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Art 551 | Fall 2014

THEORIES OF VISUALITY (Tentative Syllabus)

Course Description Theories of visuality are central to debates in the humanities. Interdisciplinary approaches to art have prompted reconsiderations of representation and reality, changing the parameters of our objects of study. This has resulted in new relationships of words to images and objects, as well as innovative conceptual tools available to interpret all three. In this course we will examine the phenomena of cultural production and consumption of a range of media, asking how images and objects function, and how they mediate what we see and experience. Through shared readings, student presentations, and written projects, we will consider issues of form, representation, and knowledge, and the politics of ascribing meaning and value.

THEORIES OF VISUALITY meets Tuesdays 7:00-8:30pm, Library 41

Dana E. Katz, Library 321, phone x7416, email: katzda@reed.edu, office hours: Mondays 11am-1pm (or appt)

Website The following website offers you access to the syllabus, readings, assignments, and images associated with the class, http://academic.reed.edu/art/courses/art5XXkatz Readings You may purchase copies of the following textbooks at the Reed bookstore: Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. All other assigned readings are available on Moodle (logon to moodle.reed.edu and enter email username and password). Presentations You and another student will work together to lead the discussion two times during the semester. In preparation, you will circulate to the entire class a list of questions that you create collaboratively with your partner. When preparing questions, please consider the principal issues raised by the selected readings. What is the proposed thesis? How is it substantiated? Conceptually, how do the themes brought out in the text correspond to other readings we have studied? How do they correspond to the imagery we have analyzed?

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Response Papers I have assigned one response paper (3-4 pages in length and double spaced). The assignment, due XXX, will be a formal analysis of any work of art from the Portland Art Museum. In writing this paper, consider how the artist organized the composition? How does he/she employ light, color, texture, scale, perspective, line? Research Paper I require all students to write a research paper (7 double-spaced pages--please staple) on any work of art of your choice. The paper (due XXX) must incorporate one of the methodologies we have studied in class. In preparation for the paper, I ask students to submit to me a proposal describing their research project (due XXX). The proposal should include an abstract of 2-3 paragraphs, a working bibliography of at least 4 sources, and copies of the images under consideration. Course Requirements and Due Dates regular attendance and active participation presentations (2), dates to be assigned the first week of class paper 1: formal analysis, due XXX research paper proposal, due XXX final research paper, due XXX Please come and see me if you would like help with your paper, if you and your partner would like to discuss the readings before your scheduled presentation, or if you have any other questions.

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Week 1 The Art of Art History Readings Svetlana Alpers, “Is Art History?” Daedalus 106, no. 3 (1977), 1-13. Donald Preziosi, “The Question of Art History,” Joel Snyder, “A Response to Donald Preziosi,” and Preziosi, “A Rejoinder to Joel Snyder,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines, eds. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994), 203-40. Week 2 Category and the Canon Readings Vasari, “Preface to the Third Part,” Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 617-40. Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 555-62. Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park, Penn.: Penn State Press, 1991), 3-16. Week 3 Style Readings Heinreich Wölffin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 1-40. Jas Elsner, “Style,” Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 98-109. optional Meyer Schapiro, “Style,” Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, New York: Georg Braziller, 1995), 51-102. Svetlana Alpers, “Style is What You Make It,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 137-162.

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Week 4 Iconography and Iconology Readings Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 26-54. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York, 1955, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 295-320. Michael Ann Holly, “Unwriting Iconology,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, N.J. : Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993) 17-25. Week 5 Semiology and Visual Interpretation Readings Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 6-17 (Introduction: II and III) and 65-78 (Part One: I and II). Alex Potts, “Sign,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20-34. Mieke Bal, “De-disciplining the Eye,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (Spring 1990), 506-31. Week 6 Art as Social Relationship Readings Craig Clunas, “Social Art History,” Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 465-77. Adrian W. B. Randolph, “Homosocial Desire and Donatello’s Bronze David,” in Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 139-92. opt ional : Michael Baxandall, “Conditions of Trade,” Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1-28. Week 7 Gender/Bodies/Boundaries Readings Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-34. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York : Harper & Row, 1988), 145-78.

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Diane Wolfthal, “’Heroic’ Rape Imagery,” in Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7-35.

Fall Break Week 8 Colonial/Postcolonial Interactions Readings Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 1-49.

Zeynep Çelik, “Colonial/Postcolonial Interactions,” in The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture, and Theory, ed. Rasheed Areen, Sean Cubitt, and Ziauddin Sardar (London, New York: Continuum, 2002), 61-72.

Dana Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale, 1995), 265-281.

Week 9 Seeing and Surveillance Readings Michael Baxandall, “The Period Eye,” in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29-108.

Margaret Olin, “The Gaze,” Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 318-29.

Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians, 25 (Spring, 1988), 4-30; reprinted in Broude and Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 38-57.

Week 10 The Spatial Imagination Readings Katherine Taylor, “Architecture’s Place in Art History: Art or Adjunct,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 2 (June 2001): 342-46. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1977), 195-228.

Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ix-xviii, 27-41, 245-62.

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Week 11 Value/Taste Readings Joseph Leo Koerner and Lisbet Rausing, "Value," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 419-34. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3-63. Week 12 Visual/Material Culture Readings James D. Herbert, “Visual Culture/Visual Studies,” Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 452-64. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004), 1-22. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Introduction: Fashion, Fetishism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Europe,” and “Composing the Subject: Making Portraits,” in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1-14, 34-58. Week 13 Collecting Culture Readings Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 25-32. Michael Baxandall. “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 33-41. James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1988), 215-251.