5000 Level Art History, Theory, and Criticism Course Descriptions

ARTHI 5000
Independent Study: Art History
The independent study presents opportunities for research on special projects, subject to the approval of a specific faculty member. Registration forms must be signed by the faculty member with whom the student will work.

ARTHI 5001
Cooperative Education/Internship
Graduate cooperative education and internships in art history, theory, and criticism allow students to work in part-time, art related co-op positions in approved organizations and institutions. Students are assigned a co-op faculty adviser and are responsible for attending two seminars during the semester. Students are required to work 14 hours per week, earning a total of 210 hours for every 3 credit hours. Permission to register must be obtained from the director of the Cooperative Education Program, with the approval of the chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism. Call the Cooperative Education Program at 312. 629-9160 for further information.

ARTHI 5002
Graduate Survey of Modern and Postmodern Western Art
This course surveys late nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Basic formal, contextual, and technical developments are discussed in relation to socioeconomic, intellectual, and cultural trends. Emphasis is placed on theoretical and critical issues. This course is required for the Master of Fine Arts in Studio or Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio. If a student has previously taken a twentieth-century survey or its equivalent, this requirement may be waived with the permission of the chair of the art history department.

ARTHI 5004
Research and Writing In Art History
This seminar deals with the sources and methods of art research and analysis. It is also a practicum for the writing of different kinds of art studies and criticism. You must be a Master of Art History student to take this course.

ARTHI 5005
Current Writing in Art History
This course analyzes the most significant methods currently practiced in art history. It is intended for students who may want to go on to research and write about art history. Students will read art historical texts written within the last ten to twenty years, in order to exemplify various approaches: structuralist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, De Manian, semiotic, Marxian, feminist. Authors may include Krauss, Steinberg, Fried, Clark, Alpers, Baxandall, Crow, Bal, and Foster. This is primarily a reading/discussion seminar, fulfilling an alternative requirement for students working on the Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

ARTHI 5006
Current Writing in Art Criticism
This course analyzes methods that are currently viable in art criticism. It is intended for students who may want to go on to write art criticism. Students will read art critical texts written within the last ten to twenty years, in order to exemplify various approaches. Authors may include Schjeldahl, Saltz, Hickey, Gilbert-Rolfe, Ostrow, Masheck, McEvilley, and Plagens. This is primarily a reading/discussion seminar, fulfilling an alternative requirement for students working on the Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

ARTHI 5007
History of Art History
In this seminar, the genesis of the discipline of art history, its founding, and continuing assumptions, will be examined through close readings of key texts in the discipline up until the period of high formalism in the 1950s. Readings will be chosen from among the following thinkers: Kugler, Schnaase, Morelli, Riegl, Wolfflin, Focillon, Panofsky, and Warburg. Student reports will focus on others. Discussions will introduce issues regarding the rise of art history in universities, professional organizations, and conferences, and the relation between museum and academia. Formalism, contextualism, universal history, and the relation between nationalism and art will be explored. This is primarily a reading/discussion seminar, fulfilling an alternative requirement for students working on the Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

ARTHI 5008
History of Art Criticism
In this seminar, the genesis of the discipline of art criticism, its founding and continuing assumptions will be examined through close readings of key texts up until the period of high formalism in the 1950s. Readings will be chosen from among the following thinkers: Winckelmann, Diderot, Baudelaire, Thoré, Castagnary, Gautier, Venturi, Pater, Bell, and Clark. Student reports will focus on other critics. Discussions will introduce issues regarding the rise of dissemination of art criticism, and we will consider how the various practices of criticism imply different theories of the role of the critic. This is primarily a reading/discussion seminar, fulfilling an alternative requirement for students working on the Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

ARTHI 5010
Survey Of Critical Theory
The 1960–70s saw the English translation and influence of “Continental Theory” (in the writings of Europeans such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan) upon literary studies, while the 1980s experienced the impact of many of these ideas upon the visual arts. Traditional ideas about truth, history, art, and representation are being questioned by artists and writers alike. This course introduces interested MFA students to critical theories of representation, emphasizing the relevance of “theory” to recent art production and art criticism. Reading assignments focus on theory and practice so as to exposed students to both primary theoretical texts as well as artists’ writings and visual practices that negotiate these ideas, including feminism, queer theory, and post-colonial theory.

ARTHI 5021
Exhibition Seminar:
History and Practice
This seminar focuses initially on the history and theory of exhibitions and continues with an analysis of contemporary exhibition practices. A wide range of exhibition paradigms will be explored, from early encyclopedic notions of the exhibition as source of authority and connoisseurship, to current dialogic and contestatory models linked with issues of access and globalism. Basic curatorial issues, including that of the relationship of the curatorial thesis to the artist’s intent, and of the role of curator as interpreter and arbiter, will be discussed. Students develop and present their own exhibition proposals for the final project.

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ARTHI 5225
Cracking Victorian Gender Codes
Seeking paradox rather than paradigm, this seminar challenges the ideas of male, female, and everything in between that have descended to us from nineteenth-century Britain. Separate spheres for men and women, rigid rules of conduct, and strict definitions of identity define the Victorian gender code. Or do they? Our subjects for analysis include painting, popular fiction, public monuments and events, myths about artists, fashion, critical language, and the London gallery scene.

ARTHI 5260
Figuring a Nation: American Art and Culture From 1876 to 1913
During the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, America was introduced to such marvels as the telephone and the arts of Japan and China. In 1913, Americans got their first real exposure to modern art at the Armory Show in New York City. These two events frame the four decades that mark this nation’s political, economic, and cultural transformation, as the nation began to realize itself as a global power in an industrial world. This seminar explores the impact that this transformation had on American art and artists. The conflict between tradition and modernism, the reconciliation of the cultural legacies of both the Old and the New Worlds, and the attempt to define what is “American,” were played out in every arena, from world’s fairs, Darwinism, immigration, women’s suffrage, comic books, the advent of the skyscraper, and the founding of museums and art schools.

ARTHI 5265
Romantic Radicals:
The Pre-Raphaelites
This interdisciplinary course delves into the romantic, narrative, realist art of this group celebrated for initiating the only radical artistic movement in nineteenth-century England. Among themes explored are: the notion of the avant-garde; the links between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and reformist social movements; artists’ publications (The Germ); Pre-Raphaelite fashion; variant constructions of artistic identity; Pre-Raphaelite women and feminist interpretations of the movement; photographic parallels (Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron); fantasy literature and illustration; aestheticism; and William Morris’s utopian socialism. Poetry, contemporary criticism, and other literary materials are integral to the course.

ARTHI 5270
Dissident Voices in Ninetenth Century European Art
Throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, diverse groups of artists formed in opposition to perceived constraints that affected artistic training and/or opportunities for exhibiting works of art. Early dissidents included the Nazarenes in Rome, German artists who prefigured certain objectives of the English Pre-Raphaelites. By the final decades of the century there was considerable incentive for artists to distance themselves from official bodies of art, and to establish new types of collective identities, primarily to gain greater recognition and promote their artistic gains. By the 1880s Les Vingt appeared in Brussels, and the New English Art Club was begun in Britain, followed by numerous Symbolist groups on the Continent, and major secessionist movements in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.

ARTHI 5290
Pop Arts in America, 1850–1950
This seminar surveys a wide range of popular visual arts from illustration (in both books and magazines), popular prints, and advertisements to war posters and comic strips. The accessibility of this imagery to marry segments of society makes its importance in history undeniable yet why has it been excluded form the canon of art history? Topics of the course include: the known and lesser known creators of theses images, their positions in the art world, popular arts’ direct engagement with other popular media, such as civic pageants, parades, and Wild West Shows, and the ongoing discourse between “high” and “low” art.

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ARTHI 5309
Re-Inventing the 1970s
Despite considerable developments in popular culture and art practice in video, performance, and (not least of all) in feminist art activity, the decade of the nineteen-seventies tends to dissolve in the fog of “pluralism.” An aim of this course is to discover whether the 1970s exist as a discrete historic entity or merely as a period in which the sixties ended and the eighties began. The course discusses ways of defining or imagining the 1970s, and of answering the question posed by Robert Hughes: “The seventies are gone, and where is their typical art? Nobody seems to know.” A secondary aim is to discover why this might be and thus assist in an understanding of the workings of contemporary art.

ARTHI 5331
Postminimalism
In the late Sixties, attacks on Minimalism came from all angles, as it was accused of moral failure, derided for its alleged “detachment” from life, and villified for the relative absence of women and racial minorities among its makers. In response to these criticisms, a wildly diverse group of younger artists pushed Minimalism’s aesthetic values in new and unforeseen directions. In evaluating the art and ideas that constitute this “postminimalist” backlash and extension, this class takes on the questions raised by these emerging artists, and ask what gives art its meaning and social relevance. It also address the death of artistic Modernism and the birth of the post-modern era. In so doing, the class will explore what happens to art once its objective principles are rejected.

ARTHI 5343
Latin American Avant-Gardes
Focusing on radical and original accomplishments, this course explores the interrelations of a wide range of artistic practices in Latin America throughout the twentieth century: visual arts, poetry, music, architecture, photography, art and technology, film and performance. Refuting the colonialist perception that Latin American avant-gardes are second-hand European products, this course merges conceptual and formal perspective, integrating literary, acoustic and visual material.

ARTHI 5355
Chicago Imagists
This course discusses the origins and development of the imagist movement in Chicago from the 1950s to the present.

ARTHI 5370
Seminar: Conceptual Art
This seminar is structured around readings, discussions, and writing about the history of conceptual art, including an investigation of precedents inherent in early modernism, dada, and surrealism. After achieving a coherent understanding of the specific history of the development of conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, Japan, and the United States, the seminar then focuses on how the movement has splintered, modulated, and evolved in to eighties appropriation and deconstruction and nineties multiculturalism and postmodern installation work. Readings include seminal texts by working artists and critics as well as recent attempts at rewriting and reassessing conceptualism, and a required term paper addresses students’ specific concerns and interests in the area.

ARTHI 5379
Can Art Tell the Truth?
Art of the Sixties is usually understood through the lens of idealist critics like Greenberg, Fried, and their followers. But a passionate debate raged during this era, which has now been lost to history —a debate over the nature of truth and reality in art. This course resurrects this lost debate, testing the idealists’ claim that art provides access to an immediate form of universal knowledge against its realist challengers, who believed that art must only make claims about the world that present verifiable facts and observable phenomena. In meeting this debate head-on, we will evaluate the arguments of each side and question how these ideas relate to the art of this era. Finally, we’ll ask the most important questions: Is it possible for art to tell the truth? And why would it want to do so?

ARTHI 5382
Contemporary Art Seminar
This graduate seminar will assess the contemporary art world through an investigation of the Chicago art scene, including viewing work in museums, commercial galleries, university galleries, artist-run non-for-profit spaces, as well as drawing on the resources of art professionals working here such as curators, critics, and artists. Multiculturalism, abstract formalist painting, sculptural, site-specific video installations, spiritualism, computer technology, collaboration, and education are among the topics that will be under consideration.

ARTHI 5384
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
This seminar will explore the contemporary art world through an investigation of the Los Angeles art scene, including viewing work in museums such as The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the LA County Museum, The Geffen Contemporary, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Norton Simon at Pasadena, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, and the Armand Hammer Museum of UCLA. The class will also visit commercial galleries, artist-run not-for-profit spaces, and artists’ studios. It will draw upon the resources of the Los Angeles community of curators, critics, dealers, and artists. This course will be taught by Terry Myers, independent curator and critic based in Los Angeles. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including ones for MOCA and Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. The class will meet for 5 days in Los Angeles and then reconvene in Chicago, to assess the work through discussion and written assignments.

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ARTHI 5450
Art East and West
With the advent of the modern world, the disparate cultures of Asia and the West have faced each other with greater frequency, but not necessarily with greater understanding. This seminar considers the differing approaches to art among the cultures of East Asia—China, Japan, and Korea, in particular—and Europe and America. We explore some of the interactions and exchanges among these cultures, examining what happens when vastly different beliefs and values collide. Students research a particular topic in depth and present their findings, along with a paper, to the class. Research topics may be wide-ranging and might include late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese artists’ interest in Western painting, the European interest in Asia from the eighteenth century to the present, the American interest in Zen during the 1950s and 1960s, and the adaptation of the modern and postmodern artistic vocabulary by contemporary Asian artists.

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ARTHI 5517
Websites, Networks, and Other Signs in the Digital Landscape
How do new technologies, mass culture, and the emergence of a global economy affect democracy and the public sphere? This class is an investigation into the realms of art and media in cyberspace. Using web sites as spaces for discourse, the class will examine the theory and practice of art and popular culture on the Internet. Readings in this class will include a wide range of critical work including articles by Brian Wilson, Roland Barthes, George P. Landow, Mikhail Bakhtin, Adriana Hernandez, and Simon Penny. Through these readings, screenings, and our own work on the Internet, we will build a context for understanding the digital world.

ARTHI 5518
Documentary Issues in Photography, Digital Media, and Text
This seminar explores documentary approaches in photography, writing, and the Internet. Accepting that a cultural product is more than a simple mirror of reality, what are the many functions of a work that seeks to record and comment on the real? What is the relationship between the documentarian and the people whose lives are being represented? What about when the focus is on the documentarian, as in memoir books and multifaceted presentations of the self on the net?

ARTHI 5540
Technology, Objects, Subjects, Art
The events of “Ash Tuesday,” September 11, 2001, are a starting point for a meditation on what our relationship is to technology in the wide sense. This seminar uses both theory and case studies to explore the place of aesthetic (art) and configurative (design) practices in regard to how these practices can map and challenge our relations with technology. Discussions examine (theoretically) the changed historical and cultural context of the early twenty-first century, and (practically) the character of some emerging critical practices in art, architecture, and design that seem to offer indications of different ways to re-negotiate or re-direct this relationship. The aim is to use analysis of examples and models to construct a set of criteria which can be used in critical and studio practice that addresses these issues.

ARTHI 5543
American Interior Design
This course is a historical examination of American interior design, furniture, and decorative arts from colonial beginnings to the 1960s. The emphasis will be on the architectural and decorative interior styles (both high and common) prevalent in U.S. history, and their European, Middle Eastern, and Asian influences. Both public and private interiors will be covered. Field trips are included.

ARTHI 5580
Film Theory
The art of cinema has had an incalculable impact on the course of twentieth-century art and artists. In fact, it might be argued that it is impossible to understand many of the directions modern art has taken without a firm grounding in film history and the theoretical discourses that this extraordinary history has generated. Intended as an introduction, this course is designed for advanced students as a way to connect the major concepts and discourses of film theory and practice to developments in the other visual arts. We read and view many of the founding works of film theory and practice, including some of the early film theorists, as a way to understand the relationships between cinema and modernism. The course also takes up the major discussions in contemporary film and cultural theory, focusing on theories of film in relation to semiotics, feminist psychoanalysis, popular culture, counter-cinematic practices, as well as on feminist, third world, and post-colonial theory and on post-structural approaches to cinema.

ARTHI 5581
Queer Pictures: Critical Studies in Film and Video
This seminar explores questions of cinema and television in relation to the larger issues concerning visual representations and definitions of sexuality. Themes and approaches include theories of spectatorship, in particular, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories of looking as related to sexuality; stereotypes and social roles; the interplay between unconscious processes and forms of representation; and the political implications of sexual iconoclasm, concentrating on homosexuality. The course consists of weekly discussions based on screenings of films and videotapes, as well as critical and theoretical texts that, from a variety of perspectives, address these issues. Films and videos include works directed by Dorothy Arzner, Stuart Marshall, Rose Troche, John Greyson, Richard Fung, Gregg Bordowitz, Sadie Benning, Sonali Fernando, Isaac Julien, Jennie Livingston, and Todd Haynes, among others.

ARTHI 5582
Cinema and Drug Use
Starting with the notion of an altered state of consciousness--what is, how it is achieved in various cultures and towards what ends--the course follows two line of inquiry: film as an “altered state” and representations of “altered states” in films. In doing so we consider a range of ideas central to film theory, including on the one hand, beauty, the sublime and aesthetic pleasure, and on the other hand, ideology, hegemony, false consciousness, the spectacle and virtuality. Some readings include Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, William Burroughs, The Critical Art Ensemble, Dan Graham, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, and Marshall MacLuhan while some of the films may include: Man with a Movie Camera, Lost Weekend, Reefer Madness, Easy Rider, The Trip, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Panic in Needle Park, Blade Runner, Videodrome, Drugstore Cowboy, and others.

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ARTHI 5623
From Proto-Photography to Post-Photography
This theory seminar focuses on the various conceptions of the nature of photography, examining (á la Michel Foucault’s genealogical method) the discursive regimes concerning the birth of the medium and its purported transformation in the digital era. A discussion of primary historical texts and contemporary theory elucidate the topic. The seminar contrasts photography as identified with its own nature (a modernist notion of inherent properties, such as Beaumont Newhall and John Szarkowski’s) vs. photography as a dispersed technology, as identified with the culture that surrounds it (a postmodernist notion, such as Allan Sekula and John Tagg’s). However, the seminar questions whether this either/or, nature/culture binary opposition that haunts photographic theory can be rethought and transcended drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s “logic of the supplement.”

ARTHI 5660
Critical Seminar in Experimental Music & Audio Art
This seminar will focus on critical issues in recent music and audio art. Topics will include: Power and Responsibility—the influence of politics, identity and technology in composed and improvised musical decision making; Pleasure—the role of “bump and mind” in the crossover of “high” and “low” musical culture; Groove, Pit, and Wave—recording, transmission, and music, the grain beneath the voice; Reducing the Tempo to Zero—the crisis of the beat after Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman, the time of music versus the time of installations; Chip Chop Shop (or Searching for the Perfect Beep)—the role of specific technological objects in the rise of new musical forms. After an initial series of lectures, students will be expected to research topics (chosen in consultation with the instructor), and present them in written and oral form, as well as guide group discussion. The course will draw on the extensive collection of recordings and printed materials in the Flaxman Library, as well as the instructor's and students' personal resources.

ARTHI 5680
Documentary Visual Media
The documentary, once regarded as a vehicle for the heroic confrontation of artist and society, has been questioned in recent years. This seminar uses selected documentaries to focus on issues regarding the truth claims of the work itself, the authority of the documentarist to speak for his/her subjects, and the construction of the audience for the work. The course takes into account traditional documentary media, including photography, film, and video, as well as less traditional nonfiction media, such as cartoons and performances.

ARTHI 5681
Defining Twentieth-Century Dress
Slide lectures, discussions, research, creative writing and field trips take the class from 1890 to the present. The focus of the seminar is on the relationship of art and dress—for example—the work of Sonia Delaunay, Picasso’s costume for the ballet, and Saint Laurent’s Mondrian collection. Feminist artwork of the 1970s regarding the body is considered, as well as 80s and 90s post-feminist performance art such as Mathew Barney’s Cremaster. Field trips include visits to the impressive Chicago Historical Society costume collection, and the AIC textile collection. Much research is developed through individual study in the Fashion Resource Center of SAIC. Theories of exhibition are discussed, and various writers who have used dress as an important element in story telling will be studied and used as models for creative and analytical writing.

ARTHI 5682
Comparative Studies in Artistic Process
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar systematically investigates five different processes for art-making: 1) chance procedures; 2) improvisation (including stream of consciousness and poetry of the subconscious); 3)found materials/objects trouve; 4) cumulative form (in which the process itself shifts, e.g., exquisite corpse); 5)recursivity (in which the process is static e.g. feedback). Lectures and discussion focus on the application of constraints—filters, games, systems, prohibitions—as a generative model for new ideas and materials. The class will consider existing work in a variety of media that utilizes these processes, and read and discuss applicable writings of both artists and theorists, culled equally from time arts, plastic arts, and literary arts (including material from the Oulipo group, Brion Gysisn, John Coltrane, Anna Lockwood, John Cage, the Machine for Making Sense, Jackson Mac Low, John Zorn, Gary Hill, Chris Marker, Alvin Lucier, Tony Conrad, Jean-Luc Godard, Theater Oobleck, Michael Snow, Kurt Schwitters, Maggie Nichols, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell). Over the course of the term, participants are responsible for five short projects inspired by each of the five different processes, and students will present their projects in class as well as submit a short written investigation of each one, placing it within a historical context and exploring its theoretical implications.

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ARTHI 5710
Ttaditions in Art Theory and Criticism
This course surveys the major concepts and methods of art theory and criticism, from antiquity to the landmark writings of Baudelaire and Ruskin, which launched critical theory into the modern era. Relevance to twentieth-century issues and concepts is discussed.

ARTHI 5713
Issues of the Art of Our Age: From Baudelaire to the Millenium
This course commences with a considered study of Charles Baudelaire’s seminal ideas about art, including the following: The relationship between the artist and society; that between art and literature; the meanings of artifice; the significance of artistic identity (auteurism); the aesthetic of chance; reference and appropriation; the comedic aesthetic. These concerns are then pursued into the present, as they are addressed and reconfigured by such figures as Conrad Fiedler, Oscar Wilde, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Roger Fry, Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, Michel Foucault, and Arthur Danto.

ARTHI 5720
Theories of Perception
This seminar explores theories of perception, from Alberti’s studies of perspective to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, with special emphasis of their relevance to practice in the visual arts, particularly painting and photography.

ARTHI 5731
Metaphors, Narratives, and Images
This course is designed to explore the ways we develop notions of individual and cultural identity through images. Comparing creative models and theories of various artists, filmmakers, ethnographers, and theorists, the class will question the nature of given forms and processes in promoting particular ways of seeing and understanding visual representations of cultural thought and practices. Readings and films include works by Berger, Clifford, Fernandez, Flaherty, Gass, Gombrich, Rouch, and Taussig.

ARTHI 5741
Imprint/Index/Trace/Mark/Photo: Towards an other Materiality
The use of techniques of imprinting and casting from the body and from objects has been pervasive in modern art. Introducing ways of engendering objects independently of controlling intention and open to chance effects, such techniques lend to the thing a traumatic immediacy, and raise questions of the relation between life and death, presence and loss, mourning, and the uncanny. The imprint has also been used as the basis for an alternative to an art history based on representation and idea. The index, a sign physically related to its referent, has been proposed as the basis to link sculptural practice of the 1970s to a model based on photography. The class will follow four threads: First, an exploration of the history and contemporary relevance of techniques of the imprint (handprints in prehistoric art; the life cast and death mask; the relic, Veronica, and “image not made by human hands;” the medical life-cast). Second, a consideration of the relations between the mark and the trace, as trace of the other. What, for example, is the relation between outline and shadow in Pliny's story of the origin of drawing? Third, the implications of the photograph conceived as a kind of cast of the object made by light (readings: Barthes and Lacan). Finally participants will look, in the context of contemporary installation work, at the relation of the imprint to place.

ARTHI 5751
Criticism Practicum
In addition to serving and or critiquing the art market, what are the functions of cultural criticism? To contest exclusionary language (Patricia Williams, Edward Said), to expand the role of the artist (Walter Benjamin), to engage politically (Ernst Bloch, Anne Higonnet), to feint with consumerism (Tom Frank), to connect the personal and analytical (Critical Fictions): we explore these and our own motivations as writers.

ARTHI 5753
Art and Ideas of The 90s
With the decade now over, people still say “there was no 1990s.” This course, taught by a New York art critic, focuses on art made in the 1990s, examining its diversity, the theories, and attitudes that have contributed to it, and the concerns that occupy it.

ARTHI 5754
Contemporary Art Criticism
Art criticism—the description, analysis, exegesis, contextualization, and judgement of art—is perceived as being a bit bedraggled of late. It just doesn’t seem to be doing its job. It is either lumbering under the ponderous weight of crusty deconstructive theory, or fleeing to the safety of the academy with its self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling hermeticism. It is crippled by the strangling constraints of political correctness, wallowing in a solipsistic subjectivism, stuck in celebrity self-aggrandizement, and floundering in a vast undifferentiated sea of relativism. What to do? This seminar comprises reading, writing, and discussion of art criticism and cultural commentary, including a concise historical survey and many field trips to visit area exhibitions, curators, and artists. The current state of criticism is assessed by readings of contemporary art writing in journals, weeklies, daily newspapers, and on the web. Special attention is devoted to understanding different audiences for practical as well as theoretical reasons. Emphasis is placed on developing new critical strategies to address new types of artistic practice (installation, video, digital media, interactive and socially engaged projects, and service oriented practices), and on new venues for art criticism (new journals, ‘zines, CD-ROMs, and the internet). This will be accomplished though visiting art exhibitions, class discussion of critical strategies, writing, and presenting one analytical research paper.

ARTHI 5760
Critiques and Art Academies
This course examines the problematic notion of critique and examines how to make it more effective. We will look at issues including such things as critiquing art with political or religious content; autobiography; the role of technique, style, concept, and context. The course will examine the history of art training and art schools, including the history of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Different approaches will be discussed: analysis, description, prescription, deconstruction, and just plain conversation. Students may use their own work as extended examples for class study in addition to selected other artworks.

ARTHI 5780
Writing About Art
This seminar is equally divided between discussion of readings in art criticism and sharing the students’ and teacher’s writings in journals that are kept throughout the semester. Each class begins by reading aloud and discussing what was written since the last class. The purpose of the course is to break down the barriers that usually exist in an art students’ mind between making art and criticizing it. The readings range from critics like Barthes, Baudrillard, Buchloh, and Kuspit to more accessible writers such as Harold Rosenberg or John Berger. This course also includes writing by artists about art.

ARTHI 5788
Criticism Practicum
This course introduces students to the history of art criticism from its genesis in art historical and philosophical disciplines in classical times to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; then the course concentrates on the development of art criticism as a specialized field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The influence of postmodernist philosophical theory and pop culture studies on recent art criticism is examined. This course is also a practicum in writing art criticism. In writing assignments students discuss and practice the mechanics of art writing: description, formal analysis, iconography, exegesis, interpretation, and critical judgement.

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ARTHI 5802
Tragedy and Ritual
The seminar offers an anthropologically-oriented exploration of cultural, philosophical and practical aspects of ancient and non-Western dramatic narrative. The goal is to form an intersection between ancient, non-Western, and contemporary, Western approaches to visualizing concepts of tragedy, narrative imperative, ritual expectation, and narrativized, cross-cultural representation. Reading simultaneously from influential works of philosophy, anthropology, art history, and drama, students will consider how fundamental structures of visualized narratives endure and are reformed in relationship to contemporary cultural issues and needs.

ARTHI 5803
Arts of Contemporary Anthropology: Visual Theory
This graduate seminar investigates the goals, license, and limits of visual anthropology and other forms of cross-cultural inquiry and representation. Through readings, screenings and seminar discussions, students will consider the relationship of representations of our imaged communities to questions of cultural identity, memory, and ideology, including reconsideration of the historical conditions of so-called “post-modernity” and “post-colonialism.” Special attention will be given to the impact of the rhetorics, forms, and models of various media on shaping our visualization of places, memory, and movement, and students will speculate on the ways these forms might serve to reflect or invent the seemingly fragmented, interconnected, or anarchic space as it is described by contemporary cultural criticism. Students will develop theories of cultural representation, testing strategies through individual projects, be they real or virtual. Multimedia projects are encouraged.

ARTHI 5804
Cultural Production in the Age of Post-Fordism
The industrialist Henry Ford revolutionized the way commodities get made. His ideas about the mass production of cars had a profound impact on all kinds of production. Gertrude Stein wanted to produce novels on an assembly line. Andy Warhol produced all of his work in a “factory.” How will cultural production change in the era of post-Fordism? This class will look at the ways that globalization within an emerging network society is changing the way we make and distribute art, particularly film and video.
The concept of post-Fordism describes the multiplicity of changes in areas of production that began to break in the late 1970s. The Fordist way of life was built around the mass consumption of consumer durables; the post-Fordist way of life is dominated by “niche market” consumption of distinct and specific goods. The mass market has fragmented into a collection of geo-demographically targeted markets. The culture of consumption is dominated by sign values. This is the society of the spectacle, the society of televisual consciousness or the hyperreal.

ARTHI 5812
“Race-ing” Art History: Its Past, Present, and Future
Vilifying some artists while essentializing others, scholars have read race into or out of the work of Gauguin, Tanner, Picasso, Pollock, and Puryear, to name a few. What impact has ethnic studies and its methodologies had upon the discipline of art history? What happens when such studies intersect with discussions of gender and class? This seminar examines the “race-ing” of modern art historical study and explores the collapsing theoretical discourse surrounding race and identity politics at the end of the twentieth century. Authors include bell hooks, Cornel West, Edward Said, Gayatri C. Spivak, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Kobena Mercer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Paul Gilroy.

ARTHI 5819
Self and Other
Examination of “dialogical” and “anti-dialogical” aspects of twentieth-century art. How are works of art conceived as constructing a self and an “other” for that self to confront, or to engage in dialogue? Topics to be covered: debate over theatricality; construction of (gendered) self in contemporary psychological theory; and rhetorical constructions of speaker and audience. Readings discussed may include Julia Kristeva, Michael Fried, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Lacan. Possible works to discuss are legion, but could include ones by Walker Evans, Barbara Kruger, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Cindy Sherman, i.e. anyone whose work problematizes selfhood and/or dialogue.

ARTHI 5821
Japan/Europe/America: Western Inventions on Eastern Culture
In 1853, after more than two centuries of cultural isolation, the nation of Japan was forced to open its ports to trade with Europe and America. During the half-century that followed, as Japanese goods flowed into the western world, Europe and America developed a passion for Japan and its art. What was first perceived as a rare and refined aesthetic—understood only by the most erudite collectors and the most progressive scholars and artists—turned into a popular vogue. This course explores how western culture invented a “Japan” that had aesthetic, intellectual, and popular appeal. Building upon a broad survey of Japanese art and culture, we chart the route of Japanese goods into the realm of western imagination. We direct our attention to issues of collecting, promotion, exhibition, and the role of Japanese aesthetics in the development of modernism, as well as the popular presence of Japonisme in costume, home decoration and design, parodies, and popular entertainment. The course looks at developments in France, Great Britain, and America, comparing individual western visions of eastern art.

ARTHI 5825
Image of The Artist in Pop Culture
While the boundaries between art and popular culture have become increasingly blurred and art draws indiscriminately from popular culture in our “postmodern” era, the relationship between art and popular culture often seems adversarial. In order to address questions about the role of the artist in society, students must also examine how society views art and artists, and how they might negotiate such representations. From Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh to Darryl Hannah as a nude performance artist in Legal Eagles, depictions of the artist in popular culture present a range of ideals about the artist. Do these depictions accurately reflect society’s attitudes towards artists or unduly influence those attitudes? Who is the artist to popular America? What is his or her race, gender and agenda according to popular culture depictions and what do these attitudes tell us about the perception of the artist in society? Theories of popular culture (Barthes, Benjamin, Williams, Penley, Ross, etc.) are read to help students determine to what extent representations of artists in mainstream culture influence public attitudes toward art, including arts funding and political or controversial art.

ARTHI 5829
Issues In Identity: The Self-Portrait
This course examines the function of self-portraiture throughout history. A brief survey of the development of the self-portrait is followed by a concentration on contemporary examples in painting and drawing. The principal emphasis of this seminar is the important role of self-portraiture in the examination and definition of issues regarding personal, cultural, ethnic, social, sexual, and gender identity. The course investigates the expanding and changing function of the self-portrait tradition in contemporary art.

ARTHI 5845
Representation and Pornography
This course investigates some of the arguments surrounding art and pornography. The distinctions between art and not-art in the area of erotic/pornographic imagery are considered primarily through the fine arts and film. Throughout this century the debate over these issues has become increasingly heated; this course attempts to assay some of the problematic relations between power and representation. The theoretical context of this course is informed by, among other things, the impetus of Foucaultian theory, Marxian-Freudian analyses of representation, internecine controversies within feminism, the raised profile of gay and lesbian artist and filmmakers, the attention given to sexual imagery in light of AIDS, and the attacks on artistic freedom initiated by the U.S. government in the 1980s.

ARTHI 5860
Art and Ritual
This graduate seminar examines theories of ritual and the relationship of art to ritual. Concepts of sacred space, the altar, festivals, and the ritual process are considered in relation to the artist/shaman and magician. Subject matter includes the art and ritual of Australian Aborigines and Dreamtime; Vodoun in Haiti; and Carnival in Europe, Brazil, Trinidad, and New Orleans. The students are expected to give one graduate level seminar presentation. Readings include van Gennep, Turner, Bakhtin, Callois, Huizinga, among others.

ARTHI 5871
The Reusable Past: Revival and Appropriation in Nineteenth-Century Art
As post-modernist discourse has made evident, art is endlessly recycled to suit whatever ideologies, theoretical strategies, and even whimsies that become caught up in the prevailing winds of artistic moment and mutability. The nineteenth century offers a tempting range of paradigms through which to recall the past, whether in the service of the present, or to address the future. The questions raised by the fascination with the past, whether archaeologically uprooted or merely glimpsed in a backward glance, are rarely based upon art alone, but are part of a larger engagement with earlier eras and styles that reveal political and societal issues and positions at work. Such concerns are made more complex in the nineteenth century by the paradoxical quest to achieve a balance between a reconsidered past and the preoccupation with notions of progress born of the industrial era.
This seminar will explore the conceptual underpinnings and artistic manifestations of “borrowing,” whether on the grandiose scale of major revival styles (neo-classical, neo-Gothic, etc.), or on a more idiosyncratic or individual basis, as in Cezanne’s allusions to the art of Poussin, or van Gogh’s persistent re-presentation of past artists’ work.

ARTHI 5879
Lust and Aggression in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture
In this seminar, we examine issues of lust and aggression represented in contemporary culture. Unlike desire, which is about a kind of yearning, lust and aggression are about acquisition and invasion. From the aggressive stalking projects of artist Sophie Calle, to the lust thrust of ‘zine-turned-magazine BUST to the consumer goals of American Girl Place, there has been a cultural shift in the ways lust and aggression are celebrated visually, particularly but not exclusively women’s lust and aggression. But what about aspects of lust and aggression that are not so easily visualized such as aggressive movements and hopes for political change? What images are in the foreground, which are upstaged, what are the related economic issues, and how can the traffic in images evolve toward a visual circulation that is radically democratic?

ARTHI 5886
Anti-Art since the Early 60s
This seminar is concerned with the burgeoning attacks on “conventional” art that have occurred since circa 1960. The course considers neo-dada, Fluxus, art strikes, and other less overt attacks on traditional art practice, such as those witnessed in punk and post-punk collaborations. “Anti-art” also includes new methods of creating, displaying, distributing, considering, and writing about art; all these avenues of research will be open to investigation, including-perhaps necessarily involving-the increasingly obfuscated distinction between theory and practice in the arts.

ARTHI 5891
The End of Art?
The “End of Art” as an object of philosophical reflection was initially announced in Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics in the context of a dialectical/developmental view of history. Since Hegel, the idea of the “End of Art” has had an impact on not only the Romantic and the Modernist artists and writers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, but also philosophers of art of diverse critical traditions. In this seminar, we will examine Hegel’s ideas and their critical developments and transformation up to the more recent formulations of the thesis of the “End of Art,” such as the one by the American philosopher Arthur Danto. If art develops historically, will it also pass historically, or on the other hand, can it represent liberation from historical necessity? Is art mortal? And if it is, should we mourn or celebrate this fact?

ARTHI 5892
Homecooking: Food as Visual Metaphor in American Art and Life
In North America food has had a prolific pictorial and literary cultural history. This seminar discusses defining a cuisine visually by regional and historical aesthetic, as well as issues like food and modern transportation (e.g., the drive-in, dining cars); dining traditions (e.g., cafeterias, diners); the sociology of food fads and trends; multiculturalism and the “American” diet; issues of fat and thin; gender and domesticity; and American food icons (e.g., hamburgers, hot dogs.) Examples are drawn from architecture, design, film, literature, painting, performance, sculpture and video.

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ARTHI 5900
History of The Museum and The Museum In Society
Museums trace their origins to earlier sites of collection and ritual display such as religious shrines, princely galleries, and cabinets of wonder/curiosity. The role of these places has variously included housing idiosyncratic arrays; making manifest wealth, power, and prestige; asserting civic or national identity; and codifying interpretations of cultural legacy. This course traces the development of museums from these early manifestations to the present day, relating the trajectory of this class of institutions to currents of political, intellectual, technological and aesthetic development. Recent trends in museum identity and practice, including the mandate to become more educational and more “public,” and the barrage of new construction internationally, are assessed. The museum’s presence in contemporary society, as both home for art and as potent cultural signifier, are examined.

ARTHI 5901
Curating History
A recent spate of controversies has erupted regarding how museums should interpret histories via exhibitions. At the Smithsonian Institution, for example, exhibitions forcusing on the Enola Gay and on Sigmund Freud have been cancelled as a result of controversy, while the Metropolitan Museum’s presentation, Treasures of Chinese Art, caused a storm of public disapproval in Taiwan. This course will ask questions about who has the right to tell these stories, who should be involved in that process, and how it should be undertaken. How should museums deal with controversial scholarship, and with “public” pressure? What is the appropriate role of the curator as broker between “scholarship” and “public?” Are there differences in these roles and responsibilities for public and private institutions?

ARTHI 5902
Exhibition Process
This course offers a perspective which asks what the curatorial and educational goals of an exhibition are, and how to devise technical and logistical procedures which are appropriate to those goals. Course work may include the design and installation of an actual exhibition. Technical areas covered will include: layout/visitor flow, lighting and color, wall texts, climate control, security, art handling, basic museum registration and condition reporting procedures, preparation of artwork for transit, loans, and installation project planning.

ARTHI 5905
The Next Museum
While once organized according to generally agreed-upon principles of order and value, museums are being rethought, reorganized, redesigned. In some cases (such as the Museé National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie in Paris) they’re even being closed, completely upending the underlying principles of cultural meaning and relatedness that museums once embodied. Museums themselves have become the subject of contemporary art in the past twenty years. Such changes are being propelled and reflected in the practice and theoretical work being done in many disciplines related to the current art scene. This seminar will be structured around bi-weekly lectures by some of the pioneers in the field of museum studies, including artists, curators, art historians and architects. Alternate weeks in class will consist of discussion and related project work, and gallery and museum visits.

ARTHI 5956
Edvard Munch: Anxiety, Symbolism, Tradition
This seminar investigates the career of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, whose best known paintings and graphic works of the late nineteenth century combine Symbolist ideas and expressionistic imagery to form a singularity insistent strain of early modernist art. The course places Munch within the cultural context of Norway, Paris, and Berlin, where his career developed in the 1890s. The critical reception of Munch’s art is considered, from the early years in Norway to his condemnation as a “degenerate” artist in the 1930s.

ARTHI 5964
H.C. Westerman, Chicago Imagism, and Related Directions
In this graduate seminar H.C. Westermann’s themes, motifs, and subjects are examined and researched in the light of other contemporaneous occurrences. His importance in twentieth century Modernism is considered, and the major retrospective of Westermann’s art the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in the summer of 2001 will be referenced.

ARTHI 5966
Dream And Vision: Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, And Balthus
A consideration of the works and stylistic development of three great individualists in twentieth-century painting. Their influences upon and connections with the major artistic directions of their times are dealt with, as well as the origins of their specialized points of view of the art of their own times and the past. The symbolic content, as well as formal structure, of the works of the three artists are emphasized, as well as analyses of their characteristic personal images.

ARTHI 5974
John Cage: Concepts and Ideas in the Arts
With the overwhelming success of the recent traveling show Rolywholyover, the ubiquitous presence of John Cage in the arts since 1950 has been confirmed by the public. Cage’s synthesis of the ideas of luminaries such as Eckhart, Thoreau, Duchamp, Satie, Stein, Hoyce, Varese, Coomaraswamy, Suzuki, McLuhan, and his camaraderie with Moholy-Nagy, Tobey, Pollock, Rauschenberg, DeKooning, Rivers, M. C. Richards, Nevelson, Cunningham, von Fischinger, Fuller, et. al., informed his unique approach to the creative process. His writings and works, both musical and visual, continue to exert a profound influence on the work of artists today. This seminar will examine this phenomenon through Cage’s extensive creative output, as well as through actual spoken works from his numerous appearances, including his visits to the School of the Art Institute.

ARTHI 5976
Three American Artists: Eakins, Tanner, and Cassatt
This seminar examines in depth the art and lives of three American artists painting during the last quarter of the nineteenth century: Thomas Eakins, Henry O. Tanner, and Mary Cassatt. Using biographies and the critical literature written both during and after their lifetimes, this course illuminates the interrelationships among these artists as well as the power of the unique style each strove to create. The course will also explore the impact of the period on these three painters as it shaped their experiences and careers.

ARTHI 5978
Wilde World: Critic as Celebrity
Few individuals have had as high a public profile as Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). He was an innovator in all his endeavors: as a writer and playwright, as a critic, as a public figure, and as a taste maker. He expressed his ideas as much through his actions and self-presentation as through his lectures, plays, and publications. The public responded in kind, as he became a major figure in popular culture: celebrated, lampooned, and eventually destroyed. This course does NOT take the form of a biographic overview. Instead, it charts the course of Wilde's influence, seeing how his daring, wit, and innovation changed the worlds of literature, home decoration, fashion, ideas about gender, and ultimately the moral strictures of his society. The course considers the spheres of culture in which he was influential, including Aesthetic Movement design, “l’art pour l’art” in painting and poetry, censorship and “yellow” publications, satires of Wilde and the Aesthetes, and the issue of celebrity. By examining the role of this distinctive individual on his own culture we are able to better understand the persuasive power of celebrity in our contemporary world.

ARTHI 5980
Special Exhibitions Seminar
These seminars take advantage of one-time special exhibitions held at local galleries and museums, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and offer concentrated study on topics specific to these exhibitions.

ARTHI 5999
Thesis Tutorial
This independent study program for Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism candidates is taken in the final term of coursework.