Curriculum & Courses

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the 'critical' in 'visual and critical studies.' For the past ten years, it has been referred to as 'a primer for the art world.' It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider 'texts' from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution.

Hybrid Practices seeks to bring artistic experimentation and research-based scholarship together. In general, Visual and Critical Studies promotes academic and artistic hybridity as a way to examine the social forces that shape our lives. Many fields will be engaged, including queer and feminist theory, literature, social identity, postcolonial studies, art history, and philosophy. The goal is to support student practices by exposing them to various critical conversations related to politics (social life) and art (general creativity). This course prioritizes artists historically marginalized because of their social identities, including gender, race, ethnicity, able-bodiedness, sexual orientation, and more.
Some artist, writers, and thinkers to be considered include, Black Audio Film Collective, Glenn Ligon, #decolonizethisplace, Sky Hopinka, Park McArthur, Sunaura Taylor, Michel Foucault, Super Futures Haunt Qollective, and Judith Butler. Screenings will include a variety of videos related to contemporary art and critical theory, including ¿Martha Rosler Reads Vogue: Wishing, Dreaming, Winning, Spending,¿ Forensic Architecture¿s 'Rebel Architecture: The Architecture of Violence,' Coco Fusco¿s ¿TED Ethology: Primate Visions of the Human Mind,¿ Paper Tiger TV¿s ¿Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographic on Primates,¿ and Democracy Now¿s ¿Freed but Not Free: Artists at the Venice Biennale Respond to the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.¿
Coursework includes a reading schedule, research-supported discussions, moments of creative presentation/critique, and writing assignments that engage hybrid approaches to culture, history, and theory.

If a society?s order of reasons disempowers its citizens, why not weaponize the irrational? This was the premise of various, systemic reactions against the ?ego? in the midlate 20th century. In Europe, the United States, and former colonies, some of this activity can be read as an extension of the historical avant garde?s investigation of altered states of consciousness and ?madness.? The neo-avant garde sometimes used the tools of rational science to deconstruct its premises, reconstruct the real, and promote a more demotic culture. This course takes an international approach and samples practices and discourses of Dadaism, Surrealism, free jazz, performance and conceptual art, dance, film, ?relational aesthetics,? and experimental poetics. We will place a special emphasis on the way indeterminacy claims to ameliorate conflicts between political commitment and aesthetic quality.

This course is an experimental seminar devoted to recent discussions about disability in the US and in Europe: how is disability represented, and how are these representations constructed? Readings include the following, among many other texts: Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, Julia Kristeva's recent essays on disability, and several Supreme Court Opinions regarding ADA, including Alabama v. Garrett, Toyota v. Williams, and Tennessee v. Lane. In the second half of the semester, seminar participants present papers and related research on disability as a social and theoretical construction.

Marxism isn't just about the 'real world' critique of capitalism and the potential rise of communism. Many thinkers and critics who have written in the wake of Karl Marx have tried to articulate what it means (and why it's important) to read like a Marxist, to understand literature, art, and all the rest of human culture as a historical expression of the human condition under capital. This course serves as an introduction to Marxism and Marxist aesthetics, literary criticism, and cultural critique. We will begin by reading Marx and Engels, and then spend most of the semester considering core concepts as they develop over the subsequent century and a half of Marxist art, literary, and cultural criticism. We will ask questions like: what is the relationship between narrative representation, socio-political life, and its underlying economic forces? Do artworks produce autonomous worlds and meanings or are they entirely shaped by capitalism and class society? How do artifacts like novels, poems, theatrical texts, films, or visual artworks theorize history and society? What do the rise of specific forms, genres, and popular cultural practices tell us about social history? To what extent is it useful to read like/as a Marxist (and are there limitations in doing so)?

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 them. 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.

This course will focus on socially engaged art practices through which participants are encouraged to be directly involved in the creative process. The seminar will explore project planning, strategies of engagement, participatory methodologies and the development of resources designed to facilitate working in collaborative situations with social groups, communities and publics. Participatory art considers approaches to art making which engage publics in generative processes that allow participants to become co-authors as well as observers of the work. At its core, participatory art requires that the artist makes space for co-creation by removing themselves from the work or receding enough so as to become an equal partner and participant in the project. In this seminar we will explore ideas of authorship, authority, agency and interaction as themes central to generative collaborations between artist, audience and environment.

This course is a a workshop introducing studio art students to various kinds of writing they can do to prepare them for professional opportunities. We will focus on connecting students to their own projects through writing and then we will discuss how that writing can be used to serve more practical ends. Instead of starting with practical requirements such as artist statments and grant applications, we will first work to build students? personal vocabularies and ways of talking about their practices. Emphasis will be on experimentation and building comfort with language.

Readings will be a combination of various forms artists' writings (diaries, interviews, sketchbooks, etc) and various formats (artist statments, grant applications, professional situations) where artists are expected to present their work in language. We will use Social Medium: Artists Writing 2000-2015 as a sourcebook for examples of writing by contemporary artists and students will also be asked to collect their own sources of inspiration from fields appropriate to their work.

Coursework focuses on weekly prompts, which will be workshopped and revised. Final projects will relate to students' own goals for presenting their studio work, including websites, grant applications, and artist statements.

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.

In 1976, as noted by a recent Viewpoint Magazine piece, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, a former sessions player for Frank Zappa, whose landmark West Coast funk compositions effortlessly fused his auto-theoretical 'gangster of love' persona with post-soul, pre-discotheque blues guitar, released the eponymous single from his album Ain't That A Bitch the same year Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And I quote: Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract! In 2015, James Franco committed to film the character 'Alien,' purportedly based on real-life Houston-based rapper Riff Raff (who has a giant tattoo on his chest of Bart Simpson holding a beaker that reads,'The Freestyle Scientist'). Right around the time of Friedman's victory speech (titled 'Inflation and Unemployment,' and dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel), Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton, the 'cool ghoul with the funk transplant') and his Holy Mothership began to hover around a new consumer class of Thumpasorus peoples, just as Parliament-Funkadelic's cosmological dispersion mirrored another kind of outsourcing?paraphrasing here, but why not put the jobs someplace they've never been perceived to be, like a spaceship. Funk, then the history of automation, then aliens. The shared history isn't some mute-poetic post-automatic ontological flirtation: it's embedded in Kurt Vonnegut's first novel Player Piano, and intertwined with the anomie registered by the twentieth century's increasing alienation of assembly line workers and e-commerce representatives. In 1963, Detroit autoworker and Marxist activist James Boggs wrote The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, about his experiences on the Chrysler assembly line, where he presupposed a new generation of the working class made obsolete by advances in heavy labor automation, left without a body to sell or their own labor-power to broker the deal. How did blip blip Marx's Labor Theory of Value 010101 Space is the Place Where I Go All Alone take us through deregulated technocratic neoliberalism and to the other side: via the simulated proprietary satellite mapping that Curtis Mayfield may or may not have fever-dreamed in 'Diamonds in the Back'? We know that it knows the Waze to your Uber Pool's rendezvous with the Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership (T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.). 'Abdul Jabar couldn't have made these prices/with a sky hook.' Long story short: funk emerged in the waning days of Fordism's hold on the American economy, before drums largely lived in machines and workers were brokered out of politics. Funk parallels Jimmy Hoffa, Wattstax, the death of Henry Ford's crony Harry Bennett, the arguments of Jefferson Cowrie's Last Days of the Working Class, Dock Ellis throwing a perfect game on LSD, the goddamned Deer Hunter, stagflation, the threat of nuclear annihilation and concerts mounted against such, pro-labor PACs, Betty Davis's 'Politician Man,' two energy crises, the Business Roundtable Lobby, Bootsy Collins dropping acid and flipping over the handlebars of his road bike in the middle of the woods triggering an out of body experience, and good ol' monetarist theory. P-Funk's Mothership is now in the Smithsonian Museum. 'Strike on Computers!,' as Watson suggested. I once climbed through a window of the abandoned Studebaker-Packard Plant one Detroit afternoon in 1996 and cut my foot on a shard of glass perhaps manufactured in the form of a Pepsi bottle at the Mack Avenue warehouse two blocks away or two decades before. I bled for a while through an anklet, but then we listened to the Fugees cover Roberta Flack's 'Killing Me Softly' on someone's CD of The Score (playback technology developed by the Advent Corporation) the rest of the ride home.

Conspiracy Theory and Other Metanarratives

The term 'conspiracy theory' has long been used to indicate a narrative genre that includes a broad selection of arguments for the existence of systemic furtive acts. Cautiously construing a space between the unwarranted and the unidentifiable, conspiracy works to situate grand narratives at the core of distinctions between the individual and the institution, public and private life, and visible and invisible architectures. At the same time, the events that sustain conspiratorial knowing are often articulated as the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public, actively questioning how concerns with collective memory, loss, and paranoia fuel both the desire for transparency and our projective urge to insert ourselves into our uncomfortable past and unknown future. From Wikileaks, the Cold War, and the Kennedy Assassination, nostalgia-driven television programs (Quantum Leap, You Are There), astrology, and the history of editorial redactions to the work of writers and artists such as Mark Lombardi, Pierre Huyghe, Dziga Vertov, Spaulding Gray, and Don Delillo, we'll examine how the sense of a 'master plot' shapes the way we narrate social and cultural experiences. What role do these narratives play in our struggle to assign meaning to events and artworks that are otherwise inexplicable? And how does our fascination with conspiracy--and its often melancholic and performative relationship to loss--address the potential of 'putting right what once went wrong'?

This interdisciplinary course approaches the topic of gender, race, 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 enslaved bodies, the Women's Health Movement and its legacy, queer and trans health issues, and sex health education. Readings include works by Audre Lourde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elaine Showalter, Leslie Feinberg and Andrea Smith. We will also consider the ways in which artists have addressed issues of gender, race and medicine in their work. Assignments include an interview project, written reflections, and a final research-based project.

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 or teaching assistant. By the end of the semester, each student will have a 25-35 page superbly written thesis (maximum 45 pages), which will most likely (although it is not required) have visual content. Students will also present their thesis projects in the VCS Undergraduate Thesis Symposium at the end of the semester. Class meetings are used to discuss readings, workshop writing, share research methods and techniques, and discuss research and writing problems. Guest speakers and group visits to libraries may also be part of the class. Students are required to attend all meetings, participate actively in class discussions and workshops, present work in the symposium, and complete a polished thesis by the end of the semester.

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 or teaching assistant. By the end of the semester, each student will have a 25-35 page superbly written thesis (maximum 45 pages), which will most likely (although it is not required) have visual content. Students will also present their thesis projects in the VCS Undergraduate Thesis Symposium at the end of the semester. Class meetings are used to discuss readings, workshop writing, share research methods and techniques, and discuss research and writing problems. Guest speakers and group visits to libraries may also be part of the class. Students are required to attend all meetings, participate actively in class discussions and workshops, present work in the symposium, and complete a polished thesis by the end of the semester.

This graduate-level course immerses students in research methods and resources for use in their Visual and Critical Studies coursework and their theses. Guest speakers include librarians and curators. Students combine study of general research information with the pursuit of individual research projects directed by the instructor. [This is a required course for first-year students in the MA in VCS program.]

In 1976, as noted by a recent Viewpoint Magazine piece, Johnny ?Guitar? Watson, a former sessions player for Frank Zappa, whose landmark West Coast funk compositions effortlessly fused his auto-theoretical ?gangster of love? persona with post-soul, pre-discotheque blues guitar, released the eponymous single from his album Ain?t That A Bitch?the same year Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And I quote: ?Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract!? In 2015, James Franco committed to film the character ?Alien,? purportedly based on real-life Houston-based rapper Riff Raff (who has a giant tattoo on his chest of Bart Simpson holding a beaker that reads,?The Freestyle Scientist?). Right around the time of Friedman?s victory speech (titled ?Inflation and Unemployment,? and dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel), Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton, the ?cool ghoul with the funk transplant') and his Holy Mothership began to hover around a new consumer class of Thumpasorus peoples, just as Parliament-Funkadelic?s cosmological dispersion mirrored another kind of outsourcing?paraphrasing here, but why not put the jobs someplace they?ve never been perceived to be, like a spaceship. Funk, then the history of automation, then aliens. The shared history isn?t some mute-poetic post-automatic ontological flirtation: it?s embedded in Kurt Vonnegut?s first novel Player Piano, and intertwined with the anomie registered by the twentieth century?s increasing alienation of assembly line workers and e-commerce representatives. In 1963, Detroit autoworker and Marxist activist James Boggs wrote The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker?s Notebook, about his experiences on the Chrysler assembly line, where he presupposed a new generation of the working class made obsolete by advances in heavy labor automation, left without a body to sell or their own labor-power to broker the deal. How did blip blip Marx?s Labor Theory of Value 010101 Space is the Place Where I Go All Alone take us through deregulated technocratic neoliberalism and to the other side: via the simulated proprietary satellite mapping that Curtis Mayfield may or may not have fever-dreamed in ?Diamonds in the Back?? We know that it knows the Waze to your Uber Pool?s rendezvous with the Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership (T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.)? ?Abdul Jabar couldn?t have made these prices/with a sky hook.? Long story short: funk emerged in the waning days of Fordism?s hold on the American economy, before drums largely lived in machines and workers were brokered out of politics. Funk parallels Jimmy Hoffa, Wattstax, the death of Henry Ford?s crony Harry Bennett, the arguments of Jefferson Cowrie?s Last Days of the Working Class, Dock Ellis throwing a perfect game on LSD, the goddamned Deer Hunter, stagflation, the threat of nuclear annihilation and concerts mounted against such, pro-labor PACs, Betty Davis?s ?Politician Man,? two energy crises, the Business Roundtable Lobby, Bootsy Collins dropping acid and flipping over the handlebars of his road bike in the middle of the woods triggering an out of body experience, and good ol? monetarist theory. P-Funk?s Mothership is now in the Smithsonian Museum. ?Strike on Computers!,? as Watson suggested. I once climbed through a window of the abandoned Studebaker-Packard Plant one Detroit afternoon in 1996 and cut my foot on a shard of glass perhaps manufactured in the form of a Pepsi bottle at the Mack Avenue warehouse two blocks away or two decades before. I bled for a while through an anklet, but then we listened to the Fugees cover Roberta Flack?s ?Killing Me Softly? on someone?s CD of The Score (playback technology developed by the Advent Corporation) the rest of the ride home.

When considering the void we are immediately confronted with nothing, absence, vacuity, the invisible, the ineffable, with destruction and rejec­tion. As emptiness, as the absence of every­thing or as negation, the void is the opposite of life. However, the experience of the void is not emptiness: it is not about nothing, nor is it about absence. The void is a whole, yet a whole which has no noticeable reality and exists as emergent, potential or conceptual. This seminar will focus on the ideologically driven construction of space. The course will explore spaces as concepts and alternately concepts as generative spaces to occupy, as entities which establish an environment for thought and action. Site, as space performed through shared social and psychic schemata, as actual space, as sacred space and as virtual space. We will consider earth formed sites, human approaches to environmental design, computational media, information as landscape in cyberspace, case study homes and closed world site proposals. In this seminar, the construction of the commons, how we exist within it and questions relating to conceptualizing public space are of central concern. Readings and course material encourage trans disciplinary methodologies and cross-media production. Final projects can take form either as research based texts or as a substantial creative project that blends academic and creative production.

How, where and why do we gather? In what ways is the impulse to gather informed by histories of exclusion? This seminar is a survey of the myriad ways that communities come together to thrive in times of crisis, assemble in times of celebration, come together around shared concerns and form structures with the capacity to take in and hold energy from scattered places and sources. Is the impulse to gather an innate tendency for humans? What informs our social need for connection, community, and shared experiences? And, how do we manifest this impulse in various forms like social gatherings, rituals, celebrations, or even simply seeking out the company of others? This course will consider forms of hospitality and hosting as well as the politics and protocols of gathering as a form of resistance. In this seminar we will explore methods of facilitating small and large group encounters with a focus on participant experience. We will examine how the structure of a gathering informs the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics. This course will focus on community as form, social context as integral to human interaction and the participatory aspects of experience.