Courses

Like the right Instagram filter, writing can change the way a photograph impacts its viewer. This course touches on some of photography's key histories and concerns to improve the way students write with images. By making something appear, a photograph wields great power on a screen or printed page. Writers not only elegantly describe photographs, but mine, subvert, and silence images with text. Class sessions will cover topics related to conceptual art, the documentary tradition, fourth-wave feminism, and postcolonial theory to interrogate photography's possibilities against the writer's responsibilities.

Full details for ARTH 1174 - FWS: Photographs and Text

Why do people collect things? How do collections relate to the people who made the objects, and those who found, bought, and assembled them together? What can collections of archaeological media reveal about past lives and our own University? In this seminar, we will explore these questions through the object collections stored and displayed in our classrooms, museums, and libraries at Cornell. Writing assignments will allow students to translate what they see and feel when engaging ancient art objects into writing, including a formal analysis, object biography, and gallery labels. Based on their own engagement with media related to the ancient Mediterranean world, students will curate an exhibition of an archaeological collection.

Full details for ARTH 1175 - FWS: Archaeological Collections

 bell hooks wrote that "Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world." But how do images, in turn, shape how we perceive the world around us? How does art and visual culture contribute to historical change? This course examines how images can construct, or question, our perspectives. We will think critically about what separates the everyday images we consume through advertisements and social media from the fine art of modern and contemporary art institutions. Drawing on a selection of modern and contemporary artists working in various geopolitical contexts, students will learn how to pair art historical methods of describing images with political, economic, and social analysis. The course will also introduce students to key texts and theories for developing a critical writing practice, particularly from the Marxist, post-/de-colonial, and Black radical traditions.

Full details for ARTH 1176 - FWS: Can Art Change the World?

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies—photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

Full details for ARTH 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

What was it like to live in the Roman world?  What did that world look, taste and smell like?  How did Romans raise their families, entertain themselves, understand death, and interact with their government? What were Roman values and how did they differ from our own?  This course takes as its subject the everyday lives of individuals and explores those lives using the combined tools of archaeology, architecture and art, as well as some primary source readings.  In doing so, it seeks to integrate those monuments into a world of real people, and to use archaeology to narrate a story about ancient lives and life habits. Some of the topics explored will include the Roman house; the Roman family, children and slaves; bathing and hygiene; food; gardens, agriculture and animals.

Full details for ARTH 2221 - Archaeology of Roman Private Life

Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern "globalized" world. The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds. People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present.

Full details for ARTH 2805 - Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds

This course surveys the art and architecture of South Asia since 1200 CE. We cover major developments over the last eight centuries, including the architecture of the Sultanate Period, Vijaynagar, painting and architecture in the Deccan and South India, Mughal art and architecture, and Rajput painting. We look at British period colonial art and architecture, the rise of nationalism and modernism in Indian art and the circulation of vernacular images, including posters and bazaar prints in the twentieth century. The recent globalization of South Asian contemporary art is also examined. Artistic movements are situated with reference to social, economic, and political developments.

Full details for ARTH 3611 - Art of South Asia 1200-Present

This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship—critiquing them and engaging their ideas—we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.

Full details for ARTH 3755 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City—a center of the Chinese diaspora—we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.

Full details for ARTH 3803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century

Topic: Latin American Moderinsims and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

Full details for ARTH 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world. Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact. This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day. This course explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America. For the purposes of this seminar, "identity" can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based. The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts. We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture. Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.

Full details for ARTH 4160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters

An examination and analysis of the major trends in art from Neoclassicism and Romanticism through Post Impressionism and the dawn of the twentieth century. Lectures and readings will concentrate on the historical context of great masterpieces by seminal artists. The class will investigate the imagery and theoretical foundation of nineteenth-century European and American art using a selection of appropriate methodological approaches. Major figures to be discussed include David, Copley, Goya, Delacroix, Courbet, Cole, Manet, Morisot, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, Sargent, Eakins, Homer, Rodin, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Part of each class will be devoted to discussions of the readings. Two classes will be held in the National Gallery of Art at times and dates to be determined. Exams, a term paper, and class participation will be used for evaluative purposes.

Full details for ARTH 4171 - 19th Century Art and Culture

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARTH 4233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Topic Spring 23: Portraiture.

Full details for ARTH 4351 - Problems in Byzantine Art

What possibilities does art offer to challenge the primacy of mapping in visualizing our world? Maps allow us to move through space, but they do so by abstracting space to its barest aspects—an act of reduction that has historically served to eliminate Indigenous inhabitants, ecological entanglements, non-spatial elements, and countless other features of our lived environment. This course posits remapping as an act of repair, a means of correcting some of the reductive tendencies of maps. Moving between the history of cartography, particularly as it appears in Cornell's extensive Map Collection, and a study of artistic critiques of the map, we will develop a critical vocabulary for assessing cartographic practice and explore new tools for imagining it otherwise. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ARTH 4620 - Art and the Remapping of the World

This course is designed to accompany the Johnson Museum's exhibition, "Wonder and Wakefulness: the Nature of Pliny the Elder", which will take place in Spring 2023 in honor of Pliny's 2000th birthday. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between "ars" and "natura" in antiquity, focusing primarily on Roman visual and literary culture of the first centuries BCE/CE, whilst drawing upon recent work in the environmental humanities. Topics explored will include cultural constructions of the "natural"; empire and consumption; Roman villa culture and the environment; literary pastoral and the bucolic; sacro-idyllic and garden paintings; and theories of matter and materialism. The group will also take a trip to San Antonio, TX, to visit the exhibition "Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii."

Full details for ARTH 4702 - Art, Nature, and Ecology in Classical Antiquity

China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on "Chinese identity" in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of "Chinese art history" in the West.

Full details for ARTH 4816 - Modern Chinese Art

This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective.

Full details for ARTH 4858 - Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture

Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 4992 - Independent Study

The student under faculty direction prepares a senior thesis.

Full details for ARTH 4999 - Honors Work II

Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 5992 - Supervised Reading

Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 5994 - Supervised Study

Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media.

Full details for ARTH 6060 - Visual Ideology

Topic: Latin American Modernisms and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

Full details for ARTH 6155 - Topics in Latin American Art

The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world.  Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact.  This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day.  This seminar explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America.  For the purposes of this seminar, "identity" can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based.  The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts.  We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture.  Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.

Full details for ARTH 6160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARTH 6233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Seminar topics rotate each semester. Topic for Spring 2023: Portraiture.

Full details for ARTH 6351 - Problems in Byzantine Art

This course investigates the emergence of aesthetics as its own philosophical discipline at the end of the eighteenth century.  In a first phase, we will examine the rationalist articulation of aesthetics in Baumgarten's work and the empiricist theory of taste, particularly Burke's Enquiry.  Drawing on the findings of these two traditions, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) inaugurated a preoccupation in German philosophy around 1800 with the philosophical status of the beautiful and of art.  Especially in Romantic theory and practice, art was meant to provide a solution to the philosophical dilemmas in the wake of Kant's critical philosophy.  However, already in Hegel's Phenomenology, and more explicitly in the Encyclopedia and the Lectures on Aesthetics, art lost this elevated position vis-à-vis philosophy.  Taking this observation as a guiding thread, the main part of the course is structured around in-depth readings that may include Kant, Schiller, Schelling, the Schlegels, Novalis, Hölderlin, and Hegel.  Further readings may include writings by contemporary philosophers and theoreticians--such as Adorno, Allison, Danto, Deleuze, Derrida, Ginsborg, Guyer, Lyotard et al.--whose work on aesthetics takes its starting point from the philosophical issues surrounding the emergence of aesthetic theory only to transcend these historical confines and formulate contemporary positions on the status of the aesthetic and of art.  The following questions will be addressed: What are the conditions for the move from the subjective judgment of taste (Kant) to objective beauty (Romantics, Hegel)?  How is the relation of art and nature reconceived by the Romantics?  What is the relation of aesthetic theory and the history of art?  Is philosophy the end of art?

Full details for ARTH 6560 - Aesthetic Theory: The End of Art

This course surveys the art and architecture of South Asia since 1200 CE. We cover major developments over the last eight centuries, including the architecture of the Sultanate Period, Vijaynagar, painting and architecture in the Deccan and South India, Mughal art and architecture, and Rajput painting. We look at British period colonial art and architecture, the rise of nationalism and modernism in Indian art and the circulation of vernacular images, including posters and bazaar prints in the twentieth century. The recent globalization of South Asian contemporary art is also examined. Artistic movements are situated with reference to social, economic, and political developments.

Full details for ARTH 6611 - Art of South Asia, 1200 - Present

What possibilities does art offer to challenge the primacy of mapping in visualizing our world? Maps allow us to move through space, but they do so by abstracting space to its barest aspects—an act of reduction that has historically served to eliminate Indigenous inhabitants, ecological entanglements, non-spatial elements, and countless other features of our lived environment. This course posits remapping as an act of repair, a means of correcting some of the reductive tendencies of maps. Moving between the history of cartography, particularly as it appears in Cornell's extensive Map Collection, and a study of artistic critiques of the map, we will develop a critical vocabulary for assessing cartographic practice and explore new tools for imagining it otherwise. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ARTH 6620 - Art and the Remapping of the World

This course is designed to accompany the Johnson Museum's exhibition, "Wonder and Wakefulness: the Nature of Pliny the Elder", which will take place in Spring 2023 in honor of Pliny's 2000th birthday. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between "ars" and "natura" in antiquity, focusing primarily on Roman visual and literary culture of the first centuries BCE/CE, whilst drawing upon recent work in the environmental humanities. Topics explored will include cultural constructions of the "natural"; empire and consumption; Roman villa culture and the environment; literary pastoral and the bucolic; sacro-idyllic and garden paintings; and theories of matter and materialism. The group will also take a trip to San Antonio, TX, to visit the exhibition "Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii."

Full details for ARTH 6702 - Art, Nature, and Ecology in Classical Antiquity

How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City—a center of the Chinese diaspora—we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.

Full details for ARTH 6803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century

China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on "Chinese identity" in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of "Chinese art history" in the West.

Full details for ARTH 6816 - Modern Chinese Art

This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective.

Full details for ARTH 6858 - Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies—photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

Full details for VISST 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

What does it mean to call a film is "Jewish"? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews—actors, directors, screenwriters, composers—play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class—an average of one per week—and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

Full details for VISST 2790 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond

Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern "globalized" world. The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds. People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present.

Full details for VISST 2805 - Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds

An introduction to the history and theory of writing systems from cuneiform to the alphabet, historical and new writing media, and the complex relationship of writing technologies to human language and culture. Through hands-on activities and collaborative work, students will explore the shifting definitions of "writing" and the diverse ways in which cultures through time have developed and used writing systems. We will also investigate the traditional divisions of "oral" vs. "written" and consider how digital technologies have affected how we use and think about writing in encoding systems from Morse code to emoji.

Full details for VISST 2812 - Hieroglyphs to HTML: History of Writing

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history.

Full details for VISST 3176 - Global Cinema II

Our present technology allows us to transmit and display information through a variety of media. To make the most of these media channels, it is important to consider the limitations and abilities of the human observer. The course considers a number of applied aspects of human perception with an emphasis on the display of visual information. Topics include "three-dimensional" display systems, color theory, spatial and temporal limitations of the visual systems, attempts at subliminal communication, and "visual" effects in film and television.

Full details for VISST 3342 - Human Perception: Application to Computer Graphics, Art, and Visual Display

"The pleasure of the text," Roland Barthes writes, "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do." What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas?  In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.

Full details for VISST 3702 - Desire and Cinema

Formally titled "technosomakinesics," this class works to expand the specific aesthetics related to dance as embodied performance. Included in the process is the analysis of built environments that both inspire and are designed to be inhabited by these disciplines. This course explores the resulting neoperformance forms being created within the range of digital media processing; such as gallery installations, multimedia dance-theatre, personal interactive media (games and digital art) and web projects. Computer-imaging and sound-production programs are examined and used in the class work (human form-animation software, vocal recording and digital editing, digital-imaging tools. The new context of digital performance raises questions concerning the use of traditional lighting, set, costume, and sound-design techniques that are examined as they are repositioned by digital-translation tools with the goal of creating experimental and/or conceptual multimedia performance and/or installation work. Theoretical texts on dance and theatrical performance, film studies, the dynamic social body, architecture, and digital technology are also used to support conceptual creative work.

Full details for VISST 3758 - Technology and the Moving Body I

Topic: Latin American Moderinsims and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

Full details for VISST 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world. Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact. This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day. This course explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America. For the purposes of this seminar, "identity" can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based. The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts. We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture. Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.

Full details for VISST 4160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters

Topic Spring 23: Portraiture.

Full details for VISST 4351 - Problems in Byzantine Art

What possibilities does art offer to challenge the primacy of mapping in visualizing our world? Maps allow us to move through space, but they do so by abstracting space to its barest aspects—an act of reduction that has historically served to eliminate Indigenous inhabitants, ecological entanglements, non-spatial elements, and countless other features of our lived environment. This course posits remapping as an act of repair, a means of correcting some of the reductive tendencies of maps. Moving between the history of cartography, particularly as it appears in Cornell's extensive Map Collection, and a study of artistic critiques of the map, we will develop a critical vocabulary for assessing cartographic practice and explore new tools for imagining it otherwise. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for VISST 4680 - Art and the Remapping of the World

Continuation of PMA 3350. PMA 4350 expands on principles explored in PMA 3350 using more complex and interactive software and spatialities. Students must create work utilizing projections and built objects or interactive web based projects.

Full details for VISST 4758 - Technology and the Moving Body II

A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Full details for VISST 4793 - Film and Video Production II

This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective.

Full details for VISST 4858 - Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture

Topic: Latin American Modernisms and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

Full details for VISST 6155 - Topics in Latin American Art

Seminar topics rotate each semester. Topic for Spring 2023: Portraiture.

Full details for VISST 6351 - Problems in Byzantine Art

What possibilities does art offer to challenge the primacy of mapping in visualizing our world? Maps allow us to move through space, but they do so by abstracting space to its barest aspects—an act of reduction that has historically served to eliminate Indigenous inhabitants, ecological entanglements, non-spatial elements, and countless other features of our lived environment. This course posits remapping as an act of repair, a means of correcting some of the reductive tendencies of maps. Moving between the history of cartography, particularly as it appears in Cornell's extensive Map Collection, and a study of artistic critiques of the map, we will develop a critical vocabulary for assessing cartographic practice and explore new tools for imagining it otherwise. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for VISST 6680 - Art and the Remapping of the World