ARTH 565
Aesthetics of Dissent in the Global Contemporary Fall 2016
Division I
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What is protest art, and what are its aesthetic and conceptual strategies, visual markers, modalities, and effects? How does protest art correlate with a genealogy of modern and contemporary visual practice more generally, and how do we situate protest art in the larger narrative of the history of art? (Or should we?) In order to address the question of what constitutes an art of protest, this MA-level course will engage with two disciplinary sub-fields not often put in direct dialogue: social art history and social movement mobilization theory; two disciplinary offshoots of the “cultural turn” in the humanities and political sciences developed in the 1970s and relevant today. Of central importance to art’s salience in contemporary social politics is the ability of a self-contained expression to transmit information in excess of itself: to generate meaningful correspondence between singular and collective experience.What marks certain political struggles as singular and unique to specific groups and experiences, and what images or ideas link disparate conflicts productively together? What artistic practices can be demonstrated as instrumental to the creation and/or dismantling of political opportunities and social change? Art’s status as an extra-political (as in ‘outside politics’) force in human society will be both challenged and substantiated in these investigations, as we examine the interrelationship of culture, representation, interpretation, visibility, space, and power in select global case studies, e.g.: the aesthetics of the Black Panther Party, the global anti-Vietnam War movement, women’s spaces in revolutionary Iran, Tahrir Square circa 2011, Occupy Wall Street, and #BlackLivesMatter.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 12
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: based on classroom discussion, several short (3-5 page) writing assignments,& an original research paper (15-20 pages)
Extra Info: utilizing interdisciplinary bibliographic sources to interpret and evaluate the artistic properties & political products of a contemporary social movement
Distributions: Division I

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