ARTH 420/868* Art and Activism
Art / Winter 2013 / Clive Robertson
(Mondays 2:30-5:30) An examination of both modern and postmodern contemporary art as activism sampled from Western and non-Western practices. The chronological period of study is from the end of the 1960s to the present. Theoretical frameworks to be used include social movement theory, postcolonial theory, and critical museum studies.
Please contact the instructor for permission to take this course. This course may be taken as CUST 890*. Please discuss with instructor
Recommended text: Imagining Resistance - Visual Culture and Activism in Canada, eds. J Keri Cronin and Kirsty Robertson, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2011, $39.95 Paper, 294 pp. ISBN13: 978-1-55458-257-0
ARTH 433/864 Studies in 20th Century Art: Art, Tourism and Modernity
Art / Fall 2012 / Lynda Jessup
(Mondays 2:30-5:30 p.m.) Drawing on the recent work of scholars dealing with art and tourism, this course explores what John Frow has called the “Other of modernity,” the objects and experiences often associated with the perceived escape from the modern world and the search for authenticity at the core of tourism. Seeming to exist outside the circuit of commodity relations and exchange values, despite the fact that they are only accessible though this circuit, such experiences and objects --among them works of art and culture -- participate in the structuring of social relations, including those between centre and periphery, colonial and colonialized nations, First and Third Worlds, developed and developing areas, metropolis and countryside. As such, they are of interest as objects of investigation within both art history and visual cultural studies, which in recent years have increasingly concerned themselves with global issues of representation. With this in mind, topics of discussion in this course include the role of tourism in the creation of such categories in the modern art-culture system as landscape, tourist, Folk and Primitive art, souvenir and craft, as well as the ways in which art in a tourism economy participates in the politics of identity and representation.
ARTH 813* Topics in Visual and Material Culture II: Madness, Modernity, and Modernism
Art / Winter 2013 / Allison Morehead
This course will explore visual and material cultures of madness as constructed and critiqued in the modern period. We will investigate how visual culture has been used to construct and represent madness, mediumship, hysteria, and mental illness and how visual and material cultures, including architecture and craft, have functioned in relation to therapy, diagnosis, as well as the practice and historical justifications of psychiatry. We will also explore how “asylum art” came to play a critical role in the twentieth century, both in relation to anti-psychiatry and as a tool for the avant-garde.