Contemporary Issues in the Visual Arts: FALL 2019 edition

& Beyond (Fall 2019)

WORK PAGES

ARTS 724. Mondays, 4-8 PM

Klapper Hall 672 and various locations

Gregory Sholette gsholetteSTUDIO@gmail.com

Office Hours: Tuesdays 1-2 Klapper 161

Why would someone make an all black painting? Who cares if the Nike swoosh or the Google logo is more recognizable to most Americans than a map of the Middle East? Must everyone in a democracy have an equal right to his or her own cultural expression? Just how can the artist relate to contemporary society with its rapidly accelerating technology, crowd-sourced imagery and click-happy attention deficit disorder? Is there such a thing as art at all? Or oneself for that matter? This research seminar examines these issues as well as questions of ethics, beauty, cultural inclusion, and critical resistance among other topics including the transformation of art into a global marketplace where a few artists command huge sums of money, and the vast majority are ignored, and yet still expected to help maintain the existing art system as is, no questions asked. Tailored to the needs of working artists as well as curators and historians this seminar is structured around weekly readings and lectures. This seminar seeks to:

  1. Build scaffolding for engaging with debates about contemporary art and culture.
  2. Create a space of research to more deeply explore ones practice & ideas.
  3. Provide a basic overview of the discourse & terminology of art theory.

REQUIREMENTS

  • Your participation in all class discussions is essential. Always have at least one specific question ready about each week’s readings linked to a paragraph in the assigned text.
  • You will lead reading discussions on two scheduled occasions.
  • Weekly briefing on (at lest) one newsworthy article/report about contemporary culture that you select and present to class.
  • Selection of a research topic (with instructor) by week 5.

FINAL PROJECT OPTIONS

A 12 minute illustrated oral presentation on your research topic (to be scheduled starting mid-semester) towards end of semester, and a 3000 word, fully- footnoted research paper (turned-in end of semester) based on your topic and integrating feedback from your presentation due at the close of the seminar.

Alternative Research Assignment

An art project (installation, drawings, video piece, photographic album or similar) on the selected research topic presented to the class towards end of semester, and a one to two page description of your project with reference materials used is turned in at the end of the semester.

RULES OF CONDUCT

  1. More than three unexcused absences will result in a grade point loss.
  2. No more than three unexcused lateness allowed without penalties
  3. Cell phone use and emailing are not permitted during class time.
  4. Eating in class is not permitted (coffee, water, etc. are fine).

GRADE COMPOSITION

25%. Attendance and engagement in class discussions.

25%.Weekly assignments and reading comprehension. 

50%. Research project.

THE SYLLABUS

9/5: Week One: Introductions

We meet at the classroom and introduce ourselves to each other, describe our interests and expectations for the class, and agree on how to accomplish these goals over the course of the seminar. Dates will be selected for your leading of reading presentations.

9/9 Week Two: The Artist as Public Enemy?  One would think a scholar dead many hundred years would have little to offer contemporary culture, but think again. Socrates, according to Plato, wanted to ban artists from his ideal notion of the Republic and we want to know today, is there any kind of culture that should perhaps be excluded from society or civilization?

 9/16 Art and Gentrification

9/23 Week Three: 1:1 

Reading: Stephen Wright:  Towards a Lexicon of Usership 

Please focus on these entries:

1:1 Scale 

Allure

Assisted Readymades

Authorship

Autonomy

Disinterested spectatorship

Double ontology

Escapaology

Eventhood

Expertise

Objecthood

Ownership

Purposeless purpose

reciprocal readymades

redundancy

repurposing

spectatorship

usership

9/30 NO CLASSES SCHEDULED

10/7 Meet at  Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College.  “Artists Respond to Authoritarianism” 4-6 pm)

  • 222-05 56th Ave, Bayside, NY  MAP

10/14 NO CLASS: COLLEGE CLOSED

10/16 WED CLASSES FOLLOW MONDAY SCHEDULE

Kant: aesthetic of the sublime  

I think it is also worth re-reading these sections of S. Wright’s Usership book:

  • Purposeless purpose
  • Disinterested spectatorship
  • Autonomy

10/21 SPECIAL EVENT: SEEING THE NEW MUSEUM OF MODERN ART:

2PM SHARP: MEET Pablo Helguera at the Education Dept. MoMA: 

The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building at 4 West 54 Street  [just west of 5th Ave.

11/28  Begin discussing Marx and materialist historical analysis

3 Questions:

1. If as Marx insists the commodity under capitalism is inherently contradictory, torn as it is between its apparent use value and it exchange value, how does this particular analysis possibly relate to the objects made by artists such as yourselves?
2. Social relations Marx insists are expressed under capitalism through commodities, within which the congealed labor power and time of workers is concealed. Given that almost all art works today are directly linked to a particular producer how would you say the artists’ signature or authorship functions to either repel art’s commodification, or accelerate it within the 60 Billion Euro market for contemporary art today?
3. When laborers form unions or go on strike or sabotage the production process they might be said to be re-appropriating their own labor power and time in a negation of commodity production, and often capital responds either with force (police or strike breakers) or laws (like public employee unions are not allowed to go on strike https://www.leftvoice.org/will-cuny-go-on-strike  ) and/or capitalists come up with ways of omitting difficult workers from production through outsourcing or mechanization, the latter a process that sometimes spurs technological innovations. However, with the possible/likely advent of AI and advance robotics what sort of work will exist in the near future and how will this change affect the arts, if at all?

11/4 Week Eight: continue Marx discussion including T. Adorno (Frankfurt School) and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural and social capital, before beginning to  work on the topic of Semiotics: “Reading” and deciphering the Visual World

  • What Is Cultural Capital? Do I Have It?: An Overview of the Concept: CLICK
  • Standard reference: Swartz, D. (1997). Culture & power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Theodore Adorno, “Black as an Ideal”: AdornoBlackIdeal

11/11  SPECIAL EVENT: 5PM guest presentations by Ailbhe Murphy and Fiona Whelan from Dublin who will discuss their projects and practices.

4 – 5 PM We continue our exploration of Marx/Cultural Capital/Reification .

11/18 The Course on General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure Saussure.GeneralLinguistics.

  • Students lead short presentations of:    MYTHOLOGIES: BARTHS
    • “The World of Wrestling” 
    • “Plastic”
    • “Soap-powders and Detergents”
    • “The Poor and the Proletariat”
    • “The Great Family of Man”

11/25 Space, Identity and Camouflage

Assignment: send me a short (two three sentence response) to each of these questions about the Lacan and Caillois text:

  • If correct, what possible impact does the fundamentally disjointed origins of human subjectivity have on one's sense of individual identity, including group identity or so-called identity politics? 
  • Given our concern as artists with representation and images, can you suggest one or more art works (paintings, photographs etc) that perhaps illustrate Lacan's idea of bodily misrecognition (méconnaissance)? (Maybe your own work?)
  • Roger Caillois describes the animal's mimetic "assimilation to space" as a type of regression or renunciation of life, how might this relate to artistic processes of mimicry and imitation in contemporary art? Provide at least one example.

12/2 Reimagining/Navigating/Revisiting/ MoMA

Assignment: first read the Duncan/Wallach 1980 text and then find one recent review/analysis of the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art and outline the key arguments that either critique or praise (or both) the revised hanging arrangement of the collection (can be the primary galleries or floors and/or the temporary exhibitions).

12/9 Vibrant Matter 

Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things…” 2004.

12/17 * TUESDAY 2 – 4 PM Final Project Presentations