ARTH 400 Advanced Seminar in Art Historical Method: Addiction in Art and Film, 1751-2024

• Thursdays, 8:45-11:30 am
• Instructor: Dr. Julia Skelly

This course will cover the period from 1751 up to and including the present. We will critically examine the concept of addiction as it is represented in visual culture, including eighteenth-century graphic satire, nineteenth-century medical photography, paintings, video art, and twentieth-century film, among other media. We will consider a wide range of visual material in order to tease out gendered, classed and raced ideologies related to addiction and addicted individuals. In examining art produced from the eighteenth century to the present against films produced in the late twentieth century, we will establish how beliefs about individuals who consume alcohol and drugs have been constructed through visual culture, while also identifying beliefs that have remained relatively consistent from the mid-eighteenth century, when British artist William Hogarth produced his famous engraving Gin Lane (1751), up to and including the present day (for example, the female addict or alcoholic as bad mother). Readings will be drawn from a range of disciplines, including art history, film studies, cultural studies, and addiction studies. We will also watch the American photographer Nan Goldin’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) in order to discuss the ongoing opioid crisis.