Course Syllabus
Week 1 The Art of Art History
Good taste, which is becoming more prevalent throughout the world, had its origins under the skies of Greece....We are told that Minerva chose this land, with its mild seasons, above all others for the Greeks in the knowledge that it would be productive of genius.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Readings for August 29
Donald Preziosi, “Art History: Making the Visible Legible,” and “Art as History” in The Art of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13-30.
Readings for August 31
Svetlana Alpers, “Is Art History?” Daedalus 106, no. 3 (1977), 1-13.
Carolyn Dean, "The Trouble with (the Term) Art," Art Journal 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 24-32.
image gallery
The Power of Patience
Jennifer Roberts HILT video
Week 2 The Canon & Its Authors
Canon: "A general rule, fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or scientific treatment of a subject; e.g. canons of descent or inheritance; a logical, grammatical, or metrical canon; canons of criticism, taste, art, etc." Oxford English Dictionary
The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work: The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."
To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.
The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.
Roland Barthes
Readings for September 5
Visual Resources Curator Chloe Van Stralendorff will visit the class to discuss how to use Reed Digital Collections (25 minutes).
Giorgio Vasari, “Preface to the Third Part,” and "Life of Leonardo da Vinci," Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 617-40.
Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 555-64.
Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park, Penn.: Penn State Press, 1991), 3-16.
Readings for September 7
Art Librarian Angie Beiriger will visit the class to discuss how to do library research in art history (25 minutes).
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-48.
Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Random House, 1984), 101-20.
Week 3 Challenging the Museum
Readings for September 12
Chloe Van Stralendorff will come to class to give a tutorial on Artsteps (45 minutes).
Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 25-32.
Kerry Downey, "Creating Good-Enough Containers: Reflections on Queerness in Community-Based Museum Education," Art Journal Open (January 9, 2019).
Readings for September 14
Lisa G. Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves” in Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, ed. Lisa G. Corrin. Baltimore: The Contemporary & New York: The New Press, 1994: 1-22.
Leslie King-Hammond, “A Conversation with Fred Wilson” in Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, ed. Lisa G. Corrin. Baltimore: The Contemporary & New York: The New Press, 1994: 23-34.
Beyonce and Jay-Z perform "Apes**t"
optional: The New York Times on "Uncovering art history"
optional: The New York Times on "When a Visit to a Museum Becomes an Ethical Dilemma"
optional: The New York Times on "Museums: A Special Section"
image gallery
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Kiana & Piper
presenters (10:30-11:50am): William & Drew
Week 4 Style
In the drawing of a mere nostril, we have to recognize the essential character of a style.
Heinrich Wölffin
Readings for September 19
Heinreich Wölffin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 1-40.
Jas Elsner, “Style,” Critical Terms for Art History , ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 98-109.
Readings for September 21
Please meet in the Cooley Gallery
Meyer Schapiro, “Style,” Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, New York: Georg Braziller, 1995), 51-102.
optional: Svetlana Alpers, “Style is What You Make It,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 137-162.
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Chloe
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Katie, Tia, & Briar
Week 5 Iconography & Semiology
Readings for September 26
Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 26-54.
Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 295-320.
Keith Moxey, “The Politics of Iconology,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. Brendan Cassidy, (Princeton, N.J. : Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993), 27-31.
Readings for September 28
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, New York, 1966, pp. 6-17 (Introduction: II and III) and 65-78 (Part One: I and II).
Alex Potts, “Sign,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20-34.
Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 3-16.
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Auden & Tommy
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Matthew & Victoria
Week 6 Gender & Race
For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued. But politics and representation are controversial terms. On the one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women. For feminist theory, the development of a language that fully or adequately represents women has seemed necessary to foster the political visibility of women. This has seemed obviously important considering the pervasive cultural condition in which women's lives were either misrepresented or not represented at all. (1)
If one "is" a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered "person" transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. (3)
My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions. (4)
Judith Butler
Readings for October 3
Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-34.
Elisabeth S. Cohen, “Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 4 (1992): 597-625.
Readings for October 5
Geraldine Heng, "Inventions/Reinventions: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages," The Invention of Race in European Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 15-27.
Kim F. Hall, "'An Object in the Midst of Other Objects': Race, Gender, Material Culture," Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 211-253.
Harper's Bazaar story on Princess Michael of Kent's brooch
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Vieve & Lily
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Percy & Aoife
Week 7 Virtual Art Exhibition Presentations
No readings for October 10
No readings for October 12
Fall Break October 14-22
Week 8 Colonial & Postcolonial Interactions
Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematizes the very authority and authenticity to which the term, 'cultural identity', lays claim.
Stuart Hall
What is at issue is the performative nature of the production of identity and meaning: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently "opening out," remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of identity or transcendent value--be it truth, beauty, class, gender or race...[W]here identity and difference are neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between...
Homi K. Bhabha
Readings for October 24
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 1-49.
Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” The Politics of Vision. Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row/Icon, 1989), 33-59.
BRITNEY SPEARS performs "I'm a Slave 4 U"
Readings for October 26
Zeynep Çelik, “Colonial/Postcolonial Interactions,” in The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture, and Theory, ed. Rasheed Areen, Sean Cubitt, and Ziauddin Sardar (London, New York: Continuum, 2002), 61-72.
Rachel Leibowitz, "The Million Dollar Play House: The Office of Indian Affairs and the Pueblo Revival in the Navajo Capital," Buildings & Landscapes: The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 15 (Fall 2008): 11-42.
presenters (9:00-10:20am):
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Ian & Connor
Week 9 Seeing & Surveillance
The term "gaze" alerts us to the fact that a work of art, like a person, can seem to gaze or be gazed at. Within a work, gazes can be exchanged.
A work would confront the beholder, making the beholder responsible for the effect of the work, the act of looking and being seen becoming the subject of the work. This dependence on the beholder for its effect, however, gave the work the inauthenticity associated with acting for an audience as in theater.
Margaret Olin
Through his concept of the period eye Baxandall emphasizes the cultural-constructedness of vision, characterizes a set of viewing norms, and charts the manner in which artists responded to those norms in their works. Thus, although the social- and cultural-historical data that Baxandall harvests to produce the period eye is extensive, the concept’s explanatory focus is explicitly limited: it seeks to describe stylistic choices and developments. That said, the phrase possesses an inherent breadth, as if its temporal span and the panoramic opticality that it evokes can capture the essentials of a particular period’s visual culture.
Adrian Randolph
Readings for October 31
Margaret Olin, “The Gaze,” Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 318-29.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1977), 195-228.
Readings for November 2
Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ix-xviii, 27-41, 245-62.
Fabrizio Nevola, “Surveillance and Control of the Streets in Renaissance Italy,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 16, no. 1/2 (Fall 2013), 85-106.
Consider Arne Svenson's series The Neighbors
Consider WeiweiCam & documenary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Kari & Aria
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Asher B. & Nar
Week 10 The Spatial Imagination
Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less thorough rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.
Walter Benjamin
Urban spaces acquired their meanings in part through their relationship to the built environment.
Sharon Strocchia
Readings for November 7
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 33, 68-85.
No Readings for November 9
Presenters will select spaces on the Reed campus to apply Lefebvre's theories. At the site, please consider the following questions: What is social space? How does it correspond to power? To representation and reality? To spectatorship and performance?
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Lena & AlexZandria
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Wystan, Libby, & Molly
Week 11 The Embodied Environment
Readings for November 14
Niall Atkinson, "Thinking Through Noise, Building Toward Silence: Creating a Sound Mind and Sound Architecture in the Premodern City," Grey Room 60 (Summer 2015): 10-35.
Maria A. El Helou, “Urban Smellscape: The Pheromones of a City and the Sense of Place,” Conscious Cities Anthology 2018: Human-Centred Design, Science, and Technology (October 15, 2018), 1-5.
Readings for November 16
Christian Tagsold, "Between Essence and Invention," and "Zen and the Art of Gardens," Spaces in Translation: Japanese Gardens and the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 80-121.
Michael Fowler, "Sound as a Considered Design Parameter in the Japanese Garden," Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 35, no. 4 (May 26, 2015), 312-27.
If interested, you may enjoy:
Alexandra Lange's article Celebrating a rugged vision of landscape architecture.
Xochitl Gonzalez's article Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? The Sound of Gentrification is Silence.
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Nina & Emma
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Kate & Diya
Week 12 Value
Readings for November 21
Joseph Leo Koerner and Lisbet Rausing, "Value," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 419-34.
Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3-63.
Devil Wears Prada (cerulean sweater scene)
Antique Roadshow Navajo Ute First Phase Blanket
If interested, you may enjoy:
Julia Jacobs's Museums vote to allow the sale of art to care for collections.
Carol Vogel's Have Art Auctions Become "Must-See TV"?
No Readings for November 23
Thanksgiving Break
presenters (9:00-10:20am): Victor
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Gavin
Week 13 Material Culture
The production of a discourse of visual culture entails the liquidation of art as we have known it.
Susan Buck-Morss
Readings for November 28
VIEWING PETER NORTON FAMILY CHRISTMAS ART PROJECT
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), 1-22.
Dawn Odell, “Porcelain, Print Culture and Mercantile Aesthetics,” in The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, ed. Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 141-58.
Huffington Post on Peter Norton Family Christmas Art Projects
MoMA Store & Peter Norton Family Christmas Art Projects
Readings for November 30
Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1-64.
presenters (9:00-10:20am):
presenters (10:30-11:50am): Asher M. & Maddie
Week 14 Theaster Gates Rebuilds
No Readings for December 5