ARTH 491

Fall 2009 All Classes

All Classes

Topics in Art History

Course in Catalog

List of Terms offered

Credit: 1 TO 4 hours.

Variable content; consult the Class Schedule for current topics.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.

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ARTH 491 class schedule data for fall 2009
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
10383	Independent Study		ARRANGED	n.a.	Location Pending		Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/09-12/09/09 Special Approval: Instructor Approval Required
47738	Lecture-Discussion	2	1:00PM -4:00PM	M	Location Pending	Higgins, H Lang, K	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/09-12/09/09 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: This course examines the art, social life and legacies of Black Mountain College, a small experimental college near Ashville, North Carolina from 1933-1956. During its short life, this college fostered several historic events; the first happening, the founding of Merce Cunningham's dance company, Robert Rauschenberg's making and display of the white paintings, summer institutes by (among others) Willem and Elaine DeKooning and Clement Greenberg, and Buckminster Fuller's first geodesic dome of 1948. As shown here, this last event forms a particularly useful lens through which to view the college, since it was a spectacular failure. Made of window blind slats, it was too soft to stand and was named 'the supine dome' by Elaine de Kooning. This course asks several questions of these achievements. First, since the art program was brought to Black Mountain when Josef and Anni Albers fled the Nazi's just before the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, we will look at connections between Black Mountain and the structure and pedagogical ideals of the famed interdisciplinary Grundkurs of the Bauhaus. Second, we will study what was added to this legacy by the tradition of American liberalism in education associated with Black Mountain College board member, John Dewey. Third, we will study how the extreme poverty of the school contributed to its can-do spirit of experimentalism. And, finally, we will study the extent to which these threads became part of the formats of postwar art and art education as faculty from Black Mountain, in particular the composer John Cage, brought experimentalism into the classroom. There is substantial secondary literature available on the Bauhaus, Black Mountain, and Cal Arts, where Cage's student, Allan Kaprow established his interdisciplinary arts program. Weekly meetings will focus on these readings, however research for papers and projects in this course will use primary materials as much as possible, in particular the microfilm Black Mountain College Papers at the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian. Enrollment is restricted to students accepted into the Illinois at the Phillips Collection program -- all classes in Washington D.C. 1st class meeting Monday, September 14 (no class on Labor Day). Undergraduate Section. Graduates must enroll in ARTH 550. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
47739	Lecture-Discussion Lecture-Discussion	3 3	10:00AM -11:00AM 6:00PM -8:00PM	W T	Location Pending Location Pending	Lang, K Greenhill, J Lang, K Greenhill, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/09-12/09/09 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: During the cultural reinvention that followed the Civil War, the market for humor expanded in the U.S.--with the new platform comedians of the 1860s, the large format comic periodicals of the 1870s and '80s, and the swelling comic back pages of elite journals like Scribner's. This investment in humor--which would erupt into a full-scale �plague of jocularity� by the end of the century--inspired many conservative critics to try to contain it in the realm of high art, a category very much under construction in these years. But why was humor so viral, so threatening? What kinds of humor were out of bounds and for whom? How might ambitious art be formulated through an engagement with humor? What role does humor play in art of the early twentieth century and can we see this work as related to--instead of fundamentally cut off from--the visual culture of the previous century? We will explore these and other questions by examining a range of material: from painting and sculpture to single-sheet cartoons and early film. In an effort to discern how the grotesque, deadpan, nonsense, irony, and other comic idioms find form in visual media, we will look in depth at the work of Alfred Jacob Miller, Winslow Homer, John George Brown, William Holbrook Beard, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Haberle, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. Period criticism and more recent theory will be fundamental to our consideration of the challenges these works present. Literature from the period will also be a crucial component of the course, and we will fold texts by Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and others into our analyses. Enrollment is restricted to students accepted into the Illinois at the Phillips Collection program -- all classes in Washington D.C. UIUC and credit students will also meet Wednesdays 10:00am to 11:00am. First class meeting Tuesday, September 8. Graduates must enroll in ARTH 546. Undergraduate section. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
52532	Lecture-Discussion	AF	1:00PM -4:00PM	W	Location Pending	Lang, K Greenhill, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/09-12/09/09 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: Art produced around 1900 has often been classified as either "late Victorian" or "early modern." But this distinction is superficial. Indeed, much of the art of this period exists between these categories or somehow exceeds them by simultaneously reinforcing and subverting traditional values and/or aesthetic tropes. We will explore this problem by focusing on materiality as a peculiar period idea that, in its various iterations, gave artists and writers a way to work through or stake a claim to the "modern." But if an artist's emphasis on the substance of paint--and thus its materiality--signaled to critics his departure from Victorian senses of paint's purpose, how should we situate the flickering filmic image or the ghost stories of Henry James, for example? When does materiality shade into immateriality and how do these terms intersect with or inform period ideas about abstraction, naturalism, and so on? What does materiality have to do with attitudes toward subjectivity and experiences of the body in these years? With texts by Bakhtin, Brown, Fried, Shklovsky, and others structuring our discussions, we will look, in depth, at works of art in The Phillips Collection as well as other area museums. Literature will also be a crucial component of the course, and we will read short stories and novels by Stephen Crane, Harold Frederic, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James and others. Enrollment is restricted to students accepted into the Illinois at the Phillips Collection program -- all classes in Washington D.C. Undergraduate Section. Graduates register for ARTH 541. 1st class meeting Wednesday, September 9. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
47956	Conference	DR	2:00PM -4:40PM	F	210A Architecture Building	Rush, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/09-12/09/09 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: Topic: Seminar in African Art. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
54090	Lecture	ISG	9:30AM -10:50AM	TR	319 Art and Design Building	Small, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/09-12/09/09 Credit: 4 hours Section Info: Topics in Art History (Art at its Limits: The 1960s in Brazil, Argentina and the US) An investigation of experimental art in Brazil, Argentina and the United States in the 1960s. Discussion of works that sought to expand and even dissolve the category of "art" through spectator participation, bodily engagement, media interventions, and political activism. Students develop comparative cultural analyses of art-making practices. Attention given to primary texts and visual documentation. Readings include: Umberto Eco, The Open Work; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception; Ines Katzenstein, Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde; Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Graduate section. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
54089	Lecture	ISU	9:30AM -10:50AM	TR	319 Art and Design Building	Small, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/24/09-12/09/09 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: Topics in Art History (Art at its Limits: The 1960s in Brazil, Argentina and the US) An investigation of experimental art in Brazil, Argentina and the United States in the 1960s. Discussion of works that sought to expand and even dissolve the category of "art" through spectator participation, bodily engagement, media interventions, and political activism. Students develop comparative cultural analyses of art-making practices. Attention given to primary texts and visual documentation. Readings include: Umberto Eco, The Open Work; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception; Ines Katzenstein, Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde; Roland Barthes, Mythologies; Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Undergraduate section. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.