This interdisciplinary freshman seminar invites a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be the contemporary artists and thinkers who have been encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life--or recalling very old ones--as they create plant protagonists, gardens in galleries, and botany-based forms of philosophy, architecture, music and more. Following the lead of these culture-makers, we will draw on the new science of plant communication and learning; uncover plant-based global histories, and renew ancient understandings of human-plant...
This research seminar uses a comparative method to study the aesthetics of deception. A deep dive into theories of art's proximity to trickery, illusion, and duplicity will be followed by student-led studies of key concepts (e.g., realism, forgery, camoflauge, passing, faux materiality) arising in the art practices of various periods and cultures. This class is open to HAA students in any subfield, and graduate students from across the humanities wishing to pursue shared interests related to the long history, and complicated theory, of art and deception...
This is an upper-level undergraduate art history/critical studies course about fact and fiction in visual art since 1960. It won't be a survey course, but you'll become familiar with a range of post-modern and contemporary art (and what the difference is between them) as you encounter some of the key artistic developments since the 1960s (e.g., conceptual art, globalization of the art world). The types of art we'll study include photography, film, video, installation art, net.art, and many varieties of performance. Sequenced...
Junior tutorial on the concept of the Anthropocene (and criticisms thereof) in relation to nonhuman timescales, post-industrial landscapes, and environmental politics in art since the 1970s.
Graduate seminar exploring the intersection of the field of art history with the globalized art world. What is "contemporary art" - in theory, in practice, and in history? We will read one recent book each week, tracing the developing discourse on contemporary art since the early 2000s, and following authors into the topics that have defined the field (such as multiple modernities, temporal drag, coloniality, the post-medium condition, globalization, networked media, post-Communism, and neoliberal culture).
