HAA 1010 Approaches to Art History (required writing seminar for HAA majors)
Approaches to Art History is restricted to majors of the department and is an intensive writing and reading seminar (an official W-class) limited to 15 students. Each student will be required to present oral and written critical evaluations of the assigned texts as well as produce a significant research paper. HAA 1010 is offered every fall and spring semester, with different sections devoted to different research topics. Recent topics include:
1010 Approachaes to Art History - Making Space: Identity, Agency and Representing Representation
This course will examine the ways in which artists have considered the act and process of conceptualizing and creating art through the representation of art making and the space of the studio over the course of several centuries. In so doing, it enables us to consider questions, concerns and themes that pertain to two of the department’s research constellations: Agency and Identity (see http://www.haa.pitt.edu/research/constellations-foundations for a fuller discussion). How do individuals who make art reflexively consider their own practice and the spaces in which this practice is enacted and performed? How might these considerations and gestures enable them to define said practice or position themselves, as individual makers, within a broader community, an audience who is similarly intrigued by this question? The course will be organized according to themes that enable us to juxtapose artworks from different times and places in ways that foster a more nuanced critical understanding of the questions raised above: Audiences and Communities; Self and Other; Windows and Frames; Corporeality and the Body; Materiality and Medium; Paragone; Reflection and Mimesis; Light and Shadow; Tradition and Knowledge. Approaches to Art History is restricted to History of Art and Architecture majors, and is an intensive writing and reading seminar limited to 15 students. Each student will be required to present oral and written critical evaluations of the assigned texts as well as produce a significant research paper.
1010 Approaches to Arty History - Socially Engaged Art Practice: Collaboration, Agency, and Community
This course will examine a worldwide contemporary art current, emergent since the early 1990s, as it has been theorized under different concepts and practiced in various forms. The course will trace the current’s trajectories throughout the 20th century into the present. It will be divided into two major parts. In the first part of the course, we will address art historical genealogies, such as Dada and Russian Constructivism and examine their collective and collaborative forms of art making as emerging from within their contemporary socio-political context. We will also engage in a contextualized discussion of specific art initiatives from the 1960s through the 1980s, such as the Situationist International in France, the Womanhouse in the US and collaborative art projects in Hungary under state socialism, while investigating the dematerialization and expansion of the contemporary art object in relation to the modernist art object. In the second part of the course we will focus on socially engaged art practices in the post Cold War era. It will be organized according to themes that will bring together different theoretical approaches and socio-politically engaged art practices from Europe, US, Latin America, and India. Through assigned readings, journal entries, in-class discussions, formal and informal presentations and group work, we will engage in thinking critically about issues and aspects that might inform your own research projects developed for the class. Topics include: Public Art, Place and Dislocation in the Contemporary City; Community, Site and Audience Engagement; Participation and Collaboration; Ethics and Aesthetics; Types of Collaboration across Communities; Curators, Institutions and Exhibitions of Socially Engaged Art; and The Educational Turn, among others.
1010 Approaches to Art History - Sight and Insight at the Florence Cathedral
"What is this site telling us?" is a question art historians have asked themselves forever. Sometime they got the answer right, but often not. The site for this particular 1010 seminar is the famous but destroyed Florence Cathedral that stood from the 6th through 14th centuries, then was replaced by the current S. Maria del Fiore. The first volume of the instructor's Florence Duomo Project asked: "What could we have known about the destroyed church had it never been excavated?" The second volume analyzed the physical remains of the site and its 17,000 artifacts. The third volume (now in draft form) uses architectural history to recompose and contextualize the site in its phases from Roman through Renaissance. The fourth volume, also in draft, shows how the excavation is rewriting the history of Florence. The challenge of this 1010 seminar is to take the ruins of the site and flesh out an architectural, social, or cultural history from them. This is ambitious (to say the least!), but earlier undergraduate seminars had excellent outcomes that materialized in the instructor's previous books on Fallingwater and Pittsburgh. Seminar members will select topics of interest to them and solve them by a combination of graphic analysis and readings, and they will present their solutions in that combination also. Students will regularly meet with the instructor through revision of the paper after its draft oral presentation; the end product will be a finished research paper that contributes an original interpretation to the evidence studied.
1010 Approaches to Art History - International Exhibitions, Exhibiting Internationalism
The 2012-13 art season in Pittsburgh offers a number of exceptional exhibitions that will enable us to explore the nature of internationalism as it is pursued within the visual arts, and the rise of a global art world. Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fair, 1851-1939, a survey of international expositions from the Great Exhibition in London to the New York World’s Fair, will show at the Carnegie Museum of Art from October 13, 2012 to February 24, 2014. Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, which examines Warhol’s art from his student days at Carnegie Mellon School of Art in the 1950s through his years in New York from the 1960s to 1983, along with the continuing impact of his work on many other artists from around the world, will show at the Andy Warhol Museum from February and through the semester. The 2013 Carnegie International, the premier regular exhibition of international contemporary art in the United States, will not open until October 5, 2013, but preparations are well advanced, and preliminary events will occur throughout the year. Beginning with the Venice Biennale (1895) and the Carnegie International (1896), we will study the interplay between international expositions of the arts and manufactures and exhibitions of international art, focusing on the role of biennial exhibitions in creating a “global” or “world” art in recent decades. For course projects, we will draw on the resources of Frick Library and the museums, as well as the access offered by curators of the exhibitions mentioned.
1010 Approaches to Art History - Sensual Perception and Medieval Art
What does a medieval icon smell like? How does a Gothic cathedral sound and feel? This course will revisit major monuments of medieval art and architecture in Europe with a focus on multi-sensory encounters. We will first consider the history of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching found in written descriptions of sensory experiences from antiquity to the present day, with a goal of understanding how the five senses operated in concert with medieval art and architecture. We will then examine medieval monuments through a wide variety of topics, including: medieval pilgrimage and relics; taste, tactility, and devotional practice; vision/visuality and mystical visions; gesture and the absence of speech; theatricality and performance; medieval acoustics; depictions of pain; space and embodiment in medieval architecture; and the absence of the senses in medieval depictions of blindness and deafness.
1010 Approaches to Art History - Women in Traditional Asian Art
Chinese women have been viewed as subordinate and inferior to men, especially in Confucian or Confucian-inspired literature and practice, throughout the historical period. Such attitudes are often described in paintings from the imperial courts of China, for instance, but further research has shown that their roles, status, and position in the family and the society were not static. Instead, changes occurred based on political, social, religious, ideological circumstances in different periods. This seminar offers an interdisciplinary exploration of women artists and the description of women in art in traditional China from the Neolithic to the end of the imperial period. Topics discussed will include how and if “Goddesses” were revered, matriarchal and patriarchal society, royal women of the Shang, the Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist attitudes on women, didactic art for women, gendered space in paintings, ways that images of women help to visualize ideas both of femininity and masculinity, Chinese women and “others”, and powerful women in literature. We will also discuss the differing roles of women as patrons, collectors, and painters. Methods from art history, archaeology, history, and literature will be studied and applied.
1010 Approaches to Art History – Washington DC as a City, Capital, and Monument
This seminar will examine the development of the nation's capital as a symbolic space and a working city. Although the intersection of the two has made Washington, D.C. unique among U.S. cities, we will also consider its history in relation to urban planning elsewhere in the U.S. and in relation to capital cities elsewhere in the world. Course requirements will include short position papers and a final paper involving original research.
1010 Approaches to Art History – Public Art
This course examines the social, political, and artistic issues surrounding the creation and interpretation of public monuments and public art. We will focus on our local urban environment, particularly the rich collection of works in and around Oakland, but we will also put these local works in larger national and global contexts. The course emphasizes experiential learning, through multiple site visits, encounters with the works of art in their real urban contexts, and individual and group exercises building on these encounters. The course will culminate in a research paper on a local monument or public artwork. Where possible student research will be published on a website, currently under development, which will serve as the official online catalogue of public art in the region.
1010 Approaches to Art History – Medieval Treasuries
This course will consider the dazzling, sumptuous, and complex works of art that were kept in western European treasuries in the ninth through fifteenth centuries. This includes the shining reliquaries, precious goblets, illuminated manuscripts, and many more priceless objects that were once considered to be essential components of Christian religious experience. We will explore key medieval treasuries, including those of Saint-Denis, Conques, Hildesheim, and Halberstadt, and we will pay special attention to the Guelph Treasure, which was the source of several important medieval objects that are now on display in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The contents of the treasury, which included cult objects routinely used in Christian rituals, and attracted the attention of countless patrons and pilgrims, will be explicitly tied to the Constellations of Agency and Mobility/Exchange. Within this framework, we will consider the numerous ancient Roman and medieval Islamic objects that found their way into the treasury, and explore the ways in which medieval European audiences used foreign materials as part of their own religious experiences. The fate of treasuries during the Crusades will also be discussed, as well as the inevitable destruction of many medieval treasuries during post-medieval conflicts including the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution.
