Course Syllabus
The idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things. -- George Kubler
Wölfflin, in a famous and oft-repeated passage, once argued the stylistic equivalence between Gothic shoes and Gothic architecture. It was in the smallest shapes, he said, that the purest manifestation of a style can be felt. It is thus in the grand order of styles that shoes are the equal of cathedrals. While Wölfflin treated shoes on a par with art, today shoes and cathedrals, but more to [the] point barns and cathedrals, carpets and frescoes are all treated as products of society. -- Svetlana Alpers
Week 1 Thing Theory
Readings for February 4
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1-24.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Trompe-l’Oeil,” in Calligram (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 53-62.
see Rogers v. Koons
see Koons v. everyone
Week 2 Class canceled
No readings for February 11
The Art Department at the College Art Association Conference in NYC
Week 3 The Corporeal and the Material
Readings for February 18
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Introduction: Fashion, Fetishism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Europe,” and “Composing the Subject: Making Portraits,” in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1-14, 34-58.
SKIM (look at images): Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas: Cesare Vecellio's “Habiti Antichi et Moderni” (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 183-273.
Boris Arvatov. "Everyday life and the Culture of the Thing (Towards a Formulation of the Question)," trans. by Christina Kiaer. October 81 (Summer 1997): 119-128.
Christina Kiaer. “The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 245-303.
E. V. Day catalogue Divas Ascending (December 2010) -- available on Moodle
Charles LeDray, NY Times article
Presenter: Erin DeJesus
Week 4 The Phenomenological Body
Readings for February 25
Michael Fried. “Art and Objecthood” in Minimal Art: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 116-147.
Robert Morris. “Notes on Sculpture” in Minimal Art: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 222-235.
Donald Judd. “Specific Objects” (1964) in Donald Judd: 1955-68, ed. Thomas Kellein. New York: D.A.P., 2002.
image gallery
Slavoj Žižek on toilets and ideology
Presenters: Lucy Hoffman and Arty Johnstone
Week 5 Fetish
Readings for March 4
William Pietz, “Fetish,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 197-207.
Charity Scribner. "Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing: Joseph Beuys and the Museum" in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 330-345.
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol, Preliminary Notes for a Critique.” The Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 2000: 41-64.
Presenters: Zoe Stal and Allison King
Week 6 Singularity and the Object
Readings for March 11
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64-91.
Patricia Fortini Brown, “To Live Nobile,” and “The Mirror of Ancient Ladies,” Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 53-121.
Presenters: Becca Roberts
Week 7 Magic Things
Readings for March 18
Julian Yates, "What are 'Things' Saying in Renaissance Studies?" Literature Compass 3/5 (2006): 992-1010.
Adrian W. B. Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye: Deschi da Parto and Renaissance Visual Culture,” Art History 27, no. 4 (September 2004): 538-62.
Presenters: Gena Beam and Charlie Higgins
Spring Break
Week 8 Damaged Goods
Readings for April 1
Karl Marx. "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secrets Thereof" Capital (volume 1, chapter 1, section 4). In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978: 319-329.
selections from Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object (exhibition catalogue), curated by Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986: 11, 12-18, 24-34, 38-41.
Presenter: Bekah Volinsky
Week 9 Part Object
Readings for April 8
Helen Molesworth, “Part Object Part Sculpture” Part Object Part Sculpture, ed. Helen Molesworth. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts & University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005: 18-26.
Rosalind Krauss. “Objet (petit) a” Part Object Part Sculpture, ed. Helen Molesworth. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts & University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005: 84-90.
Helen Molesworth. “Duchamp: by Hand, Even” Part Object Part Sculpture, ed. Helen Molesworth. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts & University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005: 179-201.
Presenters: Tori Abernathy and Nick Irvine
Week 10 Collecting Culture
Readings for April 15
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.
James Clifford. “On Collecting Art and Culture” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988: 215-51.
Presenter: Zoe Kipping
Week 11 Exhibiting Things
Readings for April 22
Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” and Michael Baxandall, “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 25-41.
Jennifer Jane Marshall, “In Form We Trust: Neoplatonism, the Gold Standard, and the Machine Art Show, 1934,” Art Bulletin 90, no 4 (Dec. 2008): 597-615.
image gallery
Presenter: Rachel Schmerge and Marvin Bernardo
Week 12 "Object Stories"
No readings for April 29
OBJECT STORIES
TRIP TO THE PORTLAND ART MUSEUM
Discussion of the "Object Stories" exhibition with
Christina Olsen, Director of Education at the Portland Art Museum
2:00pm, Stevens Board Room
Artist Talk at Portland Art Museum, 6:30pm
Geraldine Ondrizek
Apex Gallery, 4th Floor of the NW Wing
this event is free and open to the public
Week 13 Built Things
CHANGE OF DATE: We will meet Thursday evening from 5-7pm (?) in Library 41.
Readings for May 5
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 73-90.
Katherine Taylor, “Architecture’s Place in Art History: Art or Adjunct,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 2 (June 2001): 342-46.
Dell Upton, “Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55 (Sept 1996): 238-53
Presenter: Charlie Renison and Margaret Cardenas
image gallery