Syllabus
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Week 1: Introduction - The Crisis in the Humanities
Tuesday, Aug. 28 - Introduction
Thursday, Aug. 30 – The Crisis in the Humanities
Georges Steiner, “Preface,” from Language and Silence (New York: Athenuem, 1967), vii-xi.
Peter Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat. (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 11-15.
Frances K. Pohl, “Defending Civil Liberties and the American Image,” (excerpts) from Ben Shahn: New Deal Artists in a Cold War Climate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 98-117
Brian O’Doherty, “Leonard Baskin,” Art in America 50 (Summer 1962), 67-72.
Week 2: The Tragic Image I
Joselit, 9-32.
Tuesday, September 4
Willem De Kooning, Excavation, 1952
Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Evergreen, 1959), 23-39.
Hannah Arendt, “Action,” (excerpted) from The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 175-192
Barnett Newman, “The First Man Was an Artist” (1947) and “The Ideographic Picture” (1947) and Adolph Gottlieb and Marc Rothko, “Statement” (1943) in Herschel B. Chipp, ed. Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 544-545, 550-551.
Thursday, September 6
Jackson Pollock, Echo, 1951
Michael Leja, “Pollock and Metaphor” from Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 275-327.
Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of the Avant Garde” (1957) in Modern Art, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 213-226.
Screening (in class): Jackson Pollock ’51 (Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg), 1951
Week 3: Highbrow, Mass Culture, and the Search for Authenticity
Tuesday, September 11
Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947
Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch” (1939) in John O’Brian, ed. Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5-22.
Thomas Crow, “Fashioning the New York School,” in Modern Art and The Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 39-48.
Thursday, September 13
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952
Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” and “Modernist Painting” in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, pp 23-38 and vol 4, pp. 85-93.
Caroline Jones, “Abstraction,” (excerpted) from Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 97-126.
Week 4: The Tragic Image II - Tragedy Averted
Joselit 33-50
Tuesday, September 18
Morris Louis, Alpha Gamma, 1960
Michael Fried, “Three American Painters” (1965) in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 213-260.
Alexander Nemerov, “Morris Louis: Court Painter to the Kennedy Administration,” in Morris Louis Now: An American Master Reconsidered (Atlanta: High Museum of Art 2006), 20-38.
Thursday, September 20
Frank Stella, Jill, 1959
Bruce Glaser, “Questions for Stella and Judd” in Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 148-164.
Alian Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy” (1958) from For a New Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 49-76.
Week 5: The Everyday Underground
Joselit 56-63.
Tuesday, September 25
Robert Rauchenberg, Canyon, 1959
Alan Solomon, “Robert Rauschenberg,” in Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),, 19-24.
John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” from Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 109-126.
Rosalind Krauss, “Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image,” Artforum 13 (December 1974): 36-43.
Thursday, September 27
Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955
Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art” in Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 17-54.
Robert Rosenblum, “Jasper Johns,” in Pop Art, 11-13.
Susan Sontag, “One Culture and The New Sensibility” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), 293-304.
Week 6: The Credibility Gap I – Seeing and Believing
Joselit, 106-115
Tuesday, October 2
Donald Judd, Untitled (step), 1963
Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” “Jackson Pollock,” and “Lee Bontecou” in Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005), 178-190, 194-4.
Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd” Artforum 4 (May 1966): 24-26.
Daniel Boorstin, “From News Gathering to News Making: A Flood of Pseudo-Events,” from The Image (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 7-45
Thursday, October 4
Carl Andre, Lever, 1966
Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “Against Interpretation” (1964) in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 95-104, 181-204.
E. C. Goosen, The Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 7-11.
Alan Solomon, “The New Art” in Gregory Battcock, ed. The New Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 67-82.
Week 7: The Credibility Gap II – People and Things
Joselit, 64-85.
Tuesday, October 9
Roy Lichtenstein, I Can See the Whole Room, 1961
Michael Lobel, “The Emergence of Pop Art” in Image Duplicator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 17-40.
Dore Ashton et al, “A Symposium on Pop Art” (1963) in Pop Art, 104-117.
Thursday, October 11
Andy Warhol, Mustard Race Riot, 1963
Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol” in Modern Art and the Common Culture, 49-68.
Benjamin Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One Dimensional Art” in Neo-Avantegarde and Culture Industry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 461-529.
Week 8: Fall Break October 13-21
Week 9: Theatricality of Everyday Life
Joselit, 50-55
Tuesday, October 23
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964
Irving Goffman, “Performance” in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 17-30.
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” Art News 57 (October 1958): 24-26, 55-57.
Allan Kaprow, “Self-Service: A Happening” and “Assemblages, Environments & Happenings,” in Michael Kirby, Happenings and Other Acts (London: Routledge, 1995), 230-245.
Thursday, October 25
Robert Morris, Green Gallery exhibition, 1964
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 116-147.
Stanley Cavell, excerpts from “Music Decomposed” and “The Avoidance of Love” from Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 188-193, 337-344.
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture” in Battcock, Minimal Art, 222-235.
Week 10: The Technology Gap: New Frontiers
Joselit, 151-160
Tuesday, October 29
Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, 1965
Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” from Understanding Media (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 23-39.
David Joselit, “Virus,” in Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 43-84.
Thursday, November 1
Bruce Nauman, Neon Template of the Left Half of My Body Taken at 10 inch Intervals, 1966.
Jack Burnham, “Introduction” from Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 1-18.
Pamela Lee, “Eros and Technics and Civilization” in Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 4-35.
Screening, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Week 11: The Mind and Body Gap: Identity as Medium
Joselit, 140-151, 161-172
Tuesday, November 6
Elanor Antin, Carving, 1972
Amelia Jones, “Post-Modernism, Subjectivity and Body Art,” in Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 21-52.
Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement in the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 190-208.
Thursday, November 8
Available OnlineDan Graham, Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1977
Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976), 50-64.
Week 12: The Dematerialized Object
Joselit, 129-139.
Tuesday, November 13
Available OnlineEd Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990), 105-43.
Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts 41 (December 1966), 21-22.
Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967), 79-83.
Friday, November 16 - NOTE DIFFERENT DATE!
Information catalog, available in special collections
Eve Meltzer, “The Dream of the Information World,” Oxford Art Journal 29 (Spring 2006): 115-138. (available online)
Jean Francois Lyotard, “The Field: Knowledge in Computerized Societies,” from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3-6.
Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy” [1969] in Gregory Battcock, ed. Idea Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 70-101.
Week 13: Art as System / System as Art
Tuesday, November 20
Pietro Belluschi, Psychology Building, Reed College, 1949
Mel Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism” in Minimal Art, 92-102.
Reinhold Martin, “The Physiognomy of the Office” from The Organizational Complex (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 80-121.
Thursday, November 22 – NO CLASS THANKSGIVING BREAK
Week 14: The Generation Gap – Time as Medium
Joselit, 141-151
Tuesday, November 27
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970
Jennifer Roberts, “Spiral Jetty/Golden Spike” in Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 114-139.
Robert Smithson, “Ultramoderne” (1967) in The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 62-65.
Thursday, November 29
Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1966
George Kubler, “The Classing of Things,” from The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 31-61.
Sarah Rich, “Bridging the Generation Gap in Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?,” American Art 19 (Fall 2005), 17-39.
Week 15: Conclusion: Anti-Humanism
Tuesday, December 4
Michel Foucault, “The Unties of Discourse,” from The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] (New York: Harper, 1976), 21-30.
Hayden White, “The Culture of Criticism” in Ihab Hassan, ed. Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 55-69.
Screening, Head. 1968