U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES SPRING 2009

R1B

READING AND WRITING ABOUT VISUAL EXPERIENCE (4 units)

Section 1 MW 5-6:30 425 Doe CCN: 05403 Instructor: Amy Kim	Section 2 TuTh 8-9:30 425 Doe CCN: 05406 Instructor: Christine Schick	Section 3 TuTh 9:30-11 425 Doe CCN: 05409 Instructor: Orlaith Creedon
Section 4 TuTh 11-12:30 425 Doe CCN: 05412 Instructor: Joni Spigler	Section 5 TuTh 12:30-2 425 Doe CCN: 05415 Instructor: Meredith Hoy	Section 6 TuTh 2-3:30 425 Doe CCN: 05418 Instructor: Sarah Hamill
Section 7 TuTh 3:30-5 425 Doe CCN: 05421 Instructor: Sarah Hamill

One objective of this course is to introduce students to the historical study and interpretation of art. If you have already taken a course in the History of Art, you should enroll in an R1B course in another department or in a more advanced course in the History of Art.

This course is an introduction to visuality and the disciplines of art history. Its primary aim is to guide students through the processes of learning to recognize and craft persuasive and elegant arguments about visual experience. We will anchor our inquiry of vision and perception, and our efforts to develop our capacity for interpretation, by focusing on the work of selected artists. We will also expand our inquiry beyond the fine arts, testing the applicability of our perceptual and analytic skills on other kinds of visual phenomena, including film, architecture, and advertising. To begin, we will familiarize ourselves with fundamental concepts and tools for reading and writing about visual experience. These include questions of material and form; models of attention and perception, the relationship between language and vision; the role of description in interpretation; and what constitutes a satisfying and complete account of visual experience. Throughout the semester we will analyze and improve our writing abilities as we move from basic compositional skills to the construction of a compelling and effective argument. Our work will be practical in nature, and a good portion of our class time will be spent talking in small groups and working on in-class writing exercises. At the end of the term, students will write a 7-9 page paper about a single artist or work of art. Reading will figure in this course as significantly as writing. We will devote much of our home preparation and class time to the discussion of short essays, analyzing them both for their rhetorical strategies and for the lessons they have to teach us about our own writing. Students should expect to submit their prose to the same kinds of analysis that will be applied to the work of published authors, counting themselves members of the wider community of writers.

This class satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement

R1B Descriptions

Orlaith Creedon: TTH 9:30-11
Urban Encounters: Parisian Cityscapes, 1788 – 1926
Baudelaire famously wrote that “old Paris is no more! The form of the city changes faster, alas, than the human heart.” This temporal tension – between the accelerated rhythm of urban change and the lagging pace of the individual – defines the modern subject’s experience of the city. The individual’s encounter with Paris – defined as capital of modernity, of the 19th century, of the world – produces different responses (anxiety, immobility, hypermobility, nostalgia) and requires different strategies for negotiating and “using” the city. These responses and strategies give rise to new forms of artistic expression – both literary and visual – and will constitute the focus of our class.
In this course, we will consider both visual and literary Parisian cityscapes – representations of the city – with a particular attention to the ways in which artists represent their encounters with and experiences of Paris. Covering a period of French history which witnessed tremendous political upheaval (Revolutions), urban reconfiguration (Haussmann), and social brassage (rise of the bourgeoisie), we will foreground the ways in which form reflects – indeed communicates – this change (the literary tableau, the prose-poem, lithography, photography, etc). We will take inventory of the figures who populate Paris – the flâneur, the dandy, the man of the crowd – in an attempt to understand their urban strategies.
In reading our visual and literary cityscapes, some questions we will consider include, but are not limited to: how is time experienced and represented? How is identity formed and/or resisted? Whose Paris is this? How is the urban experience gendered? How is Paris remembered/forgotten/rewritten?
Cityscapes will include (mainly exerpted) texts by Mercier, Nodier, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Hugo, Sue, Apollinaire, Breton; Daumier, Manet, Caillebotte, Courbet, Guys, Degas, various lithographs and photographs. A course reader with secondary readings will be made available.

Christine Schick : TTH 8-9:30
Title: TBA
Language and visual art convey meaning through two very different sign systems: those of words and form, respectively. However, the way that we perceive and thus understand the visual world is fundamentally determined by the words that we choose to describe it. Moreover, the entire premise of art history is putting words to images. One might say that art history's very essence is the intersection of word and image.

This course will investigate the relationship of word and image in a number of different ways. In the first part of the course, we'll read classic art-historical articles, the kind that forever change the way we see the things they describe. In the second part, we'll consider what happens when word and image are combined in a single artwork. Throughout the course, we'll be reading articles that lead us to question the two sign systems and how they can (and cannot) interact.

Students will be expected to be scrupulous readers, both of texts and of images. Projects will involve visual analyses of artworks in person, analysis of art-historical writing and methodology, and, most importantly, the student's scrutiny of his or her own writing, as well as that of their peers. Because this is a required Reading and Composition course, we will also spend significant time considering and practicing the fundamentals of writing. We will look carefully at how good analytical writing is done (and what it is not), and we will also spend time reviewing the elements and mechanics of writing.

Joni Spigler: TTH 11-12:30
Science and the Supernatural in Visual Art and Culture
This course provides an introduction to the role of visual analysis in the discipline of art history. Its primary aim is to guide students through the process of learning to recognize and craft precise arguments about visual experience.
The theme of this course is “Science and the Supernatural in Visual Art and Culture" – broadly conceived and ranging in scope from Enlightenment-era taxonomies of flora and fauna to BioArt's genetic manipulations. Along the way we will explore Empiricism and the role of the visual in scientific investigation and understanding.
Possible topics include: Experiments with Air Pumps and Birds • the role of the Microscope and Telescope in Netherlandish painting • Frankenstein and Galvanism • Napoleon and the Description of Egypt • Mesmerism and Hypnosis • the Surgical "Operating Theatre" • Anatomical Illustration and Comparative Anatomies • Darwinism, Orchid Cultivation, and Plant Movement • Spirit Photography • Thinking the Surfaces of Distant Worlds • Human Zoos • 100 Suns • Entropy and Transgenic Manipulation.
The course requires that students engage with actual artworks in local museum spaces (Berkeley Art Museum; SF Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, etc.). A series of individual and group writing assignments will allow students to hone their descriptive, argumentative, analytical, research, and interpretive skills. For the final research paper, students will choose an artist or theme and write a careful analysis of several works, drawing upon a few, pertinent outside sources. Much class time will be devoted to peer-review, discussion of assigned readings, and talking and writing about images.
R1B courses are primarily writing courses. To this end, the majority of our time will be devoted to honing writing skills and learning to derive arguments directly from visual sources. The class is not easy and in some sense you must be prepared to unlearn everything you think you know about looking at and describing pictures. The class should not be enrolled in as a "fun" substitute for that Engineering class you are dreading, nor is it a poetry workshop. It is a class in a type of technical / research writing and is graded as such. That said, artworks, images, and pictures give us access to knowledge in a way that written texts never can. Art has influenced, documented, and responded to science in ways that are fascinating and relevant to the way we know and navigate our world today.
N.b. Attendance on the first day is mandatory, even if you are only on the waitlist. If you do not come the first day you will be dropped from the class.

Meredith Hoy: TTH 12:30-2
The Fate of the Picture in Contemporary Art
In the first half of the 20th century, modern painters pushed the limits of painting by expanding the range of subjects available to be representation, by rethinking the role of figuration in representation, by changing the shape of the support—thus drawing painting and sculpture closer together—and by eliminating the frame altogether
This radical interrogation by modernist painters of the nature of form and the limits of representation often drove their work toward abstraction, resulting in the genres and movements that have become emblematic of modernist art practice. From Fauvism (the painting of “wild beasts”) to Suprematism, and Abstract Expressionism, Western modernism has, from one point of view, seemed to be “about” pictorial abstraction—about the possibilities within abstraction, its limitations, its relationship to the material world, to the workings of the unconscious, to social practice, culture, and politics. But after the heyday of modernist abstraction, in which painting was pushed to, or even beyond, the edge of its possibilities as a medium, we begin to witness a renewed effort to expand the field of art. While modernist artists used the format of the picture to turn pictorial convention upon itself—i.e. they launched their critique of pictorialism from the inside—a new, anti-pictorial trend in the 1960’s constructed works of art out of emphatically non-pictorial formats and media. Already in the early 20th century Duchamp, the Dadaists, and some other members of the artistic avant-garde had rebelled against painting, producing in response a genre of art culled from the utilitarian objects and detritus of the everyday world. But in the latter half of the 20th century, we begin to see the development of new practices, including performance, installation, artworks built from the earth itself, and even “dematerialized” art in which is it no longer the object, but rather the idea, that constitutes the work of art.
This class will examine some aspects of the anti-pictorial turn in art described above. We will examine a range of works by individual artists, artist groups and larger-scale “movements” to assess what particular effects they were trying to achieve and what kinds of arguments they made about the status of art after (or in response to) painting. Some of the movements and genres will include (but are not limited to) Fluxus, installation art, Earthworks, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Street Art, and Digital Art.

Sarah Hamill: TTH 2-3:30
Modernity and Modernis Thin
This course is intended as an introduction to analyzing visual art, by focusing on modernist art in the late 19th and 20th century. We will explore modernism’s at times fraught, at times celebratory relationship to modernization and industrialization, and to the rationalization and regularization of time and urban space. At issue is how visual representation navigated a world altered by technology, war, fascism, and capitalism. The course will move between mediums of painting, sculpture, and photography, and thus a range of movements, from pointillism to constructivism, from surrealism to abstract expressionism. Throughout, we will encounter questions of how individualism and notions of self and other were tested and explored in modernity – questions that, in turn, open onto questions of art’s relationship to racial identity, constructions of gender, and changing class structures. We will consider how modernist art forms configure or refuse structures of empire, mastery, and power, and ask how the human body was mobilized as a field of representational examination. The course will trace how visual representation became a testing ground for larger claims about modernity’s altered social and political landscape – a history that expands beyond Western boundaries, into global modernisms of the 20th century. In addition to critical essays by modernist art critics such as Benjamin and Greenberg, art historical texts, and artist’s writings, we will explore authors writing in the disciplines of science, psychoanalysis, and sociology, by Darwin, Freud, and Marx, and others.
Students will be expected to participate in a series of writing workshops, scheduled throughout the semester, and almost daily writing assignments, both in and out of class. Visits to local museums will also be a component of the course.

Sarah Hamill: TTH 3:30-5
Modernity and Modernism
This course is intended as an introduction to analyzing visual art, by focusing on modern art from 1880 to 1960. We will explore how artists adopted representational frameworks to navigate a world altered by technology, war, fascism, rationalization, and industrialization. The course will move between mediums of painting, sculpture, and photography, and will trace a range of movements, from pointillism to constructivism, from surrealism to abstract expressionism. Along the way, we will explore
questions of self and other, of racial, sexual, and social identity, and of art’s complex relationship to the social sphere, tracking its complex interactions with the public sphere, mass culture and the category of the everyday. In addition to critical essays by modernist art critics, art historical texts, and artist’s writings, we will read authors writing about modernity in the disciplines of science, psychoanalysis, andsociology. Students will be expected to participate in a series of writing workshops scheduled throughout the semester, and almost daily writing assignments both in and out of class. Visits to local museums will also be a component of the course.

Amy Kim: MW 5-6:30
Modern Art, Invented Natures
This course examines the relationship of modernism to various locutions of nature, the natural, and naturalism that recur throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The meaning of these terms and their apparent proximity to one another is not always straightforward when one encounters
them in such diverse contexts as Impressionism’s direct study of nature, the politicized “naturalism” of a painter such as Courbet, the“naturalistic” presentation of Classical themes in certain paintings of
Picasso, and earthworks such as Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic. What are the different senses of nature being invoked—that of the so-called natural world, or the human—and what do the “techniques” of naturalism depict? Drawing on the work of various renowned cultural critics, we will explore how the various ways by which the world around us only appears as “natural” after a long and fraught process of concealing its “artificial” origins. For Theodor Adorno, the idea of nature raises
fundamental problems of ontology, and we will explore this interface of aesthetic and philosophical questions in a set of carefully selected works. More specifically, we will be concerned with the works’
relationship to the historical emergence of new subjectivities and categories of experience within capitalism or bourgeois modernity. The works under consideration will range over time, from the mid 19th century to the present, and key figures will include Manet, Picasso, Derain, Mondrian, Smithson, and other contemporary examples of natural disaster films. Students will also engage with a range of art historical, philosophical, and critical theoretical material, from Hegel, Lukacs, Adorno and Debord to the work of T.J. Clark, Michael Fried, Sven Lütticken, and Malcolm Bull.