Undergraduate Courses in Art History 2016-2017

This course introduces students to a range of issues concerning hacking, openness, and anonymity in science and technology though the angle of controversies. The class takes a broad view of the meanings of hacking, openness, and anonymity and includes, among other topics: the rise of the ethic of openness in science, debates over access and intellectual property law, body modification and disability, the role of new technologies in expanding the scope of state surveillance as well as opening up new possibilities for exposing state secrecy.

This class uses the angle of controversy to introduce students to various academic and popular approaches to the social scientific and humanistic study of science and technology. The class draws on classic academic works in diverse fields, such as the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, and bio­ethics, while also integrating a broad base of engaging and accessible material (editorials, national policies on science, legal regulations, and scientific controversies to name just a number examples) that educate as well as evoke critique and transformation of the complex contemporary practices, methods, and politics of science and technology.

This course offers an introduction to the diverse visual cultures of the medieval Mediterranean world from the fourth to the fifteenth century. It surveys a wide range of Byzantine, Islamic, and European works of art and architecture from this period, positioning them within their original social, political, and spiritual contexts and also tracing the ways in which these monuments were defined and perceived over time. Textbook readings will be supplemented by primary and secondary sources so as to provide exposure to a wide variety of methodological frameworks. In addition to becoming familiar with the central tenets of medieval art and architecture, students will therefore also develop skills in visual literacy and gain a basic understanding of the methods and aims of art historical study.

The course involves visits to the Islamic Studies Library, the Rare Books and Special Collections in McLennan Library, the School of Architecture, as well as the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal.

COURSE EVALUATION AND REQUIREMENTS
Final course evaluation will be based the following criteria:
• Test 1: 15%
• Test 2: 20%
• Test 3: 25%
• Formal Analysis Essay: 15%
• Research Assignment: 25%

From the outset, this course approaches the history of modernism and modernity through a variety of theoretical lenses and methodological approaches.  Following a chronological timeline, we will consider some of the key modernist movements and debates through an examination of artworks and visual objects produced from 1850 to the present. We will consider various definitions and approaches to “modernity” and “modernism” by reading texts from both primary and secondary sources, including works by artists, critics, historians and theorists. By focusing on the social and historical contexts in which artworks and art histories were made, we will explore how meaning is produced. In particularly, we will examine the politics of representations by discussing the ways in which sex, class, race and gender are inscribed in artworks, art historical narratives and exhibition practices.  We will also draw connections between contemporary art practices and the themes and debates address in this class.

The period from 1400 to 1700 saw the emergence of a number of new social functions for art. This course will explore the role of visual culture in the formation of identities across various social spheres in early modern Europe. The functions of selected works will be analysed in relation to civic identity, religious controversies, the rise of absolutism, capitalism and colonialism, and the spread of new visual forms of knowledge about the self and the world.

Midterm Exam: 25% (Tues Oct. 20, in class)
Research Assignment: 35% (2 parts: Nov. 3 and Nov. 17)
Final Exam: 35%  (TBA, during final exam period)
Participation: 5%

This course provides a historical overview of East Asian art and visual cultures from early dynastic times (ca. 5th century BCE) to the 20th century. Focusing on shared cultural foundations, we will mainly discuss China, Korea, and Japan. The course will be structured around several important themes such as funerary, Buddhist, landscape, and literati arts, each of which will be dealt with in chronological order, generally following the order of China, Korea, and Japan. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think about both the overarching characteristics and more particularly local and temporal variations in East Asian art.

Indigenous Art and Culture: Contemporary Indigenous Art in Canada

This course will examine the production of contemporary First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists in Canada from the 1990s to the present. A diverse range of contemporary art practices – including painting, drawing, photography, film, performance, installation and new media art – will be considered in relation to key aspects of the cultural, political and social life of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Much of the work examined reflects and responds to the continuing legacy of colonization and successive Canadian governments’ policies of assimilation and segregation. Artists, artworks and exhibitions examined will therefore be both historically and contemporarily contextualized. We will discuss the impact of the Indian Act, the Residential School System, the establishment of Reserves and conflicts surrounding sovereignty and status, as well as the portrayal of Indigenous identity in art, popular culture and news media. Additionally, we will engage with the recent recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the early stages of the national inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women, the Idle No More movement and current events related to the theme of the course. The course is divided thematically, rather than chronologically, with weekly topics addressing significant aspects of Indigenous art and culture in Canada today.

Evaluation
Midterm Assignment 20%
Research Paper Proposal, 10%
Research Paper, 35%
Final Exam, 30%
Participation, 5%

Modern Art and Theory: WWI-WWII
"Risk and Excess: Women Artists between the Wars"

This course will consider the work of female artists who were, and continue to be, positioned as ‘other’ in relation to male modernists. The theoretical framework for the course will be Mary Russo’s concept of the ‘female grotesque,’ a figure who exceeds gendered norms and expectations. Russo notes that the act of exceeding norms has inherent risk, and we will consider the ways in which female artists have exceeded gendered boundaries, as well as the risks and rewards that have accompanied these ostensible excesses. We will also discuss feminist art-historical scholarship that has set out to recuperate women artists, in addition to deconstructing the (masculine) discipline of art history. Issues of race and sexuality will also be central to our discussions. Throughout the term we will consider how the theoretical frameworks of ‘risk’ and ‘excess’ are productive (and/or limiting) for the study of women artists. Readings will focus primarily on female artists working in France, England, Mexico and Germany.

Evaluation
Short response paper (3-5 double-spaced pages) - 20%
Proposal for final research paper with a bibliography of 10 sources (max 3 double-spaced pages not including bibliography) - 20%
Final essay (max 8 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography) - 30%
Take-home exam (3 short essays, max 3 double-spaced pages each) - 30%

The Visual Culture of Crime

The term “visual culture” has been used for a decade or more to describe the range of images which circulate within our social and cultural worlds. "Visual culture" may include prestigious forms of image-making, such as high art painting, or less respectable forms, such as the popular cultural imagery of advertising and television. The institutions of justice and policing have used visual images for a variety of purposes, from cataloguing suspected criminals to reconstructing the scenes of crimes. Painters and photographers have used images of crime to "prove" prejudices about the criminal personality, to aestheticize the contemporary city, to raise metaphysical issues of life and death, to transgress cultural norms of tastefulness and acceptability and so on.

In this course, we will be looking at a wide range of images which deal in some way with crime. Some of these will be in the form of "moving" images -- that is, films or television programs. Others will be "still images": photographs, paintings, drawings, newspaper and magazine covers, maps, etc. The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of many of the genres and styles through which crime comes to be represented visually.

Grading and Assignments
Visual Analysis 1: Still Image - 25%
Visual Analysis II: Moving Image - 25%
Readings comments posted to MyCourses - 10%
Final Exam - 40%

Selected Methods in Art History / Honours Research Paper 
Affect/Art History: Difficult Emotions, Depression and Failure

Despite the depressing title of this course, the intent of the class is not to dwell on ‘difficult emotions’ per se, but to illuminate how affect theory – and the consideration of emotional states – can impact (of ‘affect’) the study of art and visual culture more broadly. Rather than a coursepack, we will read two books that consider affect and visual culture. You will note that only one is specifically concerned with art and that neither of the scholars are art historians. This course, then, will demonstrate how art history can fruitfully draw upon other disciplines to broaden the scope of how we analyze and think about art and visual culture. In keeping with this course’s additional concern with professional development, we will hold a fellowship-writing workshop and discuss the realities of academia in 2016. Ann Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling is partly a critical memoir that tracks the author’s own experience of being an academic, including professional pressures, intellectual blockage and depression. This course is not intended to deter you from pursuing graduate degrees or careers in art history, but rather to open up discussions about art, academia and affect so that we might, among other things, illuminate our own anxieties about the intellectual work that we are undertaking.

ARTH 400
Attendance and participation - 20%
Short essay/presentation - 20%
Grant application - 30%
Book review - 30%

ARTH 401
Seminar presentation - 25%
Final paper - 75%  

In the past two decades, artistic practices have become particularly invested in the exploration of materiality, evolving in close dialogue with material culture studies, new materialism, speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. These artistic, anthropological and philosophical investigations insist on the requirement to “follow” the material. More than objecthood, thingness and physicality — although certainly a bit of all of these —, materiality is best approached as the quality or state of substances “that are always subject to change, be it through handling, interaction with their surroundings, or the dynamic life of their chemical reactions.” (Petra Lange-Berndt, Materiality, 2015:12) Questioning art history’s traditional privileging of form over matter, mind over body and design over material, the inquiry into an artwork’s materiality raises questions about agency (how does one account for the agency of materials?); relationality; mediality and mediation; the gestures of making art; tools of labor and production; cultural techniques; the ways in which materials make sense culturally and transculturally; the ways in which they are explored to produce meaning; the precariousness, sustainability, memory and vitality of materials; perception and affectivity; time and space.

Why this increased attention to materiality? How is materiality best defined? How do artists, art historians, perceivers and participants experience and make sense of the material substances of art? How do artists negotiate matter in the process of making artworks? How do they infuse materials with ritual, symbolic, social and political significance?

Materiality in Contemporary Art raises these questions to better understand the material turn in contemporary art and art history. Expanding from one of the main insights of material culture — “persons make and use things and things make persons” (Tilley et al., The Handbook of Material Culture, 2006:4) — but expanding the objects of material culture to include any natural and manufactured substance used and manipulated by artists, the seminar explores nine research axes to follow the material in the making and reception of art: (1) materials or materiality (?), and the question of anthropocentrism; (2) the dematerialization of art; (3) art history’s “fear of materiality”; (4) the “thingness” of art; (5) the animist exploration of objects; (6) the plasticity and malaise of materials; (7) the performativity and vibrancy of matter; (8) the ‘object-oriented ontology versus new materialism’ debate on materialism; and (9) the gestures of art-making. Some of the artists whose work will be investigated as pivotal actors of materiality include: Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michel De Broin (guest speaker), Kara Walker (whose A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014) will be one of our special case studies), Jimmie Durham, Pierre Huygue, Sarah Sze, Ann Hamilton, Liz Magor, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Bridgit Polk, Amie Siegel, David Hammons, Teresa Margolles, Ursula Biemann and artists from The Ocean After Nature (2016) exhibition.

Seminar requirements:
- Overall: seminar participation (attendance; readings; engagement in the seminar discussions) …… 25%
- October 31: one/two-page [single-spaced] outline of your research topic, to be sent to all members of the seminar, by Monday 9:00 am at the latest …… 15%
- November 28 [14:30-19:00]: 10 min (+ 5 min Q&A) oral presentation, on the subject, hypothesis & corpus of your essay …… 20%
- December 5: 15-20pp [double-spaced] essay on artwork(s) of your choice from La Biennale de Montréal [The Grand Balcony, 19 October, 2016 - 15 January, 2017: http://www.bnlmtl.org/], dealing with the topic of the seminar ……………….…........ 40%

Supervised independent research on an approved topic.

Early modern art criticism conveys a fascination with the moving image—an artwork so strikingly lifelike that it appears to come alive. The force of the moving image is physical, immediate, and emotive. Such works deploy stunning visual effects that move and even change their human interlocutors. In the words of one commentator, the viewer thus confronted by the incarnate artwork “becomes another person.” This type of response to images has been largely repressed from art historical discourses that focus on the distanced intellectual interpretation and contemplation of the work of art as a closed field of knowledge. Frequently dismissed as a form of ‘primitivism’, the living image is most often encountered in popular culture studies or anthropologies of the image. A reconsideration of the moving image thus has the potential to put art history in motion, animating and dynamically opening it to new objects, questions, temporalities, and methods of analysis. Engagement with the affective impact of images unsettles art historical categories of understanding, prompting us to reconsider key terms of analysis like representation, mimesis, spectatorship, meaning, medium, and interpretation as mobile and transformative processes. In this seminar, we will thus seek to redress art historical neglect of the moving image and explore its multifaceted potentialities. If the power of such works was to transform viewers, how was the rhetorical force of the moving image mobilized to inspire or manipulate political, religious, colonial, and social actions? 

Weekly discussions will take up a body of readings, but also a corpus of moving images and their particular modes of address. We will consider images that move (automata, mechanical moving pictures); images that appear to move or breathe (living statues, portraits, waxworks); images that physically and /or emotionally move or alter their viewers; and the transformative potential of images that migrate between cultures. Focusing on case studies, student research can take up any aspect of the moving image in the early modern period (1500-1700).

Method of Evaluation:
Class participation and reading responses: 25%
Class presentation / discussion leader: 20%
Museum presentation: 15%
Paper Proposal: 5% (due: Nov. 2)
Oral presentation of research topic: 15%
Written research paper: 20% (due: Wed. Dec. 7)

Please visit: https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/undergraduate/ugrad/internship

This course will examine a broad range of art produced from 1945 up to the very recent past. While addressing major movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, readings and lectures will also address feminist art, performance art, and queer art. Critical methodologies such as postcolonialism will be discussed and employed.

Evaluation
Midterm take-home exam (3 short essays, max 3 double-spaced pages each) - 30%
Final take-home exam (3 short essays, max 3 double-spaced pages each) - 30%
Final essay (max 6 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography) - 40%

There are two primary objectives of this course. The first objective is to provide an overview of the methods employed in the discipline of art history since the eighteenth century. The second objective is to provide students with an opportunity to determine which methods resonate with them for future coursework. We will begin with discussions of formalism and iconography; subsequently we will discuss critical methodologies including feminist interventions into (masculine) art history, writing queer art histories, attending to intersectionality and the black female subject, as well as Marxism, the social history of art, psychoanalysis, semiotics, phenomenology and postcolonialism. We will discuss a range of artworks from the Renaissance to the present day.

Evaluation
Midterm - 30%
Final take-home exam (3 short essays, max 3 double-spaced pages each) - 30%
Final essay (8-10 double-spaced pages) - 40%

As Svetlana Alpers wrote in her provocative book, The Art of Describing: “In Holland the visual culture was central to the life of the society. One might say that the eye was a central means of self-representation and visual experience a central mode of self-consciousness. If the theatre was the arena in which the England of Elizabeth most fully represented itself to itself, images played that role for the Dutch.” In this course, we explore how the 17th-century Dutch Republic represented itself to itself through the examination of a wide range of visual imagery, from Rembrandt and Vermeer to various forms of popular culture. The focus will be on the role of the visual in shaping merchant capitalist identity in a society dominated by Calvinism. This process of self-definition will be examined in relation to a number of key symbolic sites such as the home, the marketplace, the tavern, the brothel, the theatre, the town hall, the anatomy theatre, the curiousity cabinet, the church, the synagogue, the city and the countryside, the nation and its trading partners and colonies. Our exploration of Dutch visual culture as a central mode of self-consciousness will thus open into a broader understanding of economic, social, historic, religious, literary, mercantile, colonial, and scientific developments.

Method of Evaluation:
Midterm Exam: 25% (Feb. 23, in class)
Research Essay: 25% (any time before March 14)
MMFA symposium paper: 15% (any time betwn March 23&28)
Final Exam: 30% (during final exam period)
Participation: 5%

Although so-called ‘religious art’ may be accused of being conservative by modern observers, sacred images offered exceptional opportunities for experimentation and innovation in the early modern period. From Titian’s painterly evocation of flesh to Caravaggio’s dramatic theatrical scenes, new technologies of representation made the body come to life before the eyes of beholders. This course focuses on the vivid representation of the human body in northern Italy after the Reformation, including the work of Titian, El Greco, Caravaggio, Veronese, Tintoretto and Annibale Carracci. In addition the course introduces students to intriguing lesser-known genres such as polychromatic sculpture, wax reliefs, and miraculous imprints. During the semester students will develop critical thinking towards claims of lifelikeness, reflect on the affective impact of ‘realistic’ images on the beholder, and gain familiarity with the debates surrounding sacred images after the Reformation.

Method of Evaluation:
Midterm Exam: 30% (February 22)
Term Paper: 40% (March 27 at the beginning of class)
Final Exam: 30% (Date TBA -- during exam period)

This seminar investigates how portable art objects mediated cultural relations over time throughout the medieval Mediterranean. The first section of the seminar will consider the accretive quality of medieval things—medieval liturgical objects encrusted with ancient Roman cameos or Fatimid rock crystal. Informed by sociologists, most notably Igor Kopytoff, we will assess the temporal dimension of objects as they changed hands over time and across cultures. We will explore, that is, the cultural biographies of things. The second segment of the course then addresses the issue of portability that defines things and objects as they circulated throughout the medieval worlds. Primarily inspired by the work of art historian Eva Hoffman, we will look at a series of objects that crossed cultures boundaries. In tracing the social lives of ivories from the Byzantine, Fatimid, and Andalusi worlds we will differentiate between an object’s original inception or creation and its later reception and reconfiguration in new cultural contexts. The final portion of the seminar asks about the agency and efficacy of medieval things. Here as we examine some of precise actions exerted by objects in mediating human relationships, we will look at specific medieval things that heal, intercede, teach, and preach.

This intensive upper-level seminar is intended for students with a strong foundation in Art History preferably with a background in medieval art.

Course Requirements:
Research Project: 40%
Participation: 60%

This course will critically engage with the ways that craft has traditionally been marginalized and denigrated in art-historical discourses. Beginning with texts written by feminist art historians who have been committed to deconstructing the so-called art/craft hierarchy, we will subsequently discuss a range of contemporary artists who are employing craft materials, practices and processes in their work. Readings will address gender, activism, queer theory, Indigenous crafting, silences in art-historical scholarship, and fashion, among other things.

Evaluation
Attendance and participation - 10%
Short essay/presentation on a selected reading - 20%
Seminar presentation - 30%
Final essay - 40%

What is the role played by individuals with art historical training in the art world today and, in particular, in museums? This advanced undergraduate seminar will focus, not on museums in general, but on curatorial activities, both inside and outside the traditional museum. We will begin with a historical overview of curatorial training and some of the famous courses that trained the founders in the modern world of museums in North America and established the curatorial profession as well have come to know it. We will then move forward and look at the art world and the various types of institutions that now employ art historians with curatorial expertise—not only museums but private collections, commercial galleries, municipalities, universities, and auction houses—and look closely at how they operate and the responsibilities of the curatorial staff. Current events in the art world will figure prominently in our discussions and major exhibitions, such as the recent exhibitions on Robert Mapplethorpe and Lawren Harris, will serve as case studies. We will examine the wide range of disparate skills and types of expertise that now may be expected of a curator: connoisseurship along with an understanding of art conservation, ethics, project planning, proposal writing, public speaking, and writing for specialists, writing for the general public, etc. Guest speakers from the field will provide additional perspectives.

The McGill Visual Arts Collection (VAC) serve as our laboratory. We will take advantage of actual projects underway at the VAC: migration to a new cataloguing system, tours for groups, and an expanded website. Class members will be expected to write an exhibition review, make a presentation, write a text that expands on topic in your presentation, and develop an idea for an exhibition. Everyone will be expected to visit other museums as well, either in Montreal or other cities.

Grading
20% - Class attendance and participation
10% - Review of an exhibition
20% - Presentation on a work of art
20% - Written submission on a work of art
30% - Final writing assignment

Supervised independent research on an approved topic.

Please see: https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/undergraduate/ugrad/internship

Selected introductory survey of the history of art.