ARTH 356 - Studies in Materials and Processes of Art: Of Knowing

• J - 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 nature that have historically linked activities in both art and science in Western thought. This history, however, is a global one, with knowledge of botanical and anatomical drawings, alchemy and optical theories, recording movements of the planets and stars, and experimenting with matter being the preoccupations of natural philosophers who often shared and learned in turn from artisans and philosophers, and scholars, before the formalization of disciplines as we recognize them today. Sessions will explore transmissions across cultures and disciplines of natural philosophy, science and art beginning in early modern period, 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. Artists and historians endeavor to expand views of art that tell us about socio-cultural contexts, and the systems, tools, intent and curiosity that lie alongside materials and processes can help us better understand artworks as evidence of knowing and therefore being.