Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies: Courses

What are the concerns that drive one's creative practice? How does one set the terms for its future development? This course offers strategies for the evaluation and communication of students' individual practice as artists, designers and/or scholars. Through essential readings, studio projects, and writing, students will generate narratives about how and why they make art. To do so, they will investigate methods (visual, critical, written, and creative) for the reconsideration of their work and of its aims and priorities. Individual mentoring with the faculty member is a central and dedicated component of the class as a means of fostering the self-identification of goals and priorities. Students will also examine historical and contemporary precedents that relate to their own work in order to consider the ways in which their individual explorations can be brought into dialogue with other perspectives. Students participate in broad ranging discussions about the present status and future prospects of art and design through workshops, dialogues, and collaborations both in the class and in SAIC-wide conversations with other Sophomore Studio Seminars. An important function of this course is to build upon these insights in forming a practical plan that helps students effectively map the curriculum and resources of SAIC into their own needs. For more information see http://blogs.saic.edu/sophseminar/

This course examines contemporary ways of rethinking the privilege accorded to vision in the organization of thought and social life in the West. The aim of the course is both to diagnose the ways in which society and the subject are dominated by various forms of visibility, and to find resources that can be harnessed in aesthetics, phenomenology, architecture, and everyday practices which might redirect the ends of visibility. Readings include Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Ranciere, and others.

This introductory course is used to historicize globalization as well as to understand its contemporary dimensions. Emphasis is placed upon analyzing the rationales underlying globalization, the emergence of institutions making globalization possible, manifestations of globalization in culture (especially art and popular culture), and resistance to globalization as shaped by race, nation, gender, class, and their intersections. Possible authors and texts include Saskia Sassen, Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales and Subjects; Anita Chan, et. al., Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization; Ann Marie Stock, On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking During Times of Transition; Valentine Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks; and McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto.

Ideas of Africa and Africans have been powerfully constructed in a variety of ways throughout time and across continents. The many 'Africas' which have been invoked by a multitude of participants with very different relationships to the continent have become a significant lens through which Africa and people of African descent are imagined and understood. Inspired by Malian scholar Manthia Diawara's quest 'In Search of Africa,' this course traces the ways in which Africa and 'Africans' have been (and continue to be) powerfully 'invented,' imagined, and negotiated in historical accounts, academic scholarship, performance, film, fiction, news reporting, globalization and development discourse, popular art and literature, and religious practice. We travel through ancient Egypt and Greece, India during the transatlantic slave trade, South Carolina at the turn-of-the-century, colonial Algeria and Mexico, a newly-independent Gambia, postcolonial Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia, and contemporary Haiti and New York.

What does it mean to 'have a language'? This course begins to ask that question, using translatability as a notion to explore attendant questions of border crossings, constructions of nationalisms and genealogies.Thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Regine Robin and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha will be among our guides. The relationship between national and linguistic delineations will provide a space from which to consider genre delineations as well.

The Silver Age (1956-69) of the comic book explores the rebirth of the superhero genre in the mid-'50s and examine subsequent movements including post-Code sci-fi and horror titles, and Underground Comix of the '60s and '70s; as well as alternative comics and the creation of the graphic novel from the late '70s to the present. Key works by Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware and others are discussed.

In this class we look at the history of comics through the lens of gender, examining the vast history of female comic-book artists and the even vaster history of male cartoonists who represent women. Starting with the superheroes and moving through the golden and silver ages of comics books, and investigating the early newspaper strip artists and the mid-1990s black-and-white boom, and finally focusing on contemporary female and transgendered creators of graphic novels and self-published works, this class provides an in-depth grounding in comics history as well as a critical awareness of the very real financial, legal, and biological barriers that tend to keep women artists from achieving renown in the same numbers as men. Texts include comics, interviews, and historical overviews, by Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, Roger Sabin, Trina Robbins, Bob Levin, and Jules Feiffer.

Adv Wrt: Walking:A Poetics The textures of walking and writing are deeply woven together. In this workshop we walk and explore various theories and practices of walking, approaching them from the perspectives of poetry, essay, aphorism, anthropology, architecture and hybrid writing. We read Thomas A. Clark, Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Rousseau, Whitman, Lisa Robertson, Devin Johnston, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Basho, Rebecca Solnit, Bruce Chatwin and Shawn Micallof. Though the classroom is our workshop, the environs of Chicago will be our experimental laboratory. Classwork involves weekly walking requirements, topological writing assignments, and regular reflections, as well as occasional group expeditions and forays in which we experience varieties of walking: sauntering, strolling, strutting, foraging, skulking.

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.

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.

How do you choreograph a sustained semester-length action? How do you create a movement score watching the night sky, or a gross anatomical body in a cadaver laboratory? This course develops actions, tasks and visual movement that ask how to perform attention/distraction/exhaustion/lightness/repetition/sequence/form/miniature and monumental dances. Art works include Marie Cool, Tehching Hsieh, Simon Whitehead, Writings of Andre Lepecki, Mike Pearson.

Exploring and exploding the idea of what it means to be 'real' and 'fake' in performance, this course looks into the creation of artistic alter egos and the utilization of unreliable narratives as a means of reconfiguring and interrogating ones practice. The notion of 'inauthenticity' will be investigated as a performative strategy - from imaginary actions to imaginary oeuvres, what are the implications for the artists identity if a conscious decision is made not to do it 'for real'? Through biographical sleight of hand, and economy with the documented truth, the course will ask you to take your practice into a fictional realm, creating alternative histories and contradictory interpretations of yours and others work.

This course is a continuation of Undergraduate Thesis: Research and Writing I. Students will continue to work on the drafts developed during the first semester and will meet at times as a group and at times individually with the instructor. By the end of the semester, each student will have a 20-30 paged superbly written paper, which will most likely (although it is not required) have visual content. Students will also be encouraged to develop their essays for the publication Research Writing and Culture, which is released annually by the Liberal Arts Department, the Visual and Critical Studies Program and the Office of Publications. For these students, they will learn the final stages of publishing; checking sources, seeking copyright permissions, and developing the images for publication. Class meetings are used to discuss readings, share research methods and techniques, discuss research and writing problems, and ideas for critique. Guest speakers and group visits to university libraries, bookstores and writers' readings will also be part of the class. Students are required to attend all meetings.

This course is a continuation of Undergraduate Thesis: Research and Writing I. Students will continue to work on the drafts developed during the first semester and will meet at times as a group and at times individually with the instructor. By the end of the semester, each student will have a 20-30 paged superbly written paper, which will most likely (although it is not required) have visual content. Students will also be encouraged to develop their essays for the publication Research Writing and Culture, which is released annually by the Liberal Arts Department, the Visual and Critical Studies Program and the Office of Publications. For these students, they will learn the final stages of publishing; checking sources, seeking copyright permissions, and developing the images for publication. Class meetings are used to discuss readings, share research methods and techniques, discuss research and writing problems, and ideas for critique. Guest speakers and group visits to university libraries, bookstores and writers' readings will also be part of the class. Students are required to attend all meetings.

Following Laura Mulvey's landmark essay, 'Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,' much critical writing on pictorial art has been focused on issues relating to looking relationships. This course explores 'the gaze' in photography, painting, film, advertising, pornography and new media, using various methodologies, including psychoanalysis, feminism and queer and post-colonial theory, as well as writing on spectatorship. Texts include Velasquez's 'Las Meninas,' Hitchcock's 'Rear Window,' Cindy Sherman's 'Centerfolds' and Michael Wolf's 'The Transparent City.'

This course spans centuries but focuses on the thin line between looking and reading, imagining and writing. Considering the question, 'What is language?' leads us to readings in linguistics from art historical, literary-theoretical, philosophical, and ethnographic disciplines. We also pursue connections between 'seen words' in movements such as pop art, conceptual art, concrete poetry, language poetry, and conceptual writing by comparing works in various media that revolve around distinctions between speech, writing, the static and moving image. Notable authors and artists include Vito Acconci, Bob Brown, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Derrida, Carl Dryer, Paul Friedrich, Luce Irigaray, Roman Jakobson, Rene Magritte, Ed Ruscha, Sapir-Whorf, Hannah Weiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others.

An investigation of media and cinematic representations of 'terrorism' through the 20th century up to the present. Primary 'texts' will be films, videos, and photography, supported by readings from a wide range of sources: historical, political economy, fiction, media criticism, oral histories. Students will screen and study propaganda films, narratives, film and video essays, and experimental works whose subject directly or obliquely addresses the subject of political violence. The course will examine the moblizing effects of these works, and seek to unpack a hefty suitcase of current debates about moral relativism, just and unjust wars, the problem of evil, and uses of violence in film.

Is art a global phenomenon? What are the best concepts to describe what is happening in the contemporary international art world? What are criticism, history, and theory in relation to contemporary global art? We read the most recent and interesting theorizing on the question of world art. Authors may include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Harry Harootunian, Okwui Enwezor, Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, T.J. Demos, Parul Mukherjee, Nicolas Bourriaud, Fredric Jameson, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Arjun Appadurai, Julian Stallabrass, John Onians, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Kitty Zijlmans, Slavoy Zizek, Charlotte Bydler, Pascale Casanova, Susan Buck-Morss, Terry Eagleton, and Terry Smith. We also read the textbook Art since 1900, and study its critical reception and possible alternatives.

Adorno is well known for his scathing critique of 'culture industry.' But what is usually missed is that Adorno's critique of 20th Century cultural forms was dialectical, concerned with their potential for both emancipation and domination, and was aimed equally at modern practices of 'hermetic' art as well as those of 'popular' culture, anticipating issues in 'post'-modernist cultural criticism. In this course we address the Frankfurt School critical theory of experience and aesthetic subjectivity in modern social life in context, reading works by Benjamin, Kracauer and Marcuse, and then focusing on works by Adorno in considering the analytical and explanatory as well as critical power of certain enduring if problematic and contested categories such as 'commodification' and democratization' for a dialectic of modern forms of art and culture as forms of social subjectivity.

ALOUD is an experimental creative writing workshop that explores the process of writing as the performance of reading, or the process of talking as the performance of writing, or in other words talking aloud. It concerns itself primarily with works derived from, or composed for, speaking. ALOUD mines the possibilities of writing for your own voice, or writing for another person's voice, in such vocal endeavors as radio plays, spontaneous poetry, and compositions derived from vocal improvisation. We address questions such as: What happens when we speak extemporaneously? What mysteries of connection happen in the flow of speech in the moment? What do so-called 'mistakes' and 'slips of the tongue' reveal about thought and language, and should they remain in a work? What if the mistake is an integral part of the writing process? What needs to be edited in a work and what needs to remain? We examine the work of artists such as Caroline Bergvall, Kenneth Goldsmith, David Antin, Erik Belgum, and others. ALOUD is open to all genres and recommended for graduating students who intend to participate in the BFAW reading.

This course facilitates ongoing revision of texts in progress for mixed-genre pieces including performance, video and sound/music projects. Students present work for intensive discussion and response from an interdisciplinary perspective, and conduct individualized research relevant to their concerns. This advanced-level seminar intends to assist the completion of work that may have taken root in beginning-level intermedia workshops, or that may be used toward fulfilling the BFAW thesis requirement.

Ellipses: Art-Writing in the Post-Disciplinary Context Here we look at the concept of art-writing as an emerging and particularized process; one that has been designed to foster new modes of critical rigor, assemble new objects of attention, constitute the fields in which that might happen and develop new critical conceits. The course inhabits the tensions existing between fiction, critical theory and historical accounting in recent visual cultural writing, and takes a critical approach to issues like the requirement for ready legibility, the cultivation of wes, the exercise of similitudes, technical facility, expertise, positionality, unreliable narration, fantastic space, idiomatic speech, the use of anecdote and so forth.

Choreographesis: Starting out from Dance This course takes a series of examples of dance and other forms of choreography in cinema, athletics, performance art, urban planning, legal procedure and elsewhere as a set of already available theorizations of copying, acting in concert, theories of directed social activity and manners of attentive being. We look at dance as both a mode and model of critical writing, and examine the most fore-grounded aspects of what is proposed by dance -- spatial narrative, the contriving of gesture, the poetics of physical fluency and precocity (also breathing, pain, discipline and what constitutes a break from it) as larger social metaphors.

This seminar examines 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?

This course plunges first-year students into visual theory using texts and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school. We work through basic 'formal' subjects (lectures on Form, Color, Time( at the same time as we explore more 'advanced' subjects (lectures on Religion, Ideology, Visual Theory). The course is vocabulary-intensive and intended to give students the widest possible exposure to visual discourse in all cultures and disciplines (The Survey is meant to do the same for visual artifacts).

Students examine the history of comic book art and writing from the early 20th century to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority in 1954. The course covers artistic antecedents of the 18th and 19th centuries, newspaper funnies, pulp magazines, the Golden Age (1938-49) and various genres: superheroes, crime, war, romance, horror and science fiction. Major names discussed: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood.

This course examines human cultures from around the world in a cross cultural perspective. A number of cultures are studied in depth including various ethnic groups in the United States. Anthropological theories are discussed in their own right and as they relate to the case studies.

This interdisciplinary course approaches the topic of gender and medicine from cultural, historical, and scientific perspectives. We consider hysteria (purported to be caused by a 'wandering uterus') and other mental afflictions associated with sex and gender, the foundation of U.S. gynecology and its dependence on slave women's bodies, medical textbook illustration, the Women's Health Movement and its legacy, queer health issues, and new reproductive technologies. Readings include works by Audre Lourde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elaine Showalter, Rachel Maines and classic health texts such as Our Bodies, Ourselves. We will also consider the ways in which artists have addressed issues of gender and medicine in their work. Assignments include an interview project, written reflections, and a final research-based project.

What should every citizen know about media and their relation to contemporary society? What approaches can best prepare us to function effectively as critics, activists, scholars, teachers, artists, managers, and producers in an increasingly global, digital, and competitive landscape? What critical issues and questions should we grapple with? What resources are required and available for social action? These are some of the questions that we address in this seminar and laboratory that examines media and their relationships to society and culture. Students are encouraged to design new media based initiatives and to share projects already in progress.

This course proposes to draw out the relationship between translation and photography through the notion of inflexion. An inflexion is a bend, more particularly a bend in or towards itself. The reflexivity, or self-referentiality, of both translation and photography, each of which attempts to reiterate itself through transformation into another fixed form, requires an adjustment of its initial coordinates. In the process of moving from one state (language or light) to another (translation or photograph), there is a crucial, often overlooked, moment of disintegration. It is this moment which this course is interested in attending to, through the works of various thinkers and artists, including Herve Guibert, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Danielle Collobert, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Derrida and Henri van Lier.

This course enables upper-level students to develop a well-researched thesis project on a topic of their choice. Such a thesis project may be linked to their final BFA thesis or studio project, and may be useful for students considering graduate school in a field in which research and writing expertise is required. Students may choose to enlist innovative formats and incorporate a variety of media. Topics as diverse as 'Gay Cinema,' 'Culture as Industry,' 'Is Rap Subversive?,' 'The Art and Science of Fragrance,' and 'The Morphology of the Toy Soldier Body' have been explored. Class meetings are used to share research methods, discuss the given challenges of various projects, and present works-in-progress for critique.

This course enables upper-level students to develop a well-researched thesis project on a topic of their choice. Such a thesis project may be linked to their final BFA thesis or studio project, and may be useful for students considering graduate school in a field in which research and writing expertise is required. Students may choose to enlist innovative formats and incorporate a variety of media. Topics as diverse as 'Gay Cinema,' 'Culture as Industry,' 'Is Rap Subversive?,' 'The Art and Science of Fragrance,' and 'The Morphology of the Toy Soldier Body' have been explored. Class meetings are used to share research methods, discuss the given challenges of various projects, and present works-in-progress for critique.

This course continues an investigation of the difference, if any, between looking and reading, visuality and poetics. We will read art history, critical theory and literature, concerning mainly Stephane Mallarme, Marcel Broodthaers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Smithson, Jenny Holzer, Adrian Piper, David Antin and Edgar Heap of Birds.

This seminar explores a range of printed materials that serve a prosthetic function in relation to the making and exhibiting of art: catalogues, press releases, exhibition announcements, biographies, and even wall labels. During the course of the semester the class also looks closely at how certain social activities involving negotiation strategies have a central, and not peripheral, role in relation to contemporary exhibition practices. While the course is experiential and practical, it also explores conceptual issues underpinning the relationship between curatorial and creative practice. The final project for the class involves producing either a formal curatorial proposal or a virtual exhibition consisting of exhibition announcement, press release, catalogue dummy, and checklist of the 'work'. The course is open to a wide variety of students, including students interested in curating across many historical periods, students engaged in critical studies, and BFA and MFA students interested in the ways exhibitions create contexts for their work, and how they might participate in the construction of these contexts.

Recent developments in many disciplines, from brain science to cultural studies--what has been called the 'affective turn' -- are exerting an enormous influence in how we make theory, make art, and think about 'feelings.' In film theory, much has been written about the 'construct' of real time. This course uses both these lenses to critically investigate an eclectic group of film and video works, primarily from the 1960s and 1970s, that re-imagine politics and consciousness through an excess of imagination and feeling, from exuberance to loss.

In this course, we explore how art production contributes to global flows of information and culture dealing with feminist and/or gender issues. Conversely, we question how this context impacts the art. Artists whose work we consider include: Ghada Amer, Emily Jacir, Rineke Dijkstra, Vanessa Beecroft, Lin Tianmiao, Hanlu, Kara Walker, and Toxic Titties, among others.

This course considers the conjuncture of architecture and desire toward an excavation of sensory apprehensions of built environments and the circumscription of desire by (porous) territorialities. We endeavor to see what often goes unseen, that is, the altered boundaries of what otherwise appears to be fixed, immovable. Whether it is Le Corbusier's incursion into Eileen Gray's house, E1027, in Rocquebrune-Cap-Martin, Elizabeth Grosz's outsider considerations of architecture and gender, Juhani Pallasmaa's ocular skins, Bernard-Marie Koltes's theatrical frameworks for desire, we think together about ways in which these forms *inform* and *deform* one another.

As long as print has been a form of mass media, it has been used with equal fervor to mock, poke fun at, and tear holes in its own abilities to disseminate information--as well as the journalists, officials, and experts who make use of it. This course traces the history of parody and satire in print, including posters, broadsides, small press publications, comics, illustration, and editorial cartoons.

This writing workshop's point of departure is a creative response to Charles and Ray Eames' influential film Powers of Ten and George Perec's essay Species of Spaces. In Powers of Ten, the Eames' explore humankind's scale in a progression of images in powers of ten as seen from an individual cell to Earth's position in the galaxy. In a similar fashion, Perec examines increasingly greater scales of experience--from a blank piece of paper to the world and outer space. Using these concepts of scales of magnification we write fiction and poetry about an imaginary universe of our own devising--from the outer limits of space to life on a microscopic scale. We examine contemporary micro-nations, science fiction, the natural world, and other sources as exemplar and inspiration.