Open courses

ARTH 809 Art History and its Methodologies

Offered: 2020 /3
Credits: 3

“What art now has in its hands is the mutable stuff which need not arrive at a point of being finalized with respect to either time or space.” When the American artist Robert Morris wrote these words 50 years ago (in 1969), he was implying that artists shouldn’t try so hard to make perfectly finished objects, because it was much more interesting to embrace the lively, unstable, and unpredictable qualities of the material world – what he called “mutable stuff.” It would seem that the concerns of this mid-20th century artist have now been taken up by a wide cross-section of scholars and theorists, who now speak about the agency of objects and the vibrancy of matter.

And yet it must be acknowledged that questions about materiality, matter, objects, and things can come into focus according to various political, philosophical, aesthetic and disciplinary positions. The seminar will therefore bring together a selection of texts that have contributed to the evolving discourse about materiality in recent years, while also introducing some older readings, for genealogical reasons. We will examine Marxist concepts pertaining to historical materialism and commodities; theories of materiality and intercultural exchange; actor-network theory and the agency of the non-human actant; the “new materialism” that encompasses thingness, vibrant matter and object-oriented-ontology; Indigenous materially-based knowledge; eco-materialist approaches to entropy, waste and garbage. The seminar will also touch on more overtly aesthetic questions, concerning objecthood, the formless, and de-materialization, for instance.

Throughout the seminar we will consider how the theories and concepts being discussed might be relevant to to specific works of art, drawn from diverse historical periods. As well, students will be encouraged to develop some of these methodological/theoretical axes in relation to their own research projects.

Special instructions: Students who have received credit for ARTH 800 may not take this course for credit.

Contact: Johanne Sloan

Registration process

Please be advised that the School of Graduate Studies does not handle registration for these courses. You will need to contact the Graduate Program Assistant, Graduate Program Director (GPD), or the individual professor responsible for the course in question, depending on the directives that accompany the course.

School of Graduate Studies

School of Graduate Studies

OPEN COURSES

Art History

ARTH 809 Art History and its Methodologies

Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema

FMST 802 Feminist and Queer Media: A Counter-Lineage in Moving Image History

Registration process

1

2

3

Contact Us

Location

Join us