Constellations: HAA 2401 Special Topics Contemporary - World Picturing and Worldmaking in Contemporary Visual Cultures
This seminar will explore the connections and disjunctions, in the conditions of contemporaneity, between two kinds of cultural imagining. First, efforts to understand, through various kinds of projective picturing, the interaction of political, economic and cultural forces around and across the globe. Second, smaller acts of worldmaking - constant or occasional, and conventional or exceptional - in local, specific, concentrated situations. Much current thinking in art history, art criticism and cultural studies deploys these two senses of "world," and understands that it is the recent, and growing, contestation between South and North (itself better understood, perhaps, as the fallout of processes of decolonization and globalization, as a postcolonial constellation) that has posed "world art history" as a problem for the discipline of art history, "world art" as a problem for art practice, criticism and curatorship, and the contemporaneousness of difference as a problem for cultural studies. The seminar will examine certain key texts (by authors such as Heidegger, Mitchell, Appadurai, Zizek, Agamben and Ranciere), the output of influential critics, curators and historians, and the practices of a number of visual artists working in a variety of media that engage directly or indirectly with these questions.
