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  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. Iconoclasm, the purposeful destruction of images, and aniconism-the refusal to produce images-have been recurring phenomena throughout the history of Western art. Whether iconoclasm is an exclusively Western practice will be one of the subjects considered in this course. Prominent examples of iconoclasm and aniconism across time include the ancient practice of destroying the monuments of previous rulers; the prohibition on images in the Hebrew Bible; Christian iconoclasm in medieval Byzantium and in the wake of the Protestant Reformation; state-sponsored destruction of images during the French, Russian, and Nazi revolutions; vandalism; and contemporary attempts to censor the visual arts. Long neglected by art historians, the study of iconoclasm is now considered central to understanding the historical function of images. By examining theories of iconoclasm and selected case studies, this course will attempt to understand the phenomenon and its importance for the study of past art; over the course of the semester each student will conduct a detailed examination of an iconoclastic incident of his or her choice. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2009-10
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. This course investigates the formal relationships between architecture and images at holy sites during the Middle Ages, focusing on how those relationships structured and mediated a viewer's experience of the divine. We will explore how visual and material production in Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam informed social and political relations. We will encounter a wide array of geographical sites and histories: from classical examples in Greece and Rome (the Athenian Acropolis and Constantinian monuments), to monastic settlements in France and Germany during the 8th and 9th centuries; from the spread of Romanesque architectural sculpture along the European pilgrimage routes in the 12th century, to the rise of Gothic cathedrals and the Italian city-state during the 13th and 14th centuries. We will discover how each site's architectonics encouraged viewers to spatially interact with images. Readings will include both primary and secondary sources and will focus on a historical and formal understanding of a key set of monuments within their urban or monastic environments. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. This course addresses the nude in early modern Europe as a site for theological debate, Neoplatonic inquiry, scientific exploration, and erotic desire. Gazing into the body with an early modern eye initiated a series of negotiations involving the soul, the body politic, and the gendered body. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2009-10.
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. This course will trace the formation of modes of visual modernity in China from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) through the Republican era (1911-1949). Our exploration will focus on visualities produced in architectural and public spaces such as museums, gardens, and the theatre, as well as on cultural and imaginary spaces of representation such as printed books, maps, paper currency, and handscrolls. Among the issues for discussion will be the problematic terms "modernity," "modernization," and "Westernization." We will consider structural conditions for the emergence of distinctly Chinese modes of modern visuality in comparison to European modes, including perceptions and discourses of change and newness, the prominence of an urban public visuality of reflexive sociability and spectacle, and the role of the state in promoting certain modern modes of seeing. Further, we will take into account the development and understanding of new technologies of vision such as lithography and photography. Conference. Prerequisite: two art history courses or consent of the instr
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. Since Plato made his notoriously damning pronouncements concerning the duplicity of art and artists in his Republic, art's relationship with deception and illusion has been considered to various degrees both inherent and insidious. It is within this tradition that our survey of artistic production in U.S. culture following World War II is situated. The objects we will examine were created during a period marked by numerous gaps manifested most famously in missiles, generations, technology, and credibility itself. Moreover, during a moment of exponential growth in mass media and dematerialized, electronic forms of communication-an era filled with both hope and distrust for the regulating and economizing powers of technology and bureaucratization-the gap widened between seeing and believing. This course will explore the various ways in which the visual arts engaged within the discourse of gaps in culture between 1945 and 1975, paying special attention to how the gaps themselves become sites for signification within the historical network of objects, texts, and events in which they emerged. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2009-1
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. What is the relationship between Judaism and the visual arts How has the Second Commandment's prohibition against making "graven images" been interpreted in the ancient and modern worlds What role have art and visual culture played in "boundary definition" when Jewish communities encountered Hellenistic culture, Christianity, Islam, and modernism This course will take an in-depth look at Jewish texts on art and images from the biblical and rabbinic past to the modern period. We will study the decoration of synagogues in the ancient and modern world and the illumination of Jewish manuscripts. We will then investigate Jewish visual culture in the Italian Renaissance, the age of the ghetto, and the emancipation period. We conclude with biographical studies of some 20th-century Jewish artists, considering questions related to memory, exile and diaspora, tradition and the individual, the Holocaust, Israeli identity(ies) and the arts, and the perceived connections between Jewish spirituality, abstraction, and the use of Hebrew letterforms in the visual arts. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. This course explores the representation of Jews in European visual and literary culture from the medieval period to the 20th century. We will examine the evolution of an anti-Jewish iconography in Christian art and literature and the relationship of such representations to ecclesiastical exegesis and to the accusations of ritual murder, host desecration, image profanation, and usurious corruption that flourished throughout the continent primarily from the 12th to the 16th century. We will also study the architecture of the Jewish ghetto, examining how Christians and Jews defined themselves and their faiths through the architectural designs, urban planning, and socioeconomic structures of the city. Finally we will investigate the impact of assimilation, acculturation, and anti-Semitism on European visual culture from the 18th to the 20th century-exploring, for example, the work of Degas and Toulouse Lautrec, as well as the art and cultural policy of Nazi Germany. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. The concepts of representation and democracy have been fundamental to the political and cultural identity of the United State since the country's inception. This course will explore the history of visual art in the United States, from its formation through the rise of the industrialized and modernized nation in the late 19th century, using these two terms as guiding principles and foundational themes. In particular, we will examine how the concept of democracy and the emergenceof a middle-class culture required new models of visual representation, and how the expanding realm of political representation and economic opportunity was considered as much a force that needed to be controlled as a political ideal. This class will investigate how such national ideals and anxieties were negotiated and represented by artists, paying special attention to certain themes such as landscape, industry, race, gender, and social class. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2009-10.
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. The American West has occupied a special place in the social and political imagination of the United States since the country's founding. This course will examine how the region-itself a changing concept as western expansion progressed-was visually represented in media including paintings, sculptures, prints, maps, photographs, and films, from its first conception in the late 18th century to the present. We will explore how these various models of spatial representation operated for the different populations occupying the region as well as the ramifications and challenges of representing a sense of place, particularly in a visual lexicon. Prerequisite: Art 201 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
  • 3.00 Credits

    Full course for one semester. This intermediate studio course provides a forum for more advanced and independent work for students who have completed the introductory sequence in photography or digital media. It will function as both a studio intensive and a junior seminar, with regular discussion of articles in contemporary media arts and theory as well as selected historical writings and works. Assignments will be open-ended, providing thematic guidelines that build on skills and conceptual awareness from the introductory courses. Assignments will also respond directly to individual and group interests. Possibilities include electronic visualization, collaborative video or still production, documentary, large-format photography, mural printing (photographic and digital), and hybridization of traditional and electronic photography. Topics of reading and research will include the aesthetics and politics of visual truth, the collective imagination of popular culture, the science and psychology of optics and seeing, and the indexical as a mode of representation. Class time will be spent in lecture, slide presentations, lab work, critique, and occasional field trips. Students must be highly self-motivated and will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity. Prerequisites: Art 291 or 296 or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.
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