ARTH 367 Studies in 20th Century Art and Architecture: The Visual Culture of Expositions and World’s Fairs: Representing “Us” and “Them”
- Fridays, 12:15-14:45
- EV-1-605
- Instructor: Dr. Marco Deyasi
From the middle of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth a series of World’s Fairs, Universal, and Colonial Expositions presented immersive spectacles for visitors. A combination of theme park, educational tourism, and propaganda, these fairs and expositions show us how nations imagined themselves—or wished to be seen by others on the world stage. The Eiffel Tower was built for one such exposition as a demonstration of industrial and technological superiority. The visual culture of these spectacles, including architecture, plans, displays, and entertainments can be “read” for the ideologies and cultural identities that they promoted. This course explores the mutually constitutive relationship between the cultural identities of Euro-American nations and colonized territories via these expositions. Our twenty-first century post-colonial culture is shaped in part by these earlier efforts to enunciate who “we” are.
Topics will include: how expositions represented and embodied ideas of Western modernity, the carnivalesque spectacles of expositions, the role of immersive multimedia displays (including buildings, panoramas, and photography), authenticity (and the lack thereof), official intentions versus popular reception, how the representations of colonies responded to official priorities and changed over time, indigenous responses to metropolitan expositions, and representations of themselves by former colonies.
The course will begin with the Great Exhibition of 1851 and continue through the major expositions of the mid-twentieth century, including key moments like the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931. The final portion of the course will examine how more recent expositions differed from those at the height of colonialism, especially in regards to the presentation of newly-independent nations in the 1960s (including Canada in 1967).
Students are welcome to write their papers topics related to any of the expositions covered in the course or to apply ideas from the course material to other expositions we didn’t cover. While no previous study of the subject is required, students should have had some introduction to the study of art or history.