courses
The Body Beyond Itself: A Visual History of the Cyborg
Alexandra Dennett and Alejandro Nodarse
Harvard, January Term, 2021
The pandemic continues to reduce our mobility and to increase our technological dependency. Given this state of precarity and isolation, we turn to a set of artistic objects which have sought to engage, extend, or otherwise alter the human body. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” this J-Term course proposes a visual history of the “cyborg,” of altered bodies in which nature and artifice, machine and organism, meet. The course will develop skills of visual analysis as well as tactics for speaking about art comparatively, thematically, and creatively. The first two sessions will combine a historical overview with an introduction to the study of art in isolated conditions. How can we find new meaning in art when we are unable to see it in person? The focus in the second two sessions will shift towards developing writing and presentation skills (applicable beyond the scope of the course), as students will draft short talks on individual works of art that engage the themes of the course. How do works of art operate as tools for rethinking the present?
Figurations: Theorizing the Body as Image in Contemporary Art
Course for GEC Academy, Spring 2021
To “theorize” (from the Greek, theorein) is to “look at.” To theorize the body in art is observe the imaged body and to reconsider our own embodiment. This course explores the transformation of the human body as a work of art––as both subject and medium. Beginning with the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1959 exhibition, New Images of Man, this course considers the body’s manifestation in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, and performance: asking how, across each medium, the body is constructed and communicated. The first two sessions—Painterly Flesh and Photographic Skin—emphasize each medium in its expanded field, attending to their performative dimensions in relation to the (artist’s) body at the moment of creation. Sessions three, four, and five emphasize the physicality of the body in articulating itself, as a living image, in acts of Remembrance, Violation, and Transformation. The seminar revolves around critical theoretical texts which have conceived the history of art, and its neighboring disciplines, in corporeal terms. Each session pairs the texts with the words and works of seminal artists, those who have dwelled on the body as a site of profound in(ter)vention. Authors include Paul Tillich, Anne-Anlin Cheng, Donna Haraway, Kobena Mercer, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Erika Fischer-Lichte; artists include Chaïm Soutine, Francis Bacon, Alice Neel, Jenny Saville, Josephine Baker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Wangechi Mutu, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Derek Jarman, Yoko Ono, Anna Mendieta, Lygia Clark, ORLAN, and Rebecca Horn, among others. Students are encouraged to select (and to theorize through) objects which further illuminate and challenge the provided texts and images.
Scenes from the Avant-Garde: Painting in 19th-Century France
Course for GEC Academy, Winter 2020
This course is an intensive introduction to nineteenth-century painting in France. We begin in 1855 with Gustave Courbet’s Pavilion of Realism and conclude with Paul Cézanne’s 1906 canvases, painted in the year of his death. Each scene sets the stage for a preliminary analysis of multiple modernism(s): realism, impressionism, divisionism or pointillism, expressionism, and post-impressionism. Initial emphasis is placed on the formal analysis of seminal works—paintings by Courbet, Millet, Manet, Bazille, Pissarro, Monet, Cassatt, Morisot, Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh, and Cézanne—set against the artist’s writings and the writings of their contemporaries. Weekly assignments assume the form of five interventions. Each intervention reframes traditional narratives of art history via analyses of class, gender, race, otherness, and temporality.
Material & Metaphor in Renaissance Italy
Course for GEC Academy, Fall 2020
In this intensive, five-session seminar, we will consider the Italian Renaissance (“re-birth”) as a history of materials: oil, feathers, wood, clay, wax, marble, metal. We will set objects traditionally elevated within the history of art against those (more often) confined within “cultural” studies: marginal (often, ephemeral) objects once stationed at the center of lived experience. Challenging established chronologies and geographies, material studies continue to invoke new (art) historical questions concerning the production, movement, and meaning of materials and the objects produced from them. What did, for example, Portraits of Christ created with feathers in the “New” World signify in the “Old”? Materials, too, are subject to historical formations, and, perhaps in certain cases, to “rebirths.” In this course, we will attempt to reconstruct the historical conceptions of materials at hand. We will attend, in other words, to the poetics, or metaphors, of materials: to the discourse surrounding materials as they were formed by artists and beheld by viewers long before us. Only then, for example, might we consider what “popular” conceptions of the “mystical” dimensions of marble tell us about Michelangelo’s sculptures, or the way in which they were, in his age and thereafter, praised. Each session will engage a primary text on the material at hand—from artisanal workbooks and artist’s diaries, to (an alchemical) treatise on the raising of bees and the production of wax—in additional to literature in the history of early modern art. Of course, objects will serve as our essential sources. Students will thus be responsible for three formal analyses (on objects of their choosing) in addition to a final paper. Sessions include.
strange feathers — “It seems the most marvelous [thing].” (Marino Sanudo)
alchemic oils — “I beheld seams of color.” (Cennino Cennini)
limbs of wax — “The wax is man.” (Cornelio Musso)
prisoners in metal and marble — “I can give us long life.” (Michelangelo)
listening to Florence — “[They] sang so sweetly.” (Antonio Pucci)
Between the Eye and Brush: Episodes in European Painting, 1512–1912
Course for GEC Academy, Summer 2020
“Painting is about the impossible,” or so El Greco wrote. What is a painting, what does it do, and how does it do it? What are the conditions of its possibility, then, in the moment of its production, now, and in the interval between? Each session considers a central thematic concern within the history of European painting to begin to answer such questions. Comparisons of the artists’ concerns, as materialized in the objects themselves, will ground our study. Scholarly readings span several of art history’s methodologies—biographical, semiopoetic, material, feminist, marxist, phenomenological—while lectures and primary sources develop each week’s topos, or theme. Seminar discussion and individual assignments emphasize the practice of looking, or formal analysis. Painters covered include (in alphabetic order): Caravaggio, Chardin, El Greco, Gentileschi, Manet, Michelangelo, Morandi, Morisot, Parmigianino, Picasso, Pontormo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Sánchez-Cotán, Van Gogh, and Velazquez. We begin with Michelangelo Buonarroti’s completion of the Sistine Ceiling in 1512 and conclude with Pablo Picasso’s Compote Dish with Fruit, Violin, and Glass finished four centuries later. Lectures, however, move diachronically, rippling between historical times, to foreground connections made between the eye and the brush.
Body as Fragment: Excursions in Histories of European Art, 1650–1950
Co-taught with Alexandra Dennett. Harvard University, Boston and Cambridge Residents. January, 2020.
This course moves from 16th-century Italy to 20th-century Soviet Russia, from configurations of the body as relic to avant-garde conceptions of the human (-machine) form . Placing seemingly estranged images in dialogue with one another, we consider the following questions: How can we understand impulses like worship and community in radically different contexts? How do science, reason, religion interact in the body? How do political implications become attached to images? What is sacred about the body? What constitutes the body public? And how do different media create the body? Organized in four concentrated workshops, this short-course begins and ends with object-based visual analysis, interspersed with targeted lectures on historical themes to frame discussion. Topics include the painted icon, the printed relic, the anatomical corpse, and avant-garde imaginings of the body through film and photography. We conclude with a visit to the MFA’s exhibition, “Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death.”