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Fall 2008 Graduate Seminars
Art History 551 This course provides a critical and historical introduction to the discipline of the History of Art. It explores the notion of art as itself an historical construction, with a background discrete from that of the objects it purports to investigate. It considers the problem of subjectivity in the pursuit of art historical explanation-the sitedness of the historian as a critical factor in determining her or his approach to the material at hand. We will investigate varieties of art history chronologically, from Classical times to the present day. This means that the course will examine, in turn, ekphrasis, biography, idealism and universality, formalism, iconography and iconology, Marxism, semiotics, deconstruction, and gender studies. This course has been designed to further professional as well as intellectual goals. The challenge for the graduate student is to make the leap from functioning as a consumer (learner) within the discipline, to functioning as a producer of (art) history. Some of the readings offered are meant to provide models for scholarly emulation. Assignments are designed to familiarize students with processes of argumentation, with ways of supporting these, with research resources, and with scholarly publications that will, in the future, be both sites for information gathering and venues for publication. Art History 597A Virtually every Western (not to speak of Eastern) culture has a concept of the sacred, developed and modified over the course of time. Normally such ideas are predicated on sacred spaces and embodied in buildings often elaborately adorned - architectures and their decorations that come to be transformed as a result of changing political, ideological, social or aesthetic conditions. This seminar addresses the ways in which the sacred is given form and the nature of and reasons for its transformations. It presupposes no essential notion of the holy but rather an apparently fundamental human urge/need/desire inflected by the conditions just described. After a series of readings and class discussions, students will be expected to focus on a particular site - perhaps one with which they are familiar from earlier study - and investigate the relation between it and its (fixed) topographical and (changing) historical circumstances. Sites as diverse as Mount Sinai, before and after the sixth century, and Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, in the twentieth century, come to mind as examples of the questions we intend to raise, but any sacred structure and its embellishment, in any society between late antiquity and the postmodern era, will be accepted (after discussion with the instructor) as a topic for investigation. Equally viable would be consideration of later visual representations of a building and its decoration. A classroom presentation and a term paper are required. Students who wish to begin their research early - especially at a theoretical level - are recommended to look at Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago, 1987), and Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago, 2003). Art History 597B This seminar takes a critical look at the methods and perspectives that have been employed in the study of Asian architecture, urbanism and art from the nineteenth century to the present. Specific geographical areas covered will include South and Southeast Asia and the Middle-east. The emphasis will be on tracing the evolution of scholarship in relation to larger political, social and theoretical developments. To illustrate, an early text, James Fergusson's History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876) represents the crystallization of years of work, collecting and compiling information on the South Asian architectural landscape. However, for Fergusson, South Asian architecture with all its merits would never measure up to its classical European counterpart. On the other hand, scholars such as Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) asserted the spiritual ideals of South Asian art while disputing theories that ascribed Greek origins to Buddhist art. For postcolonial scholars, Fergusson's efforts signify the marriage of knowledge production and the colonial project, while Coomaraswamy's efforts represent overtly nationalist ideals. The advent of postcolonial theory has also resulted in a shift, so that the formal qualities of art objects no longer suffice as the focus of scholarly endeavor. A range of case studies with colonial, nationalist and postcolonial approaches will be examined. The emphasis of the course will be on the analysis and discussion of key texts as well as more recent trends in scholarship. |
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Last Updated: Thursday, May 15, 2008
