Central
European University A Program
for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals
in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University
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Central
European University A Program
for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals
in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University |
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Download Course Schedule and Syllabus here For the tasks related to reading materials please also see our recommendations here
Visual Studies Today July 7 - July 25, 2003 Course Director:
Resource Persons:
Short Biographies of the Resource Persons: Lisa Cartwright, former Director of The Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of English and of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and now Associate Professor of Communication at the University of California at San Diego, is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minnesota, 1995), co-editor with Paula A. Treichler and Constance Penley of The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science (NYU, 1998), and co-author with Marita Sturken of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford, 2001). Mark A. Cheetham is a Professor in the Dept. of Fine Art at the University of Toronto, where studied as an undergraduate (BA, Philosophy, 1976) and for his MA (Philosophy, 1977). He received his doctorate in the History of Art from the University of London in 1982. He is the author or coeditor of six books: Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cambridge UP, 2001), The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective (coeditor with Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Cambridge UP, 1998), Alex Colville: The Observer Observed (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994), The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge UP, 1991), Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in Recent Canadian Art (Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Theory Between the Disciplines: Authority\Vision \Politics (coeditor with Martin Kreiswirth, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). He has curated two national exhibitions in Canada: Memory Works: Postmodern Impulses in Canadian Art, 1990-91, and Disturbing Abstraction: Christian Eckart, 1996-98. Professor Cheetham’s awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Fellowship, Williamstown, MA (in collaboration with Elizabeth D. Harvey), several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grants, and the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Western Ontario. He is currently working on a book about recent abstract art with the support of a University of Toronto Connaught Fellowship. Whitney Davis received his Ph.D. in Fine Arts (specializing in ancient art) at Harvard University in 1985. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1987 he became Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989, Full Professor in 1994, and John Evans Professor in 1996; he also served as Humanities Professor (1993-94) and Arthur Andersen Teaching & Research Professor (1994-95) at Northwestern, Director of its Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities (1995-98), and Chair of its Task Force on Ph.D. Programs. In 2001 he joined the Department of History of Art at the University of California at Berkeley. His teaching and research interests include prehistoric and ancient art (especially north African, ancient Egyptian, and eastern Mediterranean traditions), topics in eighteenth and nineteenth century art (especially its reception of ancient art and its representation of eroticism and sexuality), contemporary art (especially postwar American sculpture), and problems in method and theory in art history and related disciplines, especially the relation of art history to archaeology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. He has a well-developed secondary teaching and research activity in the history and theory of sexuality and homosexuality. He is the author of The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (University of California Press, 1992), Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's "Wolf Man" (Indiana University Press, 1995), Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), and Pacing the World: Construction in the Sculpture of David Rabinowitch (Harvard University Art Museums, 1996), editor of Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (Haworth Press, 1994), and co-editor of Studies in Ancient Egypt, the Aegean, and the Sudan (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1981). Davis has been a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard (1983-86), J. Paul Getty Fellow in the History of Art and the Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley (1986-87), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow (1992-93), and a scholar in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center (1992-93), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washingon, D.C. (1998-99), and the Getty Research Institute (2000-1). In 1993 he delivered the Tomas Harris Lectures in the History of Art at University College London. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Culture, Theory and Critique, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and in 1995-98 served on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association. Margaret Dikovitskaya, Postdoctoral
Fellow, University of Toronto, Canada Ph.D., Columbia University, 2001. Brian Goldfarb is a digital media artist, curator, and Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California at San Diego where his teaching focuses on media studies, contemporary art and digital culture. He also teaches courses in digital art and electronic media production. His book, Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom ( Duke University Press, 2002), considers how media technologies were used in the second half of the 20th century to advance a model of pedagogy across the arts, education, and postcolonial politics in the United States and globally. Goldfarb’s current work in progress, Sense Ability, is a book and multimedia project which explores the roles of visual culture and technology in shaping the concept of disability and in the development of techniques for assessing and supporting disabilities relating to the senses and communication. Goldfarb’s digital art projects have been exhibited nationally, internationally, and on the World Wide Web. Ocular Convergence, an interactive, fictional, and critical examination of digital prosthetics for enhancing vision, has traveled to museums throughout the US and to Mexico City, Calgary, Paris and Johannesburg. After co-founding and co-directing an alternative public school in NYC, Goldfarb was curator of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC in 1994-97, where he organized "alt.youth.media" (Fall 1996), an exhibition of computer art, video, and popular print media (zines) by and for youth. Dusan Pajin, Full Professor
(since 1994), Art Philosophy and Aesthetics, Belgrade Arts University, and
Guest Professor, Ecoethics, Religion, Anthropocentrism, and Ecocentrism,
Alternative Academic Educational Network, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Home Web Page - http://dekart.f.bg.ac.yu/~dpajin/ Ruth B. Phillips, Director, Museum
of Anthropology, and Professor of Fine Art and Anthropology, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (since 1997) Course Objectives: 1. The course is designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas on the nature and status of "artwriting" today. It will address a large number of issues pertinent to the stated mission of SUN, for example, the nature of artwriting in different and inter-disciplinary cultural institutions (particularly, the practices of art history within the university and the museum/gallery world), what might be called "identity issues," that is, who writes and from what gendered, cultural, or ethnic perspectives. Contemporary theoretical debates about the nature of images will be examined through the writings of prominent contemporary scholars. 2. During the past two decades an intensive critical interrogation of the museum has raised our awareness of its important functions in modernity as an institution of social and political agency. Our analyses will demonstrate that through their representations of art, culture, history and nature all museums inscribe specific constructs of nation, citizenship, race, and gender that support the ideologies and structures of power of their sponsors, whether these are political entities, social classes, or particular advocacy groups. 3. Art history has always had an investment in the problem of eroticism and homoeroticism, and the visual arts and gay/lesbian studies and queer theory have helped to make this investment explicit. This course will introduce the participants to queer studies which remain practically unknown in the former East. 4. This course will provide an understanding of how electronic visual media informs our everyday lives and experiences. It will consider theories and methodologies for analyzing images we encounter in art, popular culture, and the disciplines in which participants study and work. We will consider in depth current debates and issues in contemporary art and media studies relating to the role of visual images in new media technologies, from the personal computer to global networks. 5. The demise of the grand narrative of communism in many countries of South-Eastern Europe was followed by the onrush of the grand narratives of nationalism and/or grand narrative of religious fundamentalism. Part of the art followed this route but the substantial amount of art production opposed that stream (which was, at times, the mainstream). Therefore, regional cooperation of such artists and theorists in the field of art and art education has had a vital role to play in the reconstruction process in South-Eastern Europe. Contemporary debates about the nature of visual images and identity issues (gender, class, ethnic values) involved in art production will be presented through the rich context of the art of the region. 6. The question of what postcolonial studies may have to say to exsocialist societies is a fascinating one. It is our belief that one should not conflate postsocialist societies with postcolonial societies. However, writings of the many authors in CEE show a strand very similar to what we find in postcolonial societies, namely, an explicit desire to catch up with the West. The latter introduces a historicism that postcolonial theorists often criticize. This course will elicit the areas where these two – postcolonial theory and postsocialist studies - can meaningfully converse. Course Level and Target Audience This course is intended as an advanced examination of these and related topics. Participants should have some prior experience with these debates in their own cultural contexts and fields of specialization. Preference will be given to faculty members of institutions of higher learning and researchers with academic background in art history and art theory, art education, art criticism, visual culture, museum studies, and cultural studies. Syllabus Since the term "artwriting" was coined in the USA by David Carrier in the 1960s, it has served as a focus for ongoing theoretical and practical discussions of the relationships between texts and visual material in art history and for cognate issues within the museum world. Are texts and images inherently different? Does writing (and especially theory) somehow distort the work of art? Does the work itself somehow guide its textual interpretation? What are the relationships between written texts and the presentation of artworks in museums? Many central debates in art history and museum studies turn on the status of "writing" in these contexts. More recently, other dimensions have been added to the debate by the advent of "visual studies." Does this broad, emerging field provide (or need) different ways of responding to the interaction of word-image? Beginning with some of Carrier’s most recent work and then moving to other pertinent texts, Mark A. Cheetham’s course segment Theories and Modes of ‘Artwriting’ will examine the current issues surrounding "artwriting." Ruth B. Phillips’s course segment The Museum as Transformative Site: Poetics, Politics, Postcolonialism will identify two notable trends that have emerged through the changing practices and re-positioning of museums in the world during the past decades - increasing commodification, on the one hand, and increasing sensitivity to the agendas of particular communities, on the other. While it is important to acknowledge the ways in which museums are today successfully exploiting old tropes of wonder and curiosity as they become increasingly commodified, franchised, corporate and tourist driven, the main focus of the course will be on a parallel development that has a greater potential for constructive social agency. We will examine the growing transformative power of museums as they exploit their potential to act as sites of memory that are informed by an emergent pluralist and postcolonial ethics. Dusan Pajin’s course segment Regionalism and Transformation in and through Art: Art and Art Concepts in South-Eastern Europe - Practices of Looking in the Time of Transition will address such issues as multiculturalism, pluralism, and the social nature of art production in South-Eastern Europe. The main focus will be on art practice in the region, particularly, in Serbia, which initiated and participated in the regional cooperation. The integration of the region into a wider European process has been promoted via art and art concepts that animated various types of visual culture — film, video, painting, performances, and installation art whose examples will be presented and analyzed in this course. Margaret Dikovitskaya’s course segment Is the Post- in Postcolonial Theory the ’Post’ in Postsocialist Art Discourse? will provide an overview of postcolonial theories and will examine current art discourses from a postcolonial perspective. "Postcolonial" refers both to a historical period that marks political autonomy (but not economic and cultural autonomy) in former colonies of the West and to a research paradigm that attempts to uncover the (neo-)colonial map. As a research paradigm, postcolonial studies share commonalities with cultural studies, postmodern theories and feminist theories. The differences between postcolonial and post-Soviet studies will be illuminated. Whitney Davis’s course segment Queer Studies in Art History introduces the background, development, and research topics and techniques of gay/lesbian and queer studies in the field of art history. Its focus will be on historiographical, methodological, and theoretical issues, but we will also read selected examples of gay/lesbian and/or queer scholarly contributions in different areas of art history (ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, and non-Western). The similarities and differences between gay/lesbian or queer approaches in art history and the approaches of social history, feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies will provide helpful frameworks for discussion. Visual images pervade our everyday experiences in an increasingly technological and communications-based culture. Drawing upon new approaches in art history, media studies, gender studies, and literary and social theory, Brian Goldfarb and Lisa Cartwright’s course segment Visual Culture and Convergence in the Digital Age will examine how digital technologies, telecommunications, and the digital arts are transforming contemporary culture and everyday life. Topics for reading and discussion will include the body and technology, transformations of identity in on-line communities, global flows of information and visual culture, and prosthetic uses of digital technologies. Our emphasis will be on cultural analysis and criticism from a humanities and arts perspective. Teaching Methods Daily seminars will be introduced by lectures/presentations and accompanied by screenings of digital media, film, video and slides. Each day a set of readings dealing with a particular topic will be assigned; participants are expected to be familiar with the readings and to be prepared to discuss them. Critiques and discussions should act as major motivators for the participants, unlike the situation of the traditional lecture-format. We will assess the in-class work of each participant and ask for a brief but theoretically informed position paper on two or more of the assigned readings. Non-discrimination Policy Statement Central European University does not discriminate on the basis of--including, but not limited to--race, color, national and ethnic origin, religion, gender or sexual orientation in administering its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.
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