ARTH 356 - Studies in Materials and Processes of Art: Of Knowing
- F - 9:00-11:30
- EV-1.605
- INSTRUCTOR: DR. MAYA OPPENHEIMER
How do we know what we know? This course looks at the materials and processes Of Knowing, beginning with the shared strategies of recording, documenting and ordering the ‘known world’ that have historically linked activities in both art and science in Western thought. Botanical and anatomical drawing, optical theories, recording movements of the planets and stars, and experimenting with mineral compounds were the preoccupations of natural philosophers who often shared and learned in turn from artists and artisans. Sessions will explore transmissions across scientific and artistic practice leading up to and in the wake of the Enlightenment (although in early modern Europe, these disciplines were harder to distinguish) and consider the changes in collaboration across the work of artists and scientists to the present. We will be preoccupied with critiquing these structures of knowledge formation and how matter and processes of experiment are used in laboratories as well as studios to better understand our world and ourselves as well as each other. Of particular importance in this course are discussing other ways of knowing outside Western modern worldviews and across visual and material media. Readings, discussions, case studies and in-class experiments will draw on methods from indigenous studies, history of science, anthropology, material science, studio art, design, creative writing and psychology in addition to art historical inquiry to explore what we know and how we know it and question the very methods we rely on to glean information about our worlds. Artists and art historians work to expand their view of artworks to tell us about socio-cultural contexts, but it is also the systems, tools, intent and curiosity that lie invisibly alongside materials and processes that can help us better understand artworks as evidence of knowing and therefore being. This is the pivot of art historical practice: seeing and understanding contexts that underlie artworks and asking rigorous questions about what we know and why.