ARTH 400
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Ethics of Abstraction Spring 2019
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The course will interrogate abstraction as a strategy in 20th and 21st century art around the globe, and its manifold implications for political projects of being, seeing, and knowing together. We will look at how various artists turn to non-representation as a means for thinking differently about issues as divergent as flatness, vision, progress, decay, identity, violence, solidarity, negation, and protest. How might we read acts of judgment performed by abstract artists, i.e., separating what is alien from that which is intrinsic, as ethically activated? How do we account for the ways abstraction has figured centrally not only in modernist art histories, but also in economic and political theories (as in the abstraction of use into exchange value)? How, too, have representation and figuration (as ostensible opposites of abstraction) been positioned as ethical tactics? We will take an object-oriented approach that foregrounds the complexity of movement between “thing” and abstract “effect,” examining divergent valences from postwar abstract painting up to contemporary abstraction as it supports coded meanings, eccentricities, and alternative (feminist, queer, marginal, racialized) formations.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 16
Expected: 12
Class#: 3170
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: research paper, class presentations
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: second-year graduate students, then first-year graduate students, then advanced undergraduate students; places for 8 undergraduates and 8 graduate students assured
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ARTH 400 Division I ARTH 500 Division I

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