ENGL 351
What Are You Laughing At? (Humor In Art) Fall 2009
Division I
Cross-listed ARTS 236
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

In this course we will discuss and explore humor as an artistic tool in visual art and its unique effectiveness in dealing with difficult subject matter. This partial survey will focus on the meeting place of socio-political issues and the artist’s life. Using basic psychoanalytical texts, art theory and common sense as our analytical tools, we will figure out why and how humor, in its various permutations, has been used to talk about anything from genocide to personal angst. Some of the artists we’ll look at are Francisco Goya, Philip Guston, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Nathalie Djunberg, David Shrigley, Nedko Solakov, Tami Ben Tor Danica Phelps, Guy Ben-Ner and Dan Perjovschi. Reading will include AndrĂ© Breton, Sigmund Freud, Dave Hickey, Andrea Fraser, Peter Schjeldahl and Slavoj Zizek.
The Class: Format: discussion/seminar
Limit: 20
Expected: 10
Class#: 1696
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: regular attendance, several short exercises, and a substantial final creative exercise
Enrollment Preferences: none
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ARTS 236 Division I ENGL 351 Division I

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