Graduate courses

The Decorative Threat (Spring 2021)

“Decoration is the specter that haunts modern painting,” Clement Greenberg once claimed; it is modernism’s “symptomatic shadow,” wrote Peter Wollen. This course seeks to understand these statements by exploring the role of decoration in modernist aesthetics and modern ideology, which entangled the decorative in motifs of excess and desire, truth and deception, and gendered labor and space, along with Orientalist fantasies, bourgeois reveries, socialist aspirations, and metaphors for the interiority of the modern subject. Beginning with readings on the significance of ornamentation and decoration at the origins of modern art history, we will examine the relationship between theories of modernism and the development of the decorative arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course concludes by considering the cultural and political legacies of the decorative threat in art and art history today. Readings include: Anne Cheng, Caroline Arscott, Beatrice Colomina, Oleg Grabar, William Morris, Alois Riegl, John Ruskin, Gottfried Semper, Theodor Adorno, J.K. Huysmans, Gertrude Stein, Clement Greenberg, Gülru Necipoğlu, Peter Wollen, Debora Silverman.

The seminar produced the publication KEYWORDS: The Decorative Threat, designed by Brian Orser.

Modern Sculpture (Spring 2020) 

This course charts the history and theory of modern sculpture from the 1870s to the 1970s as it tacked between its foils, the monument and the commodity. By engaging significantly with both campus and regional collections, we will explore how sculpture posited models for the changing historical, phenomenological, and political subject in the modern age. While we will focus on European and American art, we will also examine how sculptures, artifacts, and objects made outside these regions expanded the terms of sculpture and challenged its claim to modernity. Topics include: sculpture and the modern sensorium; modern monuments and the restructuring of national memory; racial and formal difference in the modernist tradition; modern sculpture as a philosophical object; gender and sexuality in abstract sculpture; sculpture, cybernetics, and the virtual body.

Scale (Fall 2019)

Art history has conventionally maintained a curious “scale blindness”—a cultivated insensibility to the influence of scale on the operations of perception and the work of interpretation. We are often similarly blind when it comes to scaling technologies woven into art history’s basic practices, from the slide lecture to the textbook’s reproductions. This course brings the subject into focus by examining theories of scale alongside recent art historical writing. It asks, Is an artwork’s relation to scale different from other objects’? How have technologies of scaling, from photography to GIS mapping, confronted the materiality of artworks? How have theories of scale in other disciplines informed our descriptions of the scale of artworks? And how does the attempt to conduct art history at a “global scale” expose the cultural and ideological specificity of scale?

Undergraduate Courses

Sculpture and the Human in the 20th Century (Fall 2022) with Patricia Ekpo, PhD candidate, American Studies

This course explores how sculpture responded to radical struggles over the definition of humankind during the 20th century. Our focus will be the decades between 1914 and 1989 (Eric Hobsbawm’s “short century”), an interval when competing ideas of humanity emerged from global warfare, feminist activism and theory, postcolonial nationalisms, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Non-Aligned Movement. These ideas confronted a modern conception of the human forged by the forces of whiteness, capitalism, and patriarchy. What role has aesthetic representation played in developing and propagating this conception, and can it play a role in re-imagining or dismantling it? What perspective can sculpture’s intimate relation to the body lend to a fuller understanding of the human, its problems and potential? These timely questions will vitalize student engagement with artworks and art history amid current socio-political and technological upheavals, which have once more placed the category of the human under pressure.

The course will analyze key sculptural artworks by artists such as Meta Warrick Fuller, Ronald Moody, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, Melvin Edwards, Meera Mukherjee, Paul Thek, Senga Nengudi, and Atsuko Tanaka from a range of art historical, historical, and philosophical lenses. Through these works, we will trace an interconnected set of political contests to transform humanism from an Enlightenment-era worldview built on notions of innate human nature and universal values into a flexible, evolving understanding of human difference, struggle, and solidarity across experiential spectrums. We will explore what it might look like to understand a history of sculpture shaped by Aimé Césaire’s “humanism made to the measure of the world”— one that remains alive to what sculpture might tell us about being human in relation to the non-human, “less than human,” and natural world.

The Art of Crisis (Spring 2020)

This course examines the intersection of artistic and political crises in modernity. We will explore an array of calamities, from psychological breakdowns and identity crises to political revolutions, financial crashes, and climate chaos. Reading primary texts alongside artworks that illustrate or issue out of these crises, we will investigate whether there is such a thing as an art of crisis: a set of formal characteristics or strategies for coming to terms with, surviving, or accelerating crisis. We will ask, Does art made during times of crisis obey different aesthetic criteria, or require different interpretive tools? How does the cyclical structure of crisis and recovery relate to narratives of cultural progress? Do we require the concept of crisis to explain the production of art in general, and how might art appear without it?

Surrealism (Spring 2021)

“‘Transform the world,’ said Marx, ‘change life,’ said Rimbaud; these two mottoes are for us one and the same.” With this mandate, the French poet and author André Breton established the revolutionary ambitions of Surrealism, an avant-garde movement founded in France in the 1920s. Yet how exactly did Surrealism propose to merge psychological and political revolutions? This course sets out to answer this question by mining Surrealism’s central artistic strategies and critical operations, from its invention of automatism and chance procedures to its radical experiments with the novel, sculpture, photography, film, and exhibition format. A significant portion of coursework emerges from Surrealist exercises. Class meetings and assignments engage with Yale’s art collections and archives.

Breton held that the oppositions organizing our world — life and death, real and imaginary, high and low, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, and so forth — can be united in the mind, or at the very least, appear there no longer as contradictions. We chart our trajectory through Surrealism through a set of these antinomies. In each unit, we will consider how Surrealism attempted this reconciliation and whether its tactics can still perform this work in the contemporary world. Readings address topics including: the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, Surrealist modes of research and knowledge-generation, notions of the “primitive” and the abject, feminist critiques of desire and the gaze, international Surrealisms, négritude and the revolutionary politics of Surrealism.

Critical Approaches to Art History (Fall 2021)

How have art historians decided what and whom to study? What major approaches have art historians devised and how have they borrowed from other disciplines? How have social and political changes shaped the writing and praxis of art history? What questions animate the field today? Over the course of the semester, we will begin to answer these questions by reading canonical art historical texts, theories of the artwork, statements and critiques of art historical methodology, and a smattering of influential theories drawn from neighboring disciplines. We will proceed thematically, covering key disciplinary approaches — among them, formalism, iconology, semiotics, and the social history of art — as well as broader categories that are the loci of contemporary discussions in the field, from recent efforts to decolonize the discipline to the significance of sexuality and the circulation of objects and audiences.

The course involves intensive engagement with visual and written texts, and aims to cultivate skills in visual and textual analysis as well as verbal presentation in preparation for the senior essay. To that same end, one of its primary goals is to help you develop your voice in this discipline through writing in a number of different forms and registers. It will ask that you both lavish attention on the smallest details and engage in bravura acts of synthesis, and that you learn to articulate both of these experiences in ways that are lively, self-aware, and generous.

Photography and Sculpture in Modernity (Fall 2021)

Photography and sculpture are peculiar yet consistent bedfellows in the modern world. This course examines the history of their entanglements from the early nineteenth-century up to the present day. We will track this joint history through a series of concerns lodged at the heart of modern art and visual culture: reproduction and mass-production; race and representation; testimony and embodiment; authorship and appropriation; intimacy, sexuality, and privacy; cultures of pedagogy and display; and fragmented and virtual images of the body.

Over the course of the semester, we will look at both hybrid forms — works in which these mediums mimic, cannibalize, or merge with each other — and parallels between photography and sculpture to ask what their common ground can tell us about the modern world that so often put them into conversation. What do photographs and sculptures indicate about our relationship to the recorded world, including what or whom we consider worth reproducing? How do these technologies of reproduction, one emergent and one ancient, interact with the political ideologies or social norms of representation? What metaphors or fictions sustain the practices of photography and sculpture, and how do they impact extra-artistic uses of both photographs and sculptures, from scientific labs to anthropological studies and bureaucratic systems of control and surveillance? What kinds of dreams animate how we relate to these objects or imagine their union — how we display, learn from, or even love them? And what fantasies of the future thrive in latest attempts to bring these mediums together?