"What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half dozen books."
- Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet (17 February 1853)
(Names in red denote artists and works of art under consideration for that class meeting.)
Tuesday, September 2
Course Introduction
Thursday, September 4
Michael Damm
Richard Shiff, “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 105-120.
Michel Foucault, “The Unities of Discourse” and “Discursive Formations,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper, 1976), pp. 21-39.
Tuesday, September 9
Marc Joseph Berg
link to photos of Berg's posters installed around Portland
Hans Belting, “Introduction” in Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jepcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1-16.
Nelson Goodman, “When is Art?, “ “Fact from Fiction, and “Right Representation,” in Ways of Worldmaking, pp. 57-70, 102-107, 130-33.
Thursday, September 11
Meet in Studio Art Gallery to discuss Helen Hibbert's work The Hydrogen Bond.
Wolgang Welsch, “Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics,” in Undoing Aesthetics, trans. Andrew Inkpin (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 78-102.
Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant Garde [1974], trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47-54.
Assignment #2 due in class.
Tuesday, September 16
Zoe Crosher
Wolfgang Iser, “Fictionalizing Acts” and “The Imaginary,” (excerpted) in The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1-21, 171-185.
Marilynne Robinson, “Facing Reality,” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 76-86.
Thursday, September 18
Frank Heath, Communique from Morningside Park
Frank Kermode, “Literary Fiction and Reality,” in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 127-154.
Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, 127-140.
Sunday, September 21, Opening event for Suddenly exhibition
Tuesday, September 23
Molly Dilworth
Paul de Man, “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 20-35.
Assignment # 3 due in class.
Thursday, September 25
Frank Heath, 20 Stones from Morningside Park
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (E. P. Dutton, 1969), pp. 116-147.
Walter Benn Michaels, “rocks,” in The Shape of Signifier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 82-95
Tuesday, September 30
Fritz Haeg, Animal Estates
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), pp. 7-48, 79-104.
Thursday, October 2
Ethan Jackson (North American Art Union, 922 SE Ankeny Street)
Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” October 9 (Summer 1979), 3-41. Available Online.
Tuesday, October 7
Mark Dombrowski (Portland Art Museum)
Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jepcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978, 133-138.
Theodor Adorno, “Semblance and Expression” in Aesthetic Theory, trans Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 101-113.
Thursday, October 9
E. H. Gombrich, “Conditions of Illusion” and “The Analysis of Vision in Art,” in Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 203-241, 291-321.
Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychathenia,” trans. John Sheply October, Vol. 31, (Winter, 1984), pp. 16-32. Available Online.
Tuesday, October 14
Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), pp. 18-24, 60-86
Thursday, October 16
Michael Taussig, “Protect Oneself from the Spirits” and “Physiognomic Aspects of the Visible World,” in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-32.
Assignment 4 due in class
Lecture: Walter Benn Michaels "Let Us Now Praise Famous (White) Men" 5:30 PM Psychology Auditorium
Trip to Los Angeles
Tuesday, October 28
Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (New York: Vintage, 1996).
Wednesday, October 29: Lecture David Reed
Thursday, October 30
Graham Bader, review of Jeff Koons, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Artforum (Septmeber 2008), 450-451.
Daniel B. Schneider, "Jeff Koons," Artforum (April 2008), 310-11.
David Joselit, review of Richard Serra, Museum of Modern Art, Artforum (October 2007), 352-63.
Christine Mehring, review of Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Artforum (September 2008), 199
Tuesday, November 4
David Reed
Stanley Cavell, “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting,” in The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 108-118
Michael Odom, review of David Reed, Ulirch Museum of Art, Artforum (September 2005). Available Online.
Assignment 5 due in class.
Thursday, November 6
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 1-66.
Jacques Ranciere, “The Emancipated Spectator,” excerpt from Artforum (March 2007). Available Online.
(suggested further reading):
Jacques Ranciere, "The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes," New Left Review 14 (March-April 2002), pp. 133-151. Available Online.
Tuesday, November 11
Midori Matsui, "Beyond the Pleasure Room to a Chaotic Street: Transformations of Cute Subculture in the Art of the Japanese Nineties," in Takasji Murakami, ed. Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, exh. cat. (New York; Japan Society, 2005), 209-239.
Ryan Holmberg, review of Little Boy, Japan Society, New York, Artforum (September 2005). Available Online.
Mark Grief, "Afternoon of the Sex Children," N+1 4(Spring 2006), 169-187.
Thursday, November 13
Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," (excerpts) in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York, Norton, 1989), pp 594-617.
Hal Foster, “The Return of the Real,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 126-168.
Tuesday, November 18
Joe Scanlan, "Modest Proposals," Artforum (April 2008), 313-18, 390.
Thomas Crow, "Historical Returns," Artforum (April 2008), 286-291.
Olav Velthuis, "The Architecture of the Art Market," in Talking Prices, Symbolic Meaning of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 21-52.
Thursday, November 20
David Joselit, "Market Dissent," October 123 (Winter 2009), 86-89. Available Online.
Jean-Louis Bauddry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly
(Winter 1974-5): 39-47. Available Online.
Assignment 6 due in class.
Tuesday, November 25
Craig Owens, “Posing” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 201-217.
Kate Linker, “Representation and Sexuality,” in Brian Wallis, ed. Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 391-415.
Class trip to the Portland Art Museum to View M. K. Guth "Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping,"
Thursday, November 27
Thanksgiving Break: No Class
Tuesday, December 2
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Brian Wallis, ed. Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 253-81.
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 75-88. Available Online.
Thursday, December 4
Lucien Samaha
Slavoj Žižek, “Cyberspace, or, The Unbearable Closure of Being,” in The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 127-170 (you can skip or skim pp. 143-150).
David Harvey, "Postmodernity as a Historical Condition," The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 327-349
Tuesday, December 9
Al Gore, "Introduction," The Assault on Reason, (New York: Penguin, 2007), pp. 1-22.
Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Sunday Magazine 17 October 2004. Available online.
Frank Rich, "Epilogue," The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina (New York : Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 206-225.
Thursday, December 18
Assigment 7 due in my mailbox 5 PM.