Graduate Courses in Art History 2016-2017

This advanced pro-seminar introduces key concepts and practices of art history through guided discussions of issues, ideas, and trends central to the current practice of the discipline and its historical formation. Most class sessions will be led by a different McGill faculty member from AHCS and associated institutes. Providing orientation to the field and to the department, this course also emphasizes key skills and issues of professionalization. One week will be dedicated to the essential art of grant writing, preparing you for specific funding applications. As the semester progresses, we will also discuss career opportunities, conference participation, publication strategies, and essential resources for success in the field.

Art History 1400-1900 
Emotions in Traditional Chinese Art

How did traditional Chinese visualize their happiness, humor, love, sorrow, or pain? What did smiling, crying or frowning in art signify in classical China? This seminar will historically examine expressions of emotions in art and visual culture in pre-Modern China, from the early to late imperial periods. Generally considered more demure than their counterparts in the European tradition, Chinese representations of emotions have been understudied in the field of art history. Beginning from the typology of this general impression, this seminar surveys the kinds of emotion that were depicted, and asks why they were chosen and how these representations of emotional expressions were shaped by cultural, social, and intellectual environments, as well as what specific ways of visualizing emotions can tell us about traditional Chinese society.

Advisor approval required.

This seminar takes up two key cross-cultural debates in pre-modern art history. The first concerns the status of the art object as a portable thing capable of movement across borders. The second concerns those borders themselves and the taxonomic paradigms governing them. Because things move, they offer a fundamental challenge to art history’s traditional taxonomies that relegate separate artistic traditions to different courses, textbooks, and scholarly venues. Take the case of silk as an example. Most extant silk fragments produced in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople only survive because they were preserved in the shrines of western European saints; and many silks produced in Islamic Spain owe their preservation to their status as linings of Christian sacred reliquaries. While portable arts such as silk were once relegated to “minor” arts status, they now assume scholarly primacy due to intense theoretical discussions of thing theory, object oriented ontologies, and materiality.

Just as the status of the object has received recent and intense scholarly engagement, so too has the Mediterranean as a conceptual frame for analysis. While once the terrain of Annales school historians such as Fernand Braudel, the Mediterranean now holds a privileged position as the arena (or “liquid continent”) for cultural encounter among Christians, Muslims, and Jews before the advent of the nation state. How “French” is a Parisian Gothic ivory carving when we take into consideration the itineraries of tusks from south-east Africa on Genoese fleets?

This seminar builds both on the return to the object and the framework of the Mediterranean in order to question the role of portable objects in arbitrating difference. How do art objects navigate the porous and ever shifting frontiers that are largely the product of the modern mentality? How do they negotiate a sense of difference that was at times geographic, cultural, confessional, political, and even chronological?

Course Requirements
I. Research Project: 60%
II. Participation: 40%

For the completion of thesis research.

Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.

Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.

Not available.

Not available.

Advisor approval required.

“He came to destroy painting… He was ever ready for a fight and most difficult to get along with… He was foolish and crazy, and more cannot be said… Caravaggio acted in such a barbaric and brutal manner as a result of his impatient and envious nature... This painter abandoned himself to such oddities… He did not know how to make anything without the actual model before his eyes… He died miserably, just as he lived….”

This is how Caravaggio was remembered by biographers and fellow artists. By all accounts, the artist and his art were genuinely hated by a great number of his contemporaries. His devotees were equally numerous and just as impassioned: Caravaggio-mania was a seventeenth-century phenomenon. The artist’s notorious ‘ruination of painting’ paradoxically generated a proliferation of painting, and the fall-out can still be seen in contemporary art and film.

The main focus of the seminar will be an exploration of the visual idiom that we call Caravaggesque. Weekly readings and discussions will explore the outpouring of literature on the artist, the difficulties of his biography, the idiosyncrasies of his art, and our seemingly insatiable interest in Caravaggio’s life and work.

Student research, on the other hand, will not take up Caravaggio or his paintings directly, but will focus on artists who worked in a Caravaggesque manner. How was the distinctive style of Caravaggio appropriated, adapted, and transformed by subsequent artists? In other words, how is the destruction of art related to the creation of art?

Method of Evaluation:
Class participation and reading responses -- 20%
Class presentation / discussion leader (2 x 10%) -- 20%
Museum presentation -- 10%
MMFA symposium report -- 10%
Paper Proposal -- 5% (Feb. 21)
Oral presentation of research topic -- 15%
Written research paper -- 20% (April 18)

Cultural mediation (médiation culturelle) is a term primarily employed in the francophone world to designate strategies that seek to render the arts and culture more accessible to uninitiated publics, and to encourage the participation of “non-traditional” publics in community and civic life through the production or consumption of art. Though such an understanding of médiation culturelle is upheld by ideals of “cultural democracy,” it cannot be denied that institutional policies and practices of cultural mediation also serve to project a public image of social accountability. This seminar proposes a critical investigation into cultural mediation from multiple angles (e.g., analyses of practices and policy guidelines) and across diverse institutional contexts (e.g., education, health care, museums/galleries). Working closely with local arts organisations, we will have the opportunity to observe and potentially take part in cultural mediation activities. As part of their course work, students will also have the option to design a cultural mediation project. Seminars will consist in discussions around core readings that address, amongst others: the notion of cultural participation; the promotion of cultural democracy during the Great Depression in the U.S. and in the aftermath of WWII in France; the social turn in contemporary art and in cultural policy orientations; the educational turn in curatorial practice; and accounts or analyses of specific cultural mediation initiatives. Classroom discussions will be augmented by site visits to local arts organisations and guest presentations by professionals working in the field of cultural mediation.

N.B.: Passive knowledge of French is an asset for this course, but is not required.

Assignments and evaluation:
Attendance and participation (15%)
Discussion leadership (10%)
Assignment: Cultural mediation in practice (choice of a short response essay or an activity proposal, max. 5 pages) (15%)
Oral presentation (20%), March 29, 2017 
Term research project (40%), due April 19, 2017

Contemporary Art and Criticism 2: Long Histories of the Artistic Exploration of the Moving Image.
The seminar’s main objective is to read, discuss and assess recent literature in media art studies, focusing on publications that privilege an expanded understanding of media and media art history. These publications share a common concern for media environments and media as environments; they seek to articulate a longue durée, intermedia, genealogical and archeological assessment of 20th - and 21st - century media arts, including the long contemporary artistic exploration of the moving sound-image (filmic, televisual, video and digital images). The seminar will be especially attentive to studies that produce these expanded histories as a response to the digital era and as an attempt to address the material, infrastructural, perceptual, environmental, temporal, aesthetic and political dimensions of media arts. 

Seminar participation - 20%
One reading presentation - 30%
Reading Reports (total of 8) - 50%

Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.

Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.

Directed reading.

Not available.