Course Description
From the historical avant-garde through the development of modernist abstraction, this course places the plastic arts of painting and sculpture in dialogue with the movement arts of dance, music and film and introduces a range of philosophical and critical frameworks for interpreting the place of medium in art and its reception.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be expected to produce an extensive
research paper on specific works or issues related to the
course topic. This paper will be a detailed, in-depth
consideration of the student's chosen theme requiring not only
a demonstration of advanced research skills (including the
ability to locate and use primary source material and/or
material presented in foreign languages), but also an
articulation of the student's ability to understand and
manipulate appropriate methodologies and the critical apparatus
of art history in connection with an interdisciplinary topic.
Athena Title
MODERN ART & DANCE
Prerequisite
Two ARHI 3000-level courses and permission of major
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Though each class will include introductory lecture remarks, the course will also give students an introduction to advanced seminar formats by demanding of students both critical discussion of the assigned readings and a large-scale interpretive research paper. The intensive readings assigned are aimed to help students not only identify but also begin to work with the parameters, stakes and methods of critical thinking in this new and changing field of interdisciplinary scholarship. Within the first weeks of class students will be asked to select a research project. They will then consult individually with the professor about their topic before producing an abstract and annotated research bibliography. A shorter paper assignment in the form of a book review aims to prepare students for the critical interpretation of texts involved in a large research paper and to immerse them in one of the seminal texts from their bibliographies. In the second half of the semester, students will spend time in small workshop groups to critique and edit drafts of one another’s research papers. The culmination of these assignments should be a polished 15-page scholarly research paper that demonstrates independent critical thinking and argumentation.
Topical Outline
1. FORMALISM & MEDIUM SPECIFICITY Introduction to Medium: The Seven Arts Modernism in Art and Dance: Clement Greenberg Art and Theatricality: Michael Fried 2. INTERDISCIPLINARITY & METHOD A Problem of Discipline: Art History, Visual Studies, Visual Culture Music and Dance as visual culture: Intro to analyzing ballet and modern dance Stravinsky and Nijinsky: The Rite of Spring 3. EXPERIENCING ART Aesthetic Experience: Hegel, Kant, Dewey Empathy as aesthetic experience: Vischer, Worringer Phenomenology: Merleau Ponty Somaesthetics: Shusterman 4. HOW TO: LIBRARY AND ONLINE RESOURCES IN ART AND DANCE Library Research Discussion and Individual Meetings with Professor 5. PERCEPTION and MODERNITY at CENTURY’S END 19th-Century Opera Ballet and the Gesamtkunstwerk: Degas and Wagner Sensation and Modernity: Jonathan Crary on Manet Early cinema and the Experience of modern life: Edison, Lumiere, Melies Time and Intuition: Henri Bergson Attention and Distraction: Jonathan Crary on Cezanne 6. DANCE AND THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE Isadora Duncan, Art Nouveau: Primitivism and the cult of Nature Loie Fuller and Symbolism: beyond an artists’ muse The Ballets Russes Expressionism and Ausdruckstanz: Mary Wigman and Kandinsky 7. MACHINES and ABSTRACTED BODIES Avant-Garde cinema: Surrealism and Dadaism, Ballet Mécanique & Entr’acte. The Mechanized Body: the Tiller Girls and Mass Ornament The Constructed Body: Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus 8. AMERICAN MODERNISM Martha Graham and American primitivism Dance and Politics in 1930s New York. 9. POSTMODERNISM and COLLABORATION Black Mountain College: Cunningham/Cage/Rauschenberg The Sixties: Anna Halprin and Yvonne Rainer Fluxus 10. WRITING WORKSHOP Peer-led Workshops to critique and edit research drafts