Lan Tuazon

This seminar focuses on developing a shared language for interdisciplinary critique, and on understanding one's own work better through fine-tuning how you look and talk about each other's. We will proceed with the assumption that all artworks are by nature collectively authored in that they emerge from, and contribute to, the ongoing conversation of art. This is an interdisciplinary seminar consisting of studio visits informed by selected readings and discussions, short writing assignments, and one longer piece of writing related to your work. This class aims to help you deepen your relationship to your work, and to develop an ease with, and appetite for, theoretical discourse and critical dialogue to help sustain your practice in the long-term.

Sculpture has the widest scope and breadth of artistic production precisely because it is a discipline based on the material conditions of reality. Understanding sculpture demands a trans-historical, philosophical and interdisciplinary model of art balanced with a diet of critical theory to maintain its relevance to contemporary practice. With sculpture as a discipline responding to newer socio-political and ecological imperatives, this seminar establishes criteria of sculpture in the expanded field as an integration of systems, sites, bodies, and objects. Assigned readings will address these four themes as the discipline¿s center of gravity and provide newer perspectives identified by each course instructor to nurture sculpture¿s continued interdisciplinary expansion. Students will develop a shared language that will help them understand how to position their work as well as interpret and respond critically to the work of others. This seminar¿s content is delivered through texts, workshops, lectures, and is augmented by a monthly colloquia called Sculpture Dialogues, a school-wide event where students are launched into a public and professional presentation of their work in a panel co-presenting with a visiting artist or arts practitioner.

Course reading assigments include Susan Buck-Morss, Byung-Chul Han, Mary Douglas, Fred Turner, Eduardo Kohn, and Suzi Gablik. Slide lectures of artist works from 1960's and onward including works inn sculpture, installation, dance, and artist research.

The seminar has readings due for the first 4-5 classes, readings are designed to build a shared cultural language in philosophy, contemporary art, and theory and addresses current cultural and ecological imperatives. Concepts and theories are applied through the interpretation of current artistic practices delivered through slide lectures and put into practice in 3 group critiques, 2 writing assignments, 1 portfolio analysis, and 1 public presentation.