2012-13 Catalog

A survey course on British painting, sculpture, and architecture in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. By examining the works of well-known British artists such as Hogarth, Blake, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, and Turner, the class will focus on the multiplicity of styles and themes that developed in the visual arts in Britain from 1740 to 1840 and are part of the wider artistic phenomenon known as romanticism. This introduction to the British visual arts will be enriched by several class meetings in the Huntington Art Gallery.

This course examines European and American painting, sculpture, photography, and other visual arts from 1850 to the mid-twentieth century. An era encompassing many diverse and significant developments in modern art, this period includes Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Artworks from these movements will be studied in light of their social, cultural, and political contexts, with particular attention paid to issues of gender and representation, and to the different forms of abstraction developed and theorized by early twentieth-century painters. The class will also focus on the relationships of colonialism, urbanism, rising industrialism, and international conflict to the visual culture of the period.

An introduction to the great traditions of Japanese art from prehistory through the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912). Students will examine major achievements of sculpture, painting, temple architecture, and ceramics as representations of each artistic tradition, whether native or adapted from foreign sources. Fundamental problems of style and form will be discussed, but aesthetic analysis will always take place within the conditions created by the culture.

This course will examine artists' work with new technology, fabrication methods and media from the late 19th Century to the present. Major artists, exhibitions, and writings of the period will be surveyed. While considering this historical and critical context, students will create their own original new media artworks using technologies and/or fabrication methods they choose. Possible approaches to projects may involve robotics, electronics, computer programming, computer graphics, mechanics and other technologies. Students will be responsible for designing and fabricating their own projects. Topics may include systems in art, the influence of industrialism, digital art, robotics, telematics, media in performance, interactive installation art, and technology in public space. Artists studied may include Eadweard Muybridge, Marcel Duchamp, Vladmir Tatlin, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Stelarc, Survival Research Laboratories, Lynne Hershman Leeson, Edwardo Kac, Natalie Jeremenjenko, Heath Bunting, Janet Cardiff and others.

This course examines the ways in which spectacle has been used in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe. Drawing on aesthetic writings about the impact of size and scale on audiences, but also examining historical accounts of the workings of spectacle on spectators, it looks at a number of case studies focusing on the technologies spectacles employed, the sites at which they were staged, the purposes and aims of their creators, and the controversies they engendered. Topics covered include English court masques, the rituals of absolute monarchy (especially those of Louis XIV), the changing presentation of plays and works of art, the public exhibition of torture, punishment, and human dissection, cabinets of curiosity and scientific demonstrations, religious, civic, and political ritual commemoration, the development of mixed media, panoramas and dioramas, and the staging of international exhibitions.