ARTS 182/6213: Klapper Hall 284:
Professor G. Sholette
gsholette@gmail.com
Teaching Assistant Chris Esposito
Download PDF of Syllabus here: Intro Sculpture Spring 2013 PDF
Course Goals And Description
Sculpture involves space, materials, techniques, and ideas. It is an art of the extraordinary, as well as the everyday. No longer tied to architecture, mimesis, or commemorative representation sculpture now appears in a variety of forms including as installations, collaborations, projections, appropriations, interventions, performances, and experimental projects that address formal concerns, as well as issues of urbanism, identity, historical memory, economics, the environment, and even geopolitics. Examples of such “expanded ”sculpture include public art made to attach to buildings or to be given away, inflatable homeless shelters and wearable art for street demonstrations. The principle area of knowledge addressed in this course involves exploratory learning about the formal, historical, and global dimensions of contemporary sculptural art. Students will work alone or in groups using a range of materials from cardboard and clay, to found objects, social affects, and conceptual ideas.
1. Students will become familiar with several key sculptural techniques and formal ideas through hands-on workshops and experimentation with a variety of materials and three-dimensional assignments. They will also keep a sketchbook of ideas and drawings to work out art project and to document coursework and discussions.
2. Students will learn the basic concepts and vocabulary terms generated by the contemporary art world while exploring how this specialized language has evolved durin late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
3. Students will develop collaborative skills and come to understand the way contemporary art frames broader social realities while in turn economic, political, and technological changes alters the practice of art and culture.
Requirements, Grades, and Evaluation
- 40 % Enthusiastic involvement in assignments
- 30 % Participation in making work and discussions
- 30 % Attendance (3 or more unexcused absences = a drop in grad)
SYLLABUS
Day One: Jan. 29, Introductions and material requirements list. Begin collecting small found objects for a later project based on Kurt Schwitter’s Merz Art: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/S/schwitters.html
Week Two: Feb. 5, DEFINE/DEFEND/ OCCUPY /BREACH/REDEFINE SPACE
After introductions students break into two groups to produce cardboard spaces that they must defend, alter, and/or breach within a specific space and time (One Day Project):
- Group A uses cardboard to create a barrier or blockade/wall
- Group B uses cardboard to breach the barrier
- Group A responds with a new kind of improved barriers
FEB. 12: SCHOOL CLOSED: NO CLASSES
Week Three: Feb. 19, Bauhaus-inspired hand-sculpture (one day)
Cast plaster blocks in three small containers at start of class. Carve the first to fit comfortably in your own hand. Revise the form as a second carving with second plaster block. Revise form again to create a third hand-held sculpture with the last block.
** Please bring three large coffee drinking cup sized containers and clothes that can get dirty.
Week Four: Feb. 26, Shoes For This And Other Worlds (two weeks).
Design a pair of shoes useful for a specific profession or for walking in places that would normally be very dangerous or impossible. For example: what sort of shoes would you need to cut across certain otherwise inaccessible locations on QC Campus, or on the nearby busy streets of NYC? How would you design a pair of shoes to let you move around in very harsh climates, or hostile planets? What about a pair of shoes just right for a complicated social situation, or to help you with the kind of day to day job environment that you might wind up in someday?
- What is the most socially difficult place to be seen on campus, and what sort of shoes would you need to make that situation “work” for you.
- If you landed in a war zone (for example Georgia during the recent invasion by Russia), what shoes would you want to have designed in order to: get away, or to hide, or maybe to fight?
- The surface of some asteroids are extremely cold – close to absolute zero – what sort of shoes would you need to walk there and yet still remain “fashion” conscious?
- Accounting in a cubicle is a particular type of work not typically thought of as very physical but if you could create any kind of shoe for sitting at your office desk that might help you with your work, or stay in shape, or otherwise enjoy your “routine” job: what would that look like?
Week Five: March 5, Shoes…(continued).
- Completion of Shoe projects (first hour of class)
- Presentations of Project
Temporary Site-Specific Public Intervention (one day)
(Check out these two movies of student projects on campus)
- Choose a location inside or outside of the school.
- Create an intervention that subtly modifies or alters one or more of the following aspects of the site: movement, conversation, emotion, opinion, ambient sound, light, etc…
- Document your intervention using photography, video, sound, or however possible.
Week Six: March 12, Kurt Schwitters style MERZ Assemblage (one day)
Week Seven: March 19, Prop + Mass
- Apply gravity to mass in order to produce a specific form in space
- Choose any combination of two materials, from concrete to jello
- Set up a situation in the classroom in which a specific event or form is produced using the effects of gravity acting on, or between, one or more of these materials
- You may use a wall, wall and floor, or other aspects of a given space as support
- Explore materials, interaction, gravity, space
March 26 & April 2 SPRING BREAK: NO CLASSES
Week Eight: April 9, Create a musical instrument from found materials (two weeks)
Week Nine: April 16, Musical Instrument …(continued).
Week Ten: April 23, Insect-Machine Sculpture (Final Project)
Insects are amazingly complicated compact animals – some are highly social, others eat their mates after copulating with them – the challenge of this assignment is what sort of new, hybrid insect can you imagine in the age of machines, computers, networks and so forth? Is it a warrior for the battlefield, an urban survivalist, a social hive of many smaller bugs, or an aid to the planet like a carbon eating creature, or even something that enhances a person’s physical or mental experience of the world (like a literal “walking stick”)?
Think big, think without limits, even think nasty (remember the gross-out but brilliant scene in David Cronenberg’s movie The Fly where Jeff Goldberg ––who is being transformed into a man-fly after an accident in his lab–– asks the horrified Geena Davis if she ever heard of “insect politics” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWyUi15L99Y )
Week Eleven: April 30th, Insect-Machine Sculpture …(continued).
Week Twelve: May 7, Insect-Machine Sculpture …(continued).
Week Thirteen: May 14, Final Wrap up & Crits
(have sketchbooks ready and images of your work).