ARTH 804 Writings on Art: L’imaginaire utopique en art et architecture / The Utopian Imagination in Art and Architecture

Offered: 2020 /2
Credits: 3

This doctoral seminar is structured around a series of critical and historical discussions on the significance of the concept of “utopia” and how it has played a key role in both the religious and the secular imagination in Europe and the transatlantic world over the modern period. We will begin by looking critically at the foundational text Utopia by Thomas More (1516), as well as older works considered to be precursors, such as Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BC). Then, we will consider the various ways the concept of utopia may be connected, as Jürgen Habermas has argued, to various interpretations of religious scripture (more specifically “to the hope, familiar in Jewish and Protestant mysticism, of the ‘resurrection of fallen nature’”). We will also analyze the ways that artists, architects and city planners have attempted to develop comprehensive solutions, both formally and socio-economically, to address the perceived problems of modern societies. Each week (including student presentations) will be devoted to specific case studies of social utopias, built and/or unbuilt, oriented towards the past, the present or the future. Class discussions will attempt to draw up a critique of how such utopian visions, which purported to be democratic and emancipatory, have been ideologically coopted and compromised by socially destructive phenomena like totalitarianism, colonialism and what anthropologist James C. Scott has famously called “authoritarian high modernism.” Each student will be invited to pay particular attention to the mediation/dissemination of utopian thought through print culture (books, magazines) and more recent forms of digital technologies.

Ce séminaire doctoral est structuré autour d’une série de discussions, historiques et critiques, autour du concept “d’utopie” et de comment celui-ci joua un rôle clé dans l’imaginaire européen et transatlantique durant la période moderne. En plus de lire le texte fondateur de Thomas More (1516), nous aurons aussi la chance d’explorer des textes précurseurs comme la République de Platon (c. 380 av. J-C) et d’autres sources primaires. Les premières rencontres (suivies par les présentations des étudiant-e-s) seront organisées autour de cas d’étude précis d’utopies sociales — visionnaires et/ou bâties — orientées vers le passé, le présent ou le futur. Au plan méthodologique, le séminaire mettra l’accent sur divers liens entre les utopies, les développements des médias de masse (notamment de la presse, puis des communications électroniques) et les transformations des pratiques artistiques et architecturales.  Une attention particulière sera aussi portée aux riches dimensions religieuses sous-jacentes à la pensée utopique, notamment du côté des aspirations mystiques, messianiques et millénaristes de diverses communautés juives et chrétiennes. Nous étudierons également le rôle souvent problématique joué par les avant-gardes (artistiques, architecturales et urbanistiques) afin de promouvoir une série de transformations radicales de la société. Comment peut-on, à l’ère actuelle marquée par diverses crises, mieux rendre compte des tensions entre les visions utopistes soi-disant démocratiques et émancipatrices, et leur récupération idéologique par le totalitarisme, le colonialisme et l’ingénierie technocratique (ce que l’anthropologue James C. Scott nomma le “haut-modernisme autoritaire”)? Une relecture contemporaine du concept d’utopie peut-elle nous aider à repenser certains volets de l’histoire de l’art, de l’architecture et des médias?

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in the inter-university PhD program in Art History. 

Contact: Nicola Pezolet

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