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COURSES FALL 2007

Histart 286

GRADUATE SEMINAR: RETHINKING APPROPRIATION (4 UNITS) Tuesdays 2:00-5:00 Location TBA, CCN 05679 Anne Wagner

Since 1980, if not before, the term appropriation has been in use to describe a particular and specialized artistic practice.  To quote Craig Owens’s influential account of that practice, the appropriation artist (a.k.a. the “allegorist”) “does not invent images but confiscates them.  He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his hands the image becomes something other.”

Making use of Owen’s terminology, if not the full range of his assumptions, this seminar aims to investigate the “otherness” of appropriation.  What in the post-modernist account of appropriation still seems convincing?  Do its critical moves seem appropriate to art now, with its ever-greater reliance on the found and the borrowed?  Does appropriation operate so as to cancel or empty each borrowed image, as Owens will claim?  If so, how is that process effected, and how does it differ from what is accomplished by related or similar strategies, from the ready-made to pop?  The seminar will proceed by close attention to particular case studies and readings, from Duchamp to the present—though these will not necessarily be addressed in chronological order.  Though in the collective work of the seminar, emphasis will fall on examples from within the 20th century Western tradition, students may propose paper topics that take up citational practices in the arts of other places and times.

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