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:

Underhill: Art in Northern California, 1849-1939

This course will survey painting and sculpture in California from the Gold Rush to the Golden Gate International Exposition. We will take frequent field trips to museums in Oakland and San Francisco. We will examine the lives of forty-niners in daguerreotypes and genre paintings, see California’s topography rephrased by some of America’s most sophisticated landscape painters, and explore San Francisco’s rich tradition of public sculpture and muralism in the context of its world fairs and the reinvention of the financial district after 1906. Artists to be covered include Albert Bierstadt, Samuel Brookes, Yun Gee, Thomas Hill, Ella Hopps, William Keith, Xavier Martinez, Mine Okubo, Gottardo Piazzoni, Arthur Putnam, Diego Rivera, Douglas Tilden, and Evelyn Withrow.

TOP

Cassibry: Roman Paintings and Mosaics

The study of Roman painting and mosaics is currently one of the most exciting areas of ancient art history. Excavations around the Bay of Naples continue to unearth fresco paintings of exceptional quality. For the first time, many of these paintings are being allowed to travel to exhibitions in the United States. One of these exhibits, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, will be at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during the summer of 2009. The book produced to accompany this exhibit will serve as a touchstone for the course.

Some of the subjects we will consider include collections of erotic images, collections of Greek masterpieces, ancient advertisements and business signs, and freed slaves and taverngoers as patrons and viewers. We will look at well-known paintings and mosaics from Rome, Pompeii, and Ostia as well as recently discovered ones that are only now beginning to be studied. To gain a wider perspective on the Roman world, we will also analyze examples from Antioch (Syria), Constantinople (Turkey), and Volubilis (Morocco). To see ancient paintings in person, we will take a field trip to UC Berkeley’s Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology to look at Roman-era mummy portraits from Egypt.

Many paintings and mosaics were found still decorating the walls and floors of ancient houses and public buildings. We will pay particular attention to the ways they structured the social use of dining rooms, business offices, bedrooms, bath complexes, etc. Ancient authors such as Vitruvius and Petronius discuss these spaces, and we will turn to these primary sources for contemporary frameworks of understanding. Roman paintings and mosaics have also been well-studied by modern scholars. We will turn to these secondary sources to explore new modes of analysis and strategies for structuring arguments with visual evidence.

Students will improve their critical reading skills by writing regular précis essays which summarize the thesis and argument of the secondary sources we read. In formal analysis essays, students will also learn to recognize how ancient images were constructed and intended to be viewed. For the culminating research project, each student will create a virtual exhibit of Roman paintings and/or mosaics which she or he will present to the class during the last week of the session. The related paper will have two components: 1) a research essay which contextualizes the selection of artworks and 2) one-paragraph catalogue entries for each of the artworks selected for the exhibit.

TOP

McDowell: “The Artist As”

This course aims to examine the changing role of the artist in recent decades. During this time many artists shifted from conceiving of their production as that of a painter or sculptor to encompassing a number of other activities, oftentimes not directly related to art practice. What are the implications of this broadening of the fields in which artists can and do work? Why might artists feel compelled to work as historians or ethnographers, and what kind of relationality does this form with the world?

The course will begin by considering the widespread phenomenon of artists using photography in the 1960s and 1970s to explore a range of issues surrounding representation. This is the “artist as photographer,” in which the artist takes up the medium of photography to produce work. Each week we will address a different example of such a formulation: the artist as photographer or filmmaker, the artist as producer (and postproducer), the artist as activist, the artist as curator, the artist as ethnographer, and the artist as historian. The course will begin by outlining what we historically and culturally consider to be the proper work, role, and range of the artist. We’ll then move to the 1960s and 1970s, and will address certain practices of the 1980s and 1990s, but will focus in large part on the contemporary work of the past decade. We will explore, too, the different kinds of art writing used to address art of this period: the critical essay, the exhibition catalogue essay, the critic’s review, the artist interview, and so on. Artists to be considered may include Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, Pierre Huyghe, Jeremy Deller, Martha Rosler, David Hammons, Andrea Fraser, Rikrit Tiravanija, Robert Smithson, and Amy Franceschini.

TOP

Telfair: Ambiguities

Much of the study of art history involves the identification and categorization of objects, and the resulting articulation of a stylistic and historical trajectory for the development of art. This endeavor, important as it is for our understanding art in context, involves prioritizing the coherence of the story over the irreducible complexity and fascinating specificity of any single art object. However, certain key objects in the history of art frustrate attempts to place them within this story. Through historical mischance, cultural displacement, or even purposeful mystery on the part of an artist, the status or meaning of these works remains highly contested and obstreperously ambiguous. How do art historians approach these objects, and how do they define their goals for studying them?

This class will be organized around a small number of case studies of Western art objects that are both canonical and particularly puzzling. We will read several texts that deal with each object, in order to see what different scholars can glean through different modes of inquiry. This emphasis on methodology, and focusing on conversations that form around particular objects, will also allow for the prioritizing of close reading and analyzing of the texts themselves, and we will therefore be introduced to the broader spectrum of ways to look at, think, and write about art. We will also be practicing the basic skills involved in both reading and writing effectively in an academic context.

TOP

Kunimoto: Envisioning the Nation: Art in Japan, 1868 - Present

This class will explore how issues of nationhood have been addressed in the art and visual culture of Japan. Through readings, discussion and careful looking at images, the class will investigate the ways the state has been represented, reacted against, and questioned since the Meiji Period. I will ask students to consider how encounters with the West in the late 1800’s put tremendous pressure upon artists to take up new art practices or alternatively define themselves in innovative ways. Questions for consideration throughout the semester will include: What does it mean to make “Japanese” art in the 19th century, and how does that compare with producing recognizably Japanese art in the 20th century? How did events such as the Pacific War impact the art world and how did representation in turn inform competing ideologies of nationhood. Writing assignments will emphasize critical engagement with texts and the practice of visual analysis.

TOP

Rose: Caricature in 19th Century France

The subject of this course will be the “golden age” of French caricature (1830-1848), with an emphasis on the lithographic work of Honoré Daumier. Other caricaturists of interest will include J.-J. Grandville, Paul Gavarni, C.-J. Traviès, and Henri Monnier. We will begin by investigating the defining qualities and basic propositions of the caricature print and end with an examination of caricature’s viability as a critical response to periods of social and political crisis. Intermediary sessions will examine the basis of caricature in portraiture, the interaction between word and image in the caricature print, the relationship between caricature and the “popular”, the ties of caricature to journalism and an emergent illustrated press, the continual face-off between caricaturists and the censors, and the possibilities and limits of caricature as a means of framing the shifting realities of social life under the July Monarchy. To help us make sense of these themes and problematics, we will consult important theorizations of the comic, the grotesque, and laughter by Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Gombrich (among others).

While the course will be an historical survey of sorts, we will not in all cases follow a strict chronology. Rather, the content of each course meeting will be determined by different methodological approaches, different modes of seeing, and different ways of understanding caricature and its production. At times, the broader interests of the course may even take us beyond the borders of France to England, Spain, and/or Germany. In the end, the goal of the course will be to help students develop the skills necessary for looking at and writing about images characterized by large-scale (even mass) production, topicality, and humor.

TOP

Shapirshteyn: Art and Its Destruction: Vandalism, Censorship, Iconoclasm

This course has the dual purpose of introducing students to the discipline of art history and of helping them improve their reading and writing skills. Throughout the course, students will learn to look at, describe and interpret visual images such as paintings, photographs and films. They will be asked to read, analyze and write about fictional works, short essays and articles on various art related topics. The main topic around which class discussions will be organized has to do with history of art censorship. We will explore the reasons for suppression of art and attempt to understand how its censors understood the object of their discontent. In other words, the question that we will keep coming back to has to do with the definition of art: Is artistic creation a religious enterprise or a sacrilege? What is the purpose of art? How to draw the line between art and pornography? What is the difference between art and propaganda? etc. These are just some of the questions that we will be asking this semester while learning to produce good academic prose. Readings for the class will include selections from philosophical works such as Besançon’s Forbidden Image, Plato’s Republic, Calvin’s Institutes of The Christian Religion, Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, et al. We will also be reading works by Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, Chaim Potok and Karen Finley, and discussing two films: François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 and Biberman’s Salt of the Earth.

TOP

Raddock: Pala-Sena Art

Pala-Sena period was a particularly rich period of sculpture in the Indian medieval time. As there are several examples of sculpture from the Pala-Sena period in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the students will have valuable first hand experience with the art objects.

TOP

Levin: Hidden Noises, Game Faces, and Junk Aesthetics: Writing about art after 1945

This course will serve as an introduction to thinking and writing critically about contemporary art and visual culture. The goal of this course is to provide opportunities for students to gain foundational competence in analytic reading, research and writing through close readings of critical texts, guided research assignments, and structured peer-review exercises.

The course takes its title from a selection of recent essays that address questions of artistic medium and its relation to forms of mass media in art made after 1945. Those essays and a selection of more canonical critical texts will serve as a lens through which the course will focus on topics of medium, documentation, publicity, and politics relevant to post-war and contemporary art practice. Some of the questions that will guide the readings and selection of research topics include: How do certain forms of mediation (including photographic reproduction, video and audio recording, television transmission and other forms related to mass-mediated distribution) impact artistic practice? Why and how have artists endeavored to develop new forms of media practice? What concerns about subjectivity and collectivity are admitted by these moves? We will address these questions to specific works, including examples of Pop art, Minimalism, Happenings, Photo-conceptualism, Avant-Garde cinema, Land art, Video art and more recent forms of projected-image installation.

TOP