Constellations: HAA 2400 Special Topics Modern - Socialism and Post-Socialism in the Arts and Art History
Recent years have witnessed a boom in exhibits, publications, symposia, and product placement strategies designed to commemorate/capitalize on the legacy of socialism. The socialist project is now declared--in some quarters--to be as moribund as East Germany, the Soviet Union, and other failed states that claimed socialism as their source of political legitimacy. This course will take as its starting point current writing on this phenomenon (Buck-Morss, Scribner, et al), including its relationship to collective memory, nostalgia, globalization, and its implications for Cold War notions of east and west. We will consider how our particular historical moment has recently shaped and reshaped art historical analyses of Socialist Realism and avant-garde art of the past (Clark, Groys, Bürger, and others); and conduct our own archeology of the socialist imaginary in the relevant writings and arts of those (Morris, Benjamin, Lukacs, to name but a few possibilities) who ventured to think through questions of art, politics, alienation, and emancipation from the 19th century through World War II and beyond. Participants will engage in weekly discussion of assigned texts, occasional seminar presentations, and the writing of a research paper on some aspect of the relationship between art, art history, and socialism in the modern and contemporary periods.
