ARTH 593
The Sonic Turn Spring 2025
Division I

Over the last two decades, art history has experienced something of a sonic turn. What does attending to sound open up for art historians, so long trained principally in visual analysis and critique? This seminar delves into sonic practices, methods, and theories in the visual arts from 1960 to the present. While we will examine time-based media, including film, performance, and intermedia works, this course considers the aural imagination and practices of listening more expansively and addresses artworks outside what might conventionally be deemed “sound art.” Course readings will include art historical accounts, art criticism, and artist’s writings, as well as relevant texts from adjacent disciplines including sound studies, media studies, performance theory, queer theory, disability studies, Black Studies, and Latinx and Chicana studies. The course will explore the cross-pollination of theater, music, and artistic experimentation in the 196os; the immersive installations of “radical architecture” by groups like Archigram; the strident politics of experimental Italian interventions in the 1970s; the reverberations of the AIDS crisis, for so long silenced in the United States, in the 1980s and early 90s; recent work by Deaf artists critiquing ableist hearing ideologies; and contemporary Caribbean artists using sonic methods today to grapple with histories of oppression, climate change, and diaspora, among other topics.