Image and Thought:What Art Objects Do and How They Do What They Do
The contemporary art world is described as pluralistic, one in which there is no dominant style, no overriding theory, no clear direction. To engage this seemingly incoherent world with intelligence and generosity requires modes of interpretation that do more than simply defend a "position" against perceived philistines. To understand work that lies outside the limits of your practice as other than insincere, cynical, bad art or non-art, you need a collection of interpretative tools that are rich, inventive and flexible. This seminar should help you initiate that collection. To have the trial and error process of making an art work result in precise expressions the artist must, at each step of a works production, be aware of what the work does and how it does what it does. To come to these understandings the artist cannot rely on romantic generalities [genius, unschooledness (naiveté and ignorance), pathology, intuition, etc.] that de-emphasize the intentional parts of making, for these generalities yield little insight into how a work generates meaning. Nor can she/he rely on ready-made theoretical templates, for their imposition substitutes monologue for dialogue and narrowly fixes meaning. The artist's interpretative models should be shaped by the processes of making and should be models in which the particularities of the work take precedence over the theoretical and the general. In this class we will start with the familiar interpretative scheme of formal analysis (the everyday language of the studio) to examine how a work does what it does. Not all objects/events will fully reveal themselves in this analytical framework; it is but one of many modes of interpretation. Much work, particularly that which does not privilege the experiential over the cognitive, is immune to or can be only partially disentangled by the methods of formal analysis. There are therefore two critical elements to the seminar: (1.) an understanding of the power and the limits of the tools of formal analysis and (2.) an understanding of what is needed in terms of elaboration of these tools and/or development of others to fully address the variety of work that populates today's artistic landscape. These understandings will emerge from careful formal analysis of original works of art. Be prepared to spend a great deal of time looking at film and video, attending events (theater, performance), and communing with the works in local collections and exhibitions.

Art and Perception
We wish to create a dialogue that attempts to link theory and practice. We will test the possibilities of closing the presumed gaps between theory and practice, language and image, etc. To this end we will, as was done last quarter, connect the readings and discussions to the processes of observing, interpreting and assigning value to works by engaging actual art works and examining cultural institutions. We will extend the range of our inquiry to works, media and institutional settings often outside or on the margins of the art world to engage objects/events that are not fully revealed through the analytical framework of formal analysis we focused on last quarter. In this seminar we assume that art is an activity governed by convention, one that is firmly grounded in the social matrix. Assuming practice is highly mediated and that the artist does not and cannot stand outside the culture runs counter to many assumptions of traditional practice. Those assumptions (Enlightenment and Romantic themes), such as the artist as a divinely inspired seer/guardian/presenter of essential and timeless (transcultural, transhistorical) nonverbal truths, are still the conceptual underpinning of much art making, museum practice, art marketing (commercial galleries), the public's understanding of what constitutes art and artists, and the academies (the training ground of art producers and appreciators) . Today the efficacy of these traditional themes to represent contemporary experience is under critical scrutiny. The modern/postmodern tension you encounter in the critical literature and the dialogues that surround your practice results, in part, from a re-articulation of these Romantic underpinnings. For traditionalists (believers), strategies of art making and structures for the assignment of meaning that are not autonomous/transcendent are suspect and often labeled as fashionable, cynical or nihilistic. These non-traditional approaches are seen as compromising the artist's freedom and autonomy and relativising notions of quality. Non-believers (philistines) see the artist’s autonomy as societally assigned and see selfhood as a non-essentialized and non-hierarchical collection of individual, social, economic, psychological and ideological categories. They do not believe that artistic practice will become predictable or lose its complexity when notions of autonomy and originality are replaced by an emphasis on the ephemeral, the contingent and the critical. They see believers as escapist, naive and defenders of the status quo. Resistance to attempts to place artistic practice in a social context is often encountered from believers and non-believers. In both instances there is a fear that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water. This resistance often emerges as mistrust of language and rationality, and reliance on a world where the body (separated from the head) is trusted - the mind is suspect; images are privileged over language; experience over cognition; pure-unmediated-natural experiences are idealized; individual freedom is valorized; and so on. In this seminar we are interested in the ways in which practice is bracketed and driven by these mistrusts and affinities. The process(es) of revealing, naming, cataloguing and theorizing these mistrusts and affinities are the primary subjects of the seminar. They constitute model(s) for the continuing self-conscious examination of the givens behind one's practice.

Art in Dialogue
This seminar is the third in a sequence taken in the first year of the graduate program. Discussion focuses primarily on contemporary issues and practices in relationship to the students own work. Readings, visits to exhibitions and discussions are aimed at helping students locate their own practice within the history of art and subsequently articulate a position for themselves in the present cultural stream.