Jeremy Biles

This course immerses participants in the life and work of Franz Kafka, surrealist thought, and contemporary Prague arts, including the installation art of David ¿erný. Students will visit cultural landmarks such as the DOX Center for the Arts, Franz Kafka Museum, Museum of Communism, and more, as well as excursions to Terezin Concentration Camp, Kutná Hora's ossuary, and Karlstejn Castle. The program coincides with the Prague International Fringe Theater Festival, providing students with a wide range of further cultural activities to experience. Students will explore surrealism, the uncanny, and the absurd, using journaling and sketchbooks to engage with dream imagery, hone attention to both assigned texts and the city, experiment with multiple modes of writing, and cultivate a surrealist sensibility, all while drawing on Prague's unique landscape, history, and creative culture for inspiration.

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 culminating 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.

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).