ARTH 6600 The Social Contexts of Art and Architecture: Perform or Else

• Instructor: Dr. Didier Morelli

This course looks at a century of art history (1926-2026) through the lens of performance and performativity, exploring the underpinnings of a theoretical and practical framework that have contributed to shaping critical discourses within the realms of contemporary art, culture, and society more broadly. Treating performance as both a method of analysis and an object of study, students will read and discuss foundational texts, events, works of art, and political actions that have shaped the interrelated disciplines of Performance Studies and Art/Architecture History. Drawing on local knowledge and literature as well as international sources, we will determine how performance is an interdisciplinary tool to better understand past and present, linking distinct geographic contexts and communities.

Grounded in what is described as “twice behaved behavior” or “restored behavior,” a concept that locates performance in the rituals of daily life and construction of a seamless sociality, we will consider how underlying performatives have and continue to shape concepts of the aesthetic. Case studies and topics of conversation will include a revisiting of sculpture in the expanded field; troubling the binaries of liveness and ephemerality; exploring the archiving of performance and re-enactment; finding the potential in dance and movement as social actions; tracing the outlines of site-specific/responsive art; thinking through institutional critique and intervention; as well as theorizing performance through feminist and queer body art; Black Studies and practicing refusal; Indigenous epistemologies and embodied knowledge; and crip time and space. Throughout the semester we will observe how authors, critics, and performers have described the disappearance, fluidity, immateriality, and radicality of performance throughout history, which has also been challenged by scholars seeking to locate this ontology as susceptible to capture, cooption, and exploitation.