as Making and Knowing, Refashioning the Renaissance, and Odeuropa.
ARTH 699 (CRN 1191) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 2
Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.
ARTH 701 (CRN 1192) (0 credits)
Ph.D. Comprehensive Examination
Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.
Prerequisite: Instructor's approval required.
ARTH 714 (CRN 1193) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 2
Directed reading.
ARTH 725 (CRN 7047) (3 credits)
Methods in Art History 1: Art and Climate Infrastructure
Prof. Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol
Tuesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
Ferrier 230
The histories and present prospects of art museums are haunted by a profound (colonial) anxiety regarding the weather outside. Institutions are faced with the prospect of spending exorbitant resources on climatizing storage and exhibition spaces, lest they be deemed lacking in "proper" facilities. Such environmental standards have also been central to arguments against the circulation of artworks beyond the “developed” world, whether the loaning of artefacts to museums without climatized spaces and, more notably recently, the restitution of objects to postcolonial states. What is often understood as best practice in art conservation appears increasingly unsustainable and paternalistic in the face of climate crisis and calls for decolonization today.
In this graduate seminar and curatorial studio, we will explore the possibilities of working within and beyond the frame of climatic control. The first half of the course traces a genealogy of ecological containment via a series of spatial and stylistic typologies, including colonial greenhouses and gardens, postwar tropical architecture, and air-conditioned museum storerooms. The second half examines recent artistic and curatorial projects based in indigenous and critical modes of practice. In lieu of traditional assessment, students will have the opportunity to work collaboratively to contribute to an upcoming exhibition on this topic. Approaching the curatorial as a method of inquiry, we will design a framework for collective research and production with specialist and non-specialist audiences in mind.
ARTH 731 (CRN 1194) (3 credits)
Current Problems in Art History 2: Media and Urban Life
Prof. Will Straw
Wednesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
This course deals with a variety of ways in which we might think about the relationship of cities to media, art and culture. Cities “contain” media, of course, but the relationship between the two goes beyond this. Cities are themselves media-like in the ways in which they process information, structure cultural expression and give material form to social history and memory. Likewise, as spaces marked by rhythms of activity and experience, interconnection and exchange, cities are fundamentally “cultural” in ways that go beyond those activities we normally designate as “culture.”
Cross-listed with COMS 675.