Art in the Making: Materialities of Modern Art

אומנות בתהליך: חומרי האומנות העכשווית

שיעור לתואר ראשון, 2 ש"ס, סמסטר ב, יוםג  ,14-16 תשע"ט

שם המרצה: ד"ר   Dr. Rachel Perry

טלפון: 054-772-1169

דואר אלקטרוני: perryrub@bezeqint.net

שעות קבלה: לפי תאום טלפוני מראש 

Art in the Making: Materialities of Modern Art reads the art of the 20^th century not through its styles, forms or subject matter, but through its techniques and materials.  Over the past decade, the discipline of Art History has witnessed a “material turn.” In thrall with Thing Theory, art historians and critics have insisted on the materiality of objects and works of art, attending to the physical, affective properties of materials, their durability, heft, ephemerality, and agency. Rather than attending to the finished product we see in museums and galleries, this course will, in Tim Ingold’s words, “follow the materials,” from everyday, salvaged materials to organic materials and body fluids: dust, sand, newsprint, asphalt, wax, urban detritus/consumer waste, hair, wood, mud, stone, latex, chocolate. Through specific case studies, we will investigate the way things, materials and their properties have mattered to modern artists and how they have experimented with and exploited non-traditional materials and their properties, positioning these within the wider cultural contexts in which materials were encountered and understood. Incorporating readings from the field of Technical Art History, theoretical texts will guide our discussions.

אומנות בתהליך: חומרי האומנות העכשווית

קורס זה עוקב אחר אומנות המאה ה20 לפי עיצובו, צורתו והנושא שלו, אבל בעיקר בטכניקה ובחומריות שהאומן בוחר כדי להציג את רעיונותיו. בעשור האחרון, בתיאוריית האומנות חל שינוי חומרי. מומחי האומנויות מתעקשים על הזהות החומרית של עבודות האומנות, ושמים דגש מיוחד על מאפייני החומרים שבהם משתמשים האומנים, לדוגמא משקל, קימות ותכונות אומנותיות של חומרים שונים. לפי מילותיו של טים אינגולד, קורס זה ״עוקב אחר החומרים״ ותוך כדי תחקור של מקרים שונים בהם אנו נתקלים בחומרים משונים באומנות כגון שעווה ושוקולד, נלמד למקם את מקרים אלו בקונטסקט רחב יותר של האומנות הטכנית.

Course Requirements:

2 Short Papers (40%)

• Material analysis of an object (four pages).
• Analysis of a material practice (five pages).

Participation (10%)

All students are expected to attend all class meetings and to have completed the readings prior to class. Come prepared.

Final Paper Presentation (10%)

Each student will present a 10-15 minute presentation on their research paper topic, incorporating visual materials (ideally a powerpoint presentation) during the last two weeks of the course.

Final Paper (40%)

You will write a research paper focused around one topic related to materiality that interests you. Please consult with me and choose a topic early in the semester so that you can begin your research as soon as possible.

Articles and readings will be uploaded to the Moodle. The two textbooks for the course are:

·Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art in Making: Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (Thames and Hudson, 2016).

·Materiality, Ed. Petra Lange-Bernd (MIT Press, 2015).   

Schedule:

Week 1: Introduction: Theory and Methodology

Week 2: Matter and Materiality: a survey of Modern Art

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, Introduction, pp. 8-25
• Materiality, Introduction “How to Be Complicit with Materials,” pp.12-23

Week 3: Painting - First Paper Due

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, ch. 1, pp. 26-47
• Monica Wagner, “Material” in Materiality, pp. 26-30
• Gutai Manifesto/ Shozo Shimamoto “Theory of the Curse of the Brush” in Materiality, pp. 32-34

Week 4: Viscous Matters and Plasticity (Wax, Flows)

• Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Order of Materials,” in Materiality, pp. 42-52
• Georges Bataille, “Formless” in Materiality, pp. 90
• Julia Kristeva, “Powers of Horror: Abjection” in Materiality, pp. 123-125
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Flow City” in Materiality, pp. 112-5

Week 5: Woodworking and Building

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, ch. 2 and 3, pp. 48-67; 68-89
• Wolfgang Hemp, “Wood,” in Materiality, pp. 35-38

Week 6: Tooling Up and Waste

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, ch. 5, pp. 112-133
• Mike Kelley, “On the Aesthetics of Ufology” in Materiality, pp. 105-107
• Ilya Kabakov, “On Garbage: in conversation with Boris Groys” in Materiality, pp. 110-112
• Max Kozloff, “The Poetics of Softness”/ Robert Morris, “Anti-Form” in Materiality, pp. 90-92

Week 7: Weaving, Sewing, Craft – Second Paper Due  

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, ch. 7, pp. 156-175
• Tim Ingold, “Making Culture and Weaving the World” in Materiality, pp. 164-6

Week 8: Fabricating (Land, Plastic, Foam, Dust)

• Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” in Materiality, pp. 149-152
• Elizabeth Grosz, “The Thing” in Materiality, pp. 146-9
• Joseph A Amato, “Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible” in Materiality, pp.  189-191
• Monika Wagner, “Hans Haacke’s Earth Samples for the Bundestag” in Materiality, pp. 160-4

Week 9: Performing: the Body that Matters

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, ch. 4, pp. 90-111
• Judith Butler, “Bodies that Matter” in Materiality, pp. 12-2
• Paul Thek, “Beneath the Skin” in Materiality, pp. 122-3
• Simon Taylor, “The Phobic Object” in Materiality, pp.127-9
• Ann Temkin, “Strange Fruit” in Materiality, pp. 132-4

Week 10: Outsourcing and Cashing In

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, ch. 6 and 9, pp. 134-155; 198-221

Week 11: Dematerialization/Immateriality

• Adamson and Bryan-Wilson, “Digitizing,” ch. 8, pp. 176-197
• Les Immatériaux (Paris: Pompidou, 1985).
• Jacques Derrida, “Dematerialization, Matériau, Matériel,” in Materiality, pp. 207-8
• Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Dematerialization” in Materiality, pp. 207
• Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, Six Years: The Dematerialization of Art (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968), pp. 1-14.
• Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, pp.vii-xxii.

Week 12: Student Presentations

Week 13: Student Presentations

Select Bibliography:

“Notes from The Field, Materiality,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (March 2013): 10-37.

Art History, “Material Imagination: Art in Europe, 1945-1972” (2017).

Glenn Adamson, “Playing Dumb,” Art History 36:3 (June 2013): 670-76. 

Arjun Appadurai, “The Thing Itself” Public Culture 18:1 (2006): 15-21.

Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things” and “The Agency of Assemblages” In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 1-38.

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory” Critical Inquiry 28:1 (August 2001): 1-22.

Bill Brown, “Materiality” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 49-63.

Bill Brown, ed. Things.  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters Of Aesthetics, Materiality, And Media (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2014).

Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk. Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 447 pp.

Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London; New York: Continuum, 2006).

James Elkins, "On Some Limits of Materiality In Art History," 31: Das Magazin Des Instituts Für  Theorie [Zürich] 12 (2008): 25–30.

Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood.” Minimal Art; a Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock  (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968).

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. 2002.

Guerrilla metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago.

Martin Heidegger, The Thing. In Poetry, Language, and Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), pp. 165-182.

Nancy Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations (New York University Press, 1979).

David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

Tim Ingold et al., “Materials against Materiality” in Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1):1-38, 2008.

Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” in Donald Judd: 1955-1968. Ed. Donald Judd and Thomas Kellein (New York: D.A.P).

Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium” Critical Inquiry 25:2 (Winter 1999):

289-305.

Bruno LaTour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London: Allen Lane, 2010).

Daniel Miller, ed. Materiality (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005).

W. J. Thomas Mitchell, “What do Pictures Really Want?” in October 77, Summer 1996: 71-82.

ONLINE SOURCES OF INTEREST:

Journal of Material Culture (University College, London, and NYU)     http://mcu.sagepub.com/

Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture  (Western University, Canada, and NYU)    http://shiftjournal.org/” http://shiftjournal.org/

Material World Blog     http://www.materialworld

Material Worlds Working Group, Brown   http://proteus.brown.edu/cogutmaterialworlds/4079

Brown Advanced Materials Research Working Group   HYPERLINK http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Advanced_Materials_Research/

“Things: the Material Worlds of Humanity,” by Christopher Witmore, Brown University,  http://proteus.brown.edu/things/Home

Traumwerk Working Group, Stanford     traumwerk.Stanford.edu

Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Visual And Material Cultures Working Group, Berkeley     townsendlab.berkeley.edu/visual-and-material-culture-working-group

UC Humanities Research Institute  2010-11 Working Group “The Material World in Social Life,”  Marian Feldman, History of Art, Berkeley

Material Culture/Visual Culture Working Group, University of Maryland, Department of American Studies    http://www.amst.umd.edu/AboutUS/mcvc.htm

“Thing Theory.” by Severin Fowles, Barnard College, Columbia University http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2008/web-content/index.html