Chris Reeves

In this course we will examine the ecstasy, transgressions, and transformations that occurred largely around queer networks of artistic activity in the United States ca. 1970-99. Focusing on larger cities, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis, we will look at an intermedial roster of often undersung or understudied painters, photographers, dancers, performers, conceptualists, fashion designers, and DJs who honed an aesthetic of excess that critiqued and opened up possibilities both within social conventions and the art world. While this class is not a history of disco, It is nonetheless rooted in the politics of the dancefloor, where friendship, movement, inclusion, and joy can become political expressions of freedom. Topics explored include glamour and celebrity as a mode of critique and celebration (Les Petit Bon Bons, the Miss General Idea Pageants, File Megazine), conceptual and performance gestures that trafficked in vernacular forms (Diana Ross translated through Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell), the voices of other voices in Lipysnka and Pinkietessa, alternative actions and spaces via performances and exhibitions in the storefront windows of Fiorucci and Mayfield Bleu, public performances by The Cockettes and The Whizz Kidz, space making with David Mancuso, Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, and Adrian Piper's Funk Lessons, and the politics of partying and friendship around the dance-floor. We will read excerpts and texts by and from Micah Salkind, Peter Shapiro, Deforrest Brown Jr., Giorgio Agamben, madison moore, Albert Goldman, Tim Lawrence, A.A. Bronson, Jose Esteban Munoz. Students will present on one reading or screening, do a midterm creative research project, and a final presentation with a 10 page paper.

This course allows students to develop more sophisticated ways to make sense of the intersection of video art, television studies, and contemporary art practices, and to place video art within the larger sphere of art history. To strengthen students' abilities to understand dialectical thinking as currently applied by art historians, the course includes writings by Thomas Crow, T. J. Clark, and Terry Eagleton, as well as the work of critical theorists working more exclusively in television studies and popular culture. A variety of work is screened each week, from television talk shows to European avant-garde, as well as low budget, grass roots video projects. The class explores how cultural differences are played out in current video art practices in Europe, Central America, and South America.

This section surveys select moments throughout art history in which artists aimed to agitate for social, political, or artistic change. In this collaborative and interdisciplinary course will explore such topics as the political satire of Meiji era Japan; William Morris' socialist utopia of the 19th century in conversation with Lizzie Borden's in the 20th Century; significant South American artistic dissent from the Grupo de Artists de Vanguardia and Tropicalia movements of the 1960s; Post WWII Japanese experimental groups such as Hi Red Center and Gutai; Benjamin Patterson, Robert Filliou, and George Brecht inside and outside of Fluxus; The Guerrilla Television movement of the 1970s-80s relative to YouTube culture of today; and many other minor gestures that continue to have major power today. The work, ideas, movements, and artists discussed in this course are potent reminders of art's potential and desire to not just manage the system we are all in, but to actively work to transform it.