Historical understanding in its
fullest sense demands that students investigate traditional
areas in the history of art and the historical character of
their own intellectual discipline. With this approach in mind,
courses which chart the rise of cosmopolitan cities as sites
for artistic and cultural production in the ancient past shed
profound light on the role of new media today in navigating
the global trafficking of cultures. The realization that popular
and high culture have always coexisted in a mutually constitutive
relationship has encouraged a shift away from focusing solely
on the accepted canon of "great" works. Humble everyday
objects, such as ceramics or images produced for woodblock prints,
television, film, newspapers and comic books now invite a renewed
critical look at the social forces at work in selecting and
dictating canonical forms in the first place. Emphasis is increasingly
directed toward exploring the life of the image in popular culture,
where its "aesthetic value" depends ultimately on
the cross-fertilization of prevailing cultural hegemonies and
their multiply engaged interpretive communities. This focus
renders problematic the view that cultures are closed entities
developed in isolation and implies that the globalization of
our era is part of a long trajectory of cultural contacts and
fluid patterns of reception.
Examples of Approaches and Courses
Investigating the cultural value of diverse technologies will be encouraged, from the potter’s wheel and the back-strap loom to perspectival systems, photography and the computer. Several of our courses foster awareness of how the history of art relates to the diverse cultural and ritual mappings of the human body on architecture, landscape, and the environment. An introduction to the arts of Ancient Greece and Rome is valuable in its own right. It also prepares students with the visual skills necessary to appreciate European prints from the 15th through the 17th century, where knowledge of classical art is essential in the recognition of these later appropriations from antiquity. Emphasizing the mechanical reproduction and development of kinetic poetry in early American modernism can contribute to examining the role of kinetic and cybernetic art within the mechanical, electronic and digital technologies in the late 20th and 21st centuries in Europe and North America. The "truth of the visual" in Western culture has often predominated over the evidence of sound, touch, smell and taste. As a result, while certain courses are organized around the themes of power and vision with attention to the male and female gaze, fashion, voyeurism, and surveillance; others (in the spirit of colonial critique) may subordinate the visual in order to explore how distinct cultures throughout history have created diverse hierarchies of the senses. The interaction between the history of art and the history of images has profound consequences for the emerging field of visual culture. As a department, we encourage our students to examine the complex lives of images, not only from their initial moments of production, but through their repeated intersections with the preoccupations of the world to which their various interpreters belong.
|
