U.C. Berkeley History of Art

Histart R1B

READING AND WRITING ABOUT VISUAL EXPERIENCE
(4 units)

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 SECTION COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:

Lyon: Speaking Otherwise: Gender and Allegory in Flanders and Spain, 1500-1828

In early modern art, the representation of things and even bodies often carries a symbolic charge. To ‘read’ paintings for underlying or disguised messages is not to discount their distinctive nature as visual objects. Quite the contrary, understanding the shared allegorical language employed by Renaissance and Baroque painters such as Bosch, Brueghel, Dürer, Goltzius, Titian, Rubens, Velázquez, and Goya enriches our experience of their often conceptually complex works of art. In this course, we will explore the mechanics of visual allegory. Analyzing the uses and abuses of symbols, attributes, personification, reification, figures, and tropes, we’ll think about the power of objects (paintings included) to simultaneously stand for themselves and other more abstract ‘things’ such as virtue, vice, triumph, and truth. We’ll query the burden placed on gender in representations of generalities and particulars; we’ll read relevant primary sources (From Ripa to Benjamin and Marx ) and thought-provoking secondary literature. Through looking, talking, reading, and writing students will master art historical research and writing skills broadly applicable to all the humanities. Critical thinking, close-looking, and rigorous formal analysis will be emphasized throughout; there will be at least one mandatory museum visit.

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Meegama: Fluid Boundaries in Asian Art

Asian art is generally compartmentalized into categories such as Buddhist art, Hindu art, or Muslim art. These cultural practices are also classified by binaries such as the sacred and profane, classical and folk, popular and elite, courtly and rural, art and crafts, great and little traditions, center and periphery, and global and local. However, the practice of art shows that the reality is far more complex. What happens to Buddhist artistic forms when they are transmitted from India to Japan? How do we understand the use of plunder from Hindu temples in Islamic places of worship? What happens to Asian religious images when they reach the global marketplace? These are some of the questions we will engage with as we seek to dismantle some of these binaries by looking at a set of carefully selected works of art. As we look, read, and write, we will consider ways in which boundaries between religions, countries, cultures, and visual traditions come together in producing Asian art.

This course provides an introduction to looking, reading, and writing in the discipline of art history. The primary goal is to guide students through the processes of learning to craft an argument based on their visual experience. Projects will involve visual analyses of artworks, analysis of art-historical writing and methodology, and, most importantly, the students’ scrutiny of their own writing, as well as that of their peers. The final paper (10 pages) will include an analysis of a group of objects or monuments. Visits to local museums (Berkeley Art Museum and Asian Art Museum) is also a requirement.

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Ehya: Politics of Representation of Islam and Gender

Recent years have witnessed a spate of collections and exhibitions in the Euro-American contemporary artworld devoted to work by artists who come from Islamic countries — a trend that is inextricable from the persisting geopolitical struggle between the West and the Islamic Middle East. Indeed, the artists garnering the most attention and acclaim in this field are women whose works refer to heated topics in the media today, such as to particular prevalent constructions of the relationship between Islam and gender and, above all, to women’s practices of veiling. Nonetheless, while these art practices have attained high levels of artworld visibility, there is still a marked absence of in-depth and dedicated scholarly analysis to work in this field, and it remains an exciting and extraordinarily vital area of study.

Rather than begin straight away with analysis of this contemporary work, the first part of this course aims to contextualize the art of these female practitioners with respect to the sociopolitical and visual-cultural histories out of which their art has emerged and which they engage. Thus, while in the first part of the course we might consider paintings by Western artists of ‘Oriental’ women set in the much-fantasized space of the harem, in the second part of the course we will juxtapose those paintings with representations and self-representations by women artists from the Islamic world. This inquiry will involve consideration of images and exhibitions ranging in time and media, and might span from 19th- and 20th-century colonial French exhibitionary practices, Orientalist painting, and photography, to more recent representations of Islam and its followers in the contemporary Western press such as in the 2005 cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and finally to the contemporary photographic, video and installation practices of artists such as Jananne al-Ani, Zineb Sedira, Shadi Ghadirian and Shirin Neshat.

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Dennis: Photography as Technology, Medium, and Idea

“Photography as Technology, Medium, and Idea” aims to help students acquire the visual literacy, knowledge, and know-how needed to confront the challenging questions raised by photographs, their history and criticism, and to respond with thoroughly thought-out, polished, and convincing writing. While a general chronology will be respected, this course should not be considered a comprehensive historical survey. Instead, we will focus on key figures and photographs and the function of photography within artistic—and non-artistic—movements and spheres, together with fundamental theoretical texts and historical documents. Areas of interest include early optical devices; the invention of photography; the photograph’s association with death; photography’s relationships with other mediums; travel photography; photojournalism; the significance of photography to the history of modernism and the arguments made for its crucial role in the postmodern turn; the position of the (human) artist in relation to that of the (mechanical) camera; photography’s entry into art museums; and the implications of the rise of digital imagery. As we hone our skills as sophisticated viewers, critical readers, and refined, innovative, and persuasive writers, we will ground our inquiry by consistently returning to questions concerning the ontology of the photograph. Students will be required to read all assigned texts by their due dates, participate in frequent writing exercises both in and outside of class, and complete numerous writing assignments. Visits to local museums will also be a crucial component of the course. [Note: Attendance on the first day class is mandatory, even if you are on the waitlist. Any student who fails to meet this requirement will be dropped from the course.]

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Patterson: Controversies in Buddhist Art

The long history of Buddhist art has produced a rich array of objects and images that can be used to model some of the fundamental problems of art history. It has likewise been the site of numerous controversies, not only about questions of scholarly interpretation, but also practical decisions about how, where, and by whom the objects may be possessed and experienced. This course will investigate some of the most passionate arguments that have been inspired by Buddhist art, beginning with questions of icon and narrative, and moving on to issues surrounding the conservation, renovation, and repatriation of artworks and monuments. Although not a survey, the material to be studied will be drawn from the distinctive regional and historical traditions that best illuminate each topic. Among the sites that we will examine in detail are the Great Stupa at Sanchi in India, the Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan, and the Preah Vihear Temple on the Thai-Cambodian border. We will also consider the visual and material culture of Buddhist institutions that have taken root in the United States. Visits to a local museum will complement the work done in class, with the aim of analyzing not only the objects on exhibit but also the strategies of display. The definition of Buddhist relics and icons as "art" will be challenged and explored.

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