3000 Level Visual and Critical Studies Course Descriptions

VCS 3001
Topics in Visual and Critical Studies
These courses draw on the instructor’s particular expertise and are pertinent to an understanding of the social influences on and consequences of the production and dissemination of visual images. Topics vary depending on the individual instructor.

Topic: Art History and Textual Criticism
This course explores transmission of cultural texts, and how works of art undergo change as they are disseminated. Students survey textual change in twentieth-century art and architecture and in representations of earlier art. The class will examine critical approaches to transience, including textual criticism and New Historical Criticism, and the problems inherent to documenting it. Specific subjects will include reproduction and refabrication, restoration and conservation, labels and captions, and conceptions of temporal change. Seminar participants will present papers that treat either pragmatic or theoretical implications of textual change.

Topic: Art Scene/Seen in Chicago: A World in Transition
This course investigates the ways in which the visual arts in Chicago, and, more broadly, the art scene of mainstream and community art organizations, exhibitions, artists, and audiences, have responded to the changing social dynamics of the city. Questions asked include” To what extent is Chicago’s contemporary social diversity reflected in the visual images and cultural practices that are in evidence across the city? During the semester, students will have the opportunity to engage in field research (including observations and interviews) in various Chicago communities as a major component of work for this course.

Topic: Art Worlds & Culture Industries
This course explores the evolution of visual culture industries-in both the art world and popular culture, and the institutional constraints that shape them. The course focus is on the historical and contemporary forces that have produced the market for visual culture from the perspectives of artists/producers, patrons/sponsors, experts/critics, supporting institutions, and audiences. Topics discussed include: the social forces that shape our tastes for and expectations about visual culture; how, when, and why some forms of visual culture become controversial; and the consequences of eroding boundaries between art and popular culture.

Topic: Exhibition Prosthetics
This seminar explores materials that serve a prosthetic function in the making and exhibiting of art: catalogues, biographies, and even wall labels. We study how certain social activities involving negotiation strategies relate to contemporary exhibition practices. Students produce a curatorial proposal or virtual exhibition consisting of announcement, press release, catalogue dummy, and checklist of the "work". The course should interest undergraduate or graduate students engaged in critical studies or curating, or interested in the ways exhibitions create contexts for their work, and in how they might participate in construction of these contexts.

Topic: Things: Meanings and Memories
How and why do “things” evoke responses in human beings? Why do we choose to live with certain things and reject others? This course addresses these and similar questions with reference to examples of “things” and their relationships with people at different times and in different cultures, and focuses specifically on “cultural objects,” “gendered objects,” and “memory objects.” Theoretical context is provided by texts from a range of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, sociology, design history and cultural studies. Students are encouraged to draw on examples from their own fields and experiences.

Topic: Visualized Communities
This course examines ways in which our modern culture uses images to build a sense of community. Readings begin with Benedict Anderson’s ground-breaking work, Imagined Communities. Examples of the different ways in which communities define themselves through images include the use of portraits to establish social positions and build membership in groups; the use of photographs to hold family members together; identity-oriented works of art; and images fed to a mass culture to create a sense of unity. Examples studied in class include James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead, the Catalogue for the exhibition Too Jewish, the Web site AKAKurdistan, and news coverage of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings.

Topic: Visualizing Spirituality in the Twentieth Century
In the twentieth century the spiritual has taken a variety of new forms, challenging traditional forms of representation. How have architects, designers, and artists responded to this challenge? From Vincent van Gogh to Bill Viola, from Cage to Tarkovsky, the spiritual has been an important subject in modern art. During the same period many artists have questioned, even rejected, traditional forms and representations of religion. Over the course of the twentieth century the mass media have also provided new, widely circulating images of spirituality. What influences have these representations of the spiritual had on each other and on our understanding of spirituality? How does the intention to express the spiritual, or even pursue it through the practice of art, affect the creation, the reception, and the interpretation of an artist’s work? How is the realm of the spiritual visualized? Does spiritual art require special spaces and modes of reception? When is spiritual art effective or successful? Students examine these issues through classroom lectures, discussions, and written and studio assignments.

VCS 3010
Tutorial in Visual and Critical Studies
This course will provide a link between Issues in Visual and Critical Studies, required of all first-year B.A. students, and the Thesis Seminar required in their final year. Typically students will take this course at the end of their second year of full-time study. Building on the Issues course, early in the course students will read material that suggests the range of possibilities for visual and critical studies. Then each student will undertake a project that focuses on some aspect of visual and critical studies of particular interest to her or him. The project must include a substantial written component, although it might also make use of other media. Student presentation of their projects, as works in progress and then completed work, will provide opportunity for discussion of how they might give coherence to their final semesters of study. This will include suggestions for connections they might make among different aspects of their education, and will serve as an early stage in the process of developing a senior thesis project. The instructor of the senior thesis seminar will visit the class for one session and give students some guidelines for developing their thesis projects.

VCS 3090
Interdisciplinary Studio Seminar:
Corporate Culture and Alternative Visions
The visual identities of corporations, the look of their products, and the appearance of their self-promotions are dominant aspects of our broader visual culture in the United States. This course asks questions about the visualization of corporate culture and the designer’s role. Is there an outside to corporate culture, and the variations of expressions within it? What about the designer’s power in general to intervene in mass visual communication and participate in a democratic exchange of images? A designer’s power to create visions alternative to corporate ones? The course combines reading, discussion, writing, and studio work. No previous studio work in the design field is required.

Topic: Corporate Culture and Alternative Visions
The visual identities of corporations, the look of their products, and the appearance of their self-promotions are dominant aspects of our broader visual culture in the U.S. This course asks questions about the visualization of corporate culture and the designer’s role. Is there an outside to corporate culture? Are there variations of expressions within it? What about the designer’s power to intervene in mass visual communication and participate in a democratic exchange of images, or to create visions alternative to corporate ones? The course combines reading, discussion, writing, and studio work. No previous studio work in the design field is required.

Topic: Women and Design
This course examines the impact of feminine gender issues on graphics, marketing, advertising, interior design, and product design, using historical and contemporary U.S. examples. Students explore the influence of design on our society and culture. Case studies include the design of the telephone (as discussed in design curator Ellen Lupton’s Mechanical Brides) and marketing for girls (as in play at American Girl Place). We also explore the contemporary impact of the practices of women designers such as Lorraine Wild, Marlene McCarty, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Course readings include texts by architectural historian Dolores Hayden, design historian Penny Sparke, historian Victoria de Grazia, and others. The class interweaves reading and discussion with studio practice. No previous studio experience is required.