Jeremy Biles

This interdisciplinary studio symposium course introduces students to key principles and practices of surrealism with particular focus on theories of photography and strategies of photographic image-making. Treating surrealism not only as an art-historical moment but a living body of attitudes, theories, and possibilities for thinking, art-making, and action, students will develop their own ideas and a body of work in formulating a surrealist praxis. Students will read texts by and about surrealists/surrealism, querying into the poetics, politics, and possibilities of photographic surrealism. The class will treat ideas including: erotic desire, pleasure, gender, chance, dreams/unconscious, walking, play/games, politics, race, anticolonial thought, freedom. Students will study work by surrealist thinkers including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Aime Cesaire, Georges Bataille, Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun; modern surrealist potes including Juliana Huxtable and Billy-Ray Belcourt; and contemporary theorists such as Rosalind Kruass, Susan Laxton, Angela Carter, and Tina Campt. Artists of special focus will include: Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Pierre Molinier, Maya Deren, John Akomfrah, and Aruther Jafa. Students will also engage contemporary Afrosurrealism based in photography and film, e.g. Beyonce's ?Lemonade,' Donald Glover's ?Atlanta,' Boots Riley's 'Sorry to Bother You,' and Jordan Peele's ?Get Out.? Students write two short analytic essays and a cumlinating research essay synthesizing ideas from across the semester. Students will also engage in generative photographic exercises designed to break habitual attitudes toward seeing and staging, as they build a focused body of personal work. Research, writing, and studio practice unfold in conjunction with one another, providing students with a working model for synthesizing art history and theory, political engagement, and making.

This interdisciplinary studio symposium course introduces students to key principles and practices of surrealism with particular focus on theories of photography and strategies of photographic image-making. Treating surrealism not only as an art-historical moment but a living body of attitudes, theories, and possibilities for thinking, art-making, and action, students will develop their own ideas and a body of work in formulating a surrealist praxis. Students will read texts by and about surrealists/surrealism, querying into the poetics, politics, and possibilities of photographic surrealism. The class will treat ideas including: erotic desire, pleasure, gender, chance, dreams/unconscious, walking, play/games, politics, race, anticolonial thought, freedom. Students will study work by surrealist thinkers including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Aime Cesaire, Georges Bataille, Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun; modern surrealist potes including Juliana Huxtable and Billy-Ray Belcourt; and contemporary theorists such as Rosalind Kruass, Susan Laxton, Angela Carter, and Tina Campt. Artists of special focus will include: Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Pierre Molinier, Maya Deren, John Akomfrah, and Aruther Jafa. Students will also engage contemporary Afrosurrealism based in photography and film, e.g. Beyonce's ?Lemonade,' Donald Glover's ?Atlanta,' Boots Riley's 'Sorry to Bother You,' and Jordan Peele's ?Get Out.? Students write two short analytic essays and a cumlinating research essay synthesizing ideas from across the semester. Students will also engage in generative photographic exercises designed to break habitual attitudes toward seeing and staging, as they build a focused body of personal work. Research, writing, and studio practice unfold in conjunction with one another, providing students with a working model for synthesizing art history and theory, political engagement, and making.

This course investigates the relationship between eroticism, excess, artistic practice, and modes of representation. Taking an interdisciplinary and transgeneric approach (with readings in theory, history, philosophy, psychology, and literature), the course will treat a variety of mediums, with special emphasis on painting, drawing, and adjacent practices. Instructors frame the concept of ?erotics? as a mode of practice that investigates and integrates sex, gender, and a variety of ambivalent movements, for example, the play of form and formlessness, figuration and monstrosity, taboo and transgression, attraction and repulsion, incorporation and excretion, abjection and sublimity. Key ideas discussed in class include sex/uality, gender, difference, bodies, ritual, violence, representation, desire, ?perversion.? Students will read texts from art theory and history, psychoanalysis, literature, and psychology. Throughout the class, they will be asked to synthesize course readings and discussions with their own artistic practice.

This course investigates the relationship between eroticism, excess, artistic practice, and modes of representation. Taking an interdisciplinary and transgeneric approach (with readings in theory, history, philosophy, psychology, and literature), the course will treat a variety of mediums, with special emphasis on painting, drawing, and adjacent practices. Instructors frame the concept of ?erotics? as a mode of practice that investigates and integrates sex, gender, and a variety of ambivalent movements, for example, the play of form and formlessness, figuration and monstrosity, taboo and transgression, attraction and repulsion, incorporation and excretion, abjection and sublimity. Key ideas discussed in class include sex/uality, gender, difference, bodies, ritual, violence, representation, desire, ?perversion.? Students will read texts from art theory and history, psychoanalysis, literature, and psychology. Throughout the class, they will be asked to synthesize course readings and discussions with their own artistic practice.

This course introduces students to important theories of, and concepts in, the study of religion, through a focus on two important figures working at the edges of surrealism: Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud. Bataille the ?mystic? sought to shatter his ego through an ecstatic mysticism, whereas Artaud the ?madman? sought to integrate a fragmented self through a rage against God. We examine these thinkers? distinctive approaches to religion, asking how their thoughts and lives may animate the study of religion and artistic practices. Tracing the influences of psychoanalysis and surrealism in Bataille?s mystical experiences and Artaud?s visionary travels and blasphemous writings, we inquire into the construction and dissolution of religious subjectivity, while employing key concepts including: body, affect, ecstasy, desire, the sacred, eroticism, mysticism, blasphemy, excess, taboo and transgression, ritual, totem, fetish, sacrifice, expenditure, magic, and occultism. Students read important precursors to and interpreters of Bataille and Artaud, including mystics like Angela of Foligno; theorists like Durkheim and Freud; and philosophers and critics including Deleuze, Amy Hollywood, Shannon Winnubst, and Carmen MacKendrick. We also inquire into the relations between religion and aesthetic impulses in the work of artists such as Mike Kelley, Ron Athey, Nancy Spero, and Richard Hawkins. Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.

This course investigates philosophical underpinnings and motivations of surrealist thought and activity. Focusing especially on surrealism’s intersection with religion, students discern, critically evaluate, and elaborate philosophies of surrealism. Students learn about major philosophical precursors to surrealism, from ancient thinkers (Heraclitus, Plato) to modern thinkers (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Fourier), as well as contemporary thinkers influenced by surrealism (Hélène Cixous, Byung-Chul Han, Giorgio Agamben). In addition, the class addresses philosophical modes and movements in conversation with surrealism (existentialism, phenomenology, deconstruction, object-oriented ontology). Major theories of religion from the likes of Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade are brought to bear in studying theoretical, literary, and visual work from a wide range of surrealists, including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Claude Cahun. Students will also encounter major contemporary interpreters of surrealism, e.g. Susan Buck-Morss, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster. The class considers possibilities for a “feminist surrealism” through the work of Leonora Carrington, Unica Zurn, and Penelope Rosemont, as well as the intersection of surrealism and Black thought through the work of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Robin DG Kelly, and D. Scot Miller. Among the major concepts and themes focusing conversation are: subjectivity, identity, gender, sex, erotic desire, haunting, sacred, marvelous, decolonization, utopia, reason, excess, violence, politics, community, otherness, chance, dream, convulsive beauty, work, game/play, humor, dream, unconscious, economics. Assignments include three philosophical papers, undertaken in conjunction with walking, drawing, writing, and photography exercises.

Focusing on the discourse of surrealism from its inception to the current moment, this class investigates the peculiar powers of surrealist modes of mimesis in the interrelated forms of mimicry, masks, and doubles. Taking a philosophical approach to the material, we ask questions including: How does surrealism theorize, analyze, and use mimesis to achieve its particular uncanny effects? What is the value of these effects? What implications does this vein of surrealist inquiry have for thinking and making today? The class engages a wide array of concepts, including: sex, sexuality, and gender; love and eroticism; the uncanny; death; chance; desire; madness; haunting; mannequins and dolls; representation; camouflage and counterfeiting; simulation; Afrosurrealism; humor; identity/otherness; revolutionary politics; freedom; unconscious; image; imagination; dreams; games; myth; magic. We engage surrealist expressions in both written (literary and philosophical) and visual forms. Required course readings prioritize “primary” texts from surrealist thinkers (e.g. Breton, Caillois, Bataille, Dali, Césaire, Carrington), but also include critical literature (e.g. Taussig, Caws). Students write two short reflection papers and a longer final paper (graded). Students also take part in both individual and group making exercises (particularly writing and drawing) as an experimental basis for critical analysis (ungraded).

This course introduces students to important theories of, and concepts in, the study of religion, through a focus on two important figures working at the edges of surrealism: Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud. Bataille the ?mystic? sought to shatter his ego through an ecstatic mysticism, whereas Artaud the ?madman? sought to integrate a fragmented self through a rage against God. We examine these thinkers? distinctive approaches to religion, asking how their thoughts and lives may animate the study of religion and artistic practices. Tracing the influences of psychoanalysis and surrealism in Bataille?s mystical experiences and Artaud?s visionary travels and blasphemous writings, we inquire into the construction and dissolution of religious subjectivity, while employing key concepts including: body, affect, ecstasy, desire, the sacred, eroticism, mysticism, blasphemy, excess, taboo and transgression, ritual, totem, fetish, sacrifice, expenditure, magic, and occultism. Students read important precursors to and interpreters of Bataille and Artaud, including mystics like Angela of Foligno; theorists like Durkheim and Freud; and philosophers and critics including Deleuze, Amy Hollywood, Shannon Winnubst, and Carmen MacKendrick. We also inquire into the relations between religion and aesthetic impulses in the work of artists such as Mike Kelley, Ron Athey, Nancy Spero, and Richard Hawkins. Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.