Course Description
The course gives a broad introduction into the development of activism and socially engaged art practice, with a strong focus on artists & activists of color and art exhibitions by minority artists since 1960s. It addresses the critical reading of the work and practice by forty artists and activists from different cultural backgrounds, who established their careers and were driven to activism during a period of profoundly challenging social change. The course will look at the different communities - from East European, ex-Yugoslavian, to Afro-American and Latinx, to prioritize the voices of women artists, and following chronological order of art movements on American and European continents.
The course’s theoretical and methodical investment in the field
"No doubt there is in our society […] a sort of mute terror against these events, against this mass of things said, against the surging-up of all these statements, against all that could be violent ‘discontinuous' pugnacious’ disorderly as wen, and perilous about them — against this great incessant and disordered buzzing of discourse.”
—Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse 1981, p. 66
One of the crucial questions to emerge from the radical political and social upheavals since 1960s is how art and culture could most effectively participate and contribute to urgent quests for self-determination and liberation. Artists particularly visual artists, were involved in through both their work and activism in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, The Anti War and Anti Communist Movements, the Women’s Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, environmentalism, and battles against censorships and political corruption, among many others. The women artists’s practice and activism takes a special place in all these movements, therefore it is important to show synchronicities of different action undertaken since 1960s both in America and Europe, and contextualize them in the art institutions’ critique. Protest takes place in (real or virtual) spaces and is carried out by (both real and virtual) bodies. The spaces and the bodies to which a protest refers, against which it takes a stand, or of which it aims to gain control to use for its own purposes are the spaces of politics and society. Protest — even when it is of a purely aesthetic nature — is therefore always political. The course will refer to “her/his-story” about how people across the hemisphere wove together antislavery, anti-colonial, pro-freedom, and pro-working class movements against tremendous obstacles. This insight may help to prevent cultural determinism, to promote cultural and artistic pluralism and shifting the margins to the central focus, with deconstruction of the classical art history canons.
The course is structured three topic units and 14 seminars that will be given as frontal teaching. There will be parallel reading units (see detailed course plan and academic integrity) as group work as well as preparation of additional material provided in an online module course. The power post presentations, pages presentation, prezi presentations, and pdfs, etc. will be shared via online platform. The presentations contain take-home-tasks with precise questions, e.g. in the comparison of transdisciplinary materials and approaches to the same issue or topic.
The course:
- views gender, visual production and social movements as a central category through which the modern society structures its disobedience and dynamics of protest
- is transdisciplinary in order to understand the connection between different disciplinary approaches while simultaneously reflecting critically on those approaches; is interdependent because gender can only be analyzed in its complex relationship with other categories such as "race," ethnicity, social status, sexuality, religion, dis/ability, or age
- is interventionist because women artist movements are not only based on theory of gender and feminism but also to translating the equality knowledge into real-world practice
- is interactive because the students are asked to critically read, present, and collaboratively analyze texts from cultural and art theory and the social sciences, including gender studies, institutional critique, postcolonial studies and other current theoretical approaches relevant to art, social and curatorial practice.
- is “Learning by doing research” because it has a research-oriented approach and is providing students with the actual state of the art in different disciplines.
A positioning and reflection of your disciplinary approaches
- The course is applying the already successfully adopted model of a cross-disciplinary approach of merging art, social movements, gender studies, with anthropology, and migration studies.
- The course presents an approach that attempts to escape ethnic affiliation as the main factor of identity performance and bring synchronicity into the broader context of categorization of center and peripheries in the history of art social movements.
- It applies a bottom-up perspective to scrutinize the situational and contextual factors that determine the relevance of collective solidarity and identification.
- The application of methodologies typically applied in NGOs or other social institutions and movements will enable innovative methodological inroads for academic research while providing incentives for an inter-sectorial exchange of knowledge and experience with a view of facilitating a more open, academically underbuilt, and pronouncedly activist dialogue.
Learning aims
Course Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, you should be able to:
[Objective 1]
Identify and critically discuss presented art works of different artists, including description, formal analysis, content analysis and interpretation. Within the formal analysis the following are studied: composition (open/closed), type of space, format, dynamics, drawing, modeling, colors, texture, shapes, sizes, proportions, perspective, the way of combining form with content, patches, harmony, balance, rhythms, tensions, complements. Content analysis points to iconographic, iconological aspects, history of creation, cultural, religious, historical context, draws attention to constant themes and motifs: symbols, emblems, allegories, personification, attributes.
[Objective 2]
Apply evidence-based principles to critically evaluate current policies and practices in protest thinking and gender theory.
[Objective 3] Memorizing and contextualizing facts. Students will acquire a knowledge in the development of social and art movements and female artists and activists movements since 1960s until nowadays. Social emphasis will be put on juncture between art production and unification of minority groups in order to construct an alternative art and activist spaces against the official institutional systems in Europe and Americas.
[Objective 4] Transfer of knowledge. The course will apply modern and innovative methods of social science and cultural studies, with a cross-disciplinary approach, aiming to analyze and read critically of art works beyond just art history methods.
[Objective 5] Reading competence. Students will acquire competences in reading different texts of culture, including visual and social activism, how to use their cultural inter comprehension to approach different texts (theory, anthropology fieldwork notes, proclamations, priest slogans, etc).
Didactic approaches
Inclusivity Statement
Diversity and inclusiveness are fundamental to public education and practice in Germany. Students are encouraged to have an open mind and respect differences of all kinds. I share responsibility with you for creating a learning climate that is hospitable to all perspectives and cultures; please contact me if you have any concerns or suggestions.
Bias Related Incident Reporting
HU believes all members of our community should be able to study and work in an environment where they feel safe and respected. As a mechanism to promote an inclusive community, we have created an anonymous bias-related incident reporting system. If you have experienced bias, please submit a report so that the administration can track and address concerns as they arise and to better support members of the HU community.
Detailed Course Plan:
21-22.10.2022
Session 1: GENDER POLITICS AT THE INTERSECTION OF RACE, CLASS, AND SEXUAL IDENTITY
Reading: Reading: We Wanted a Revolution. Black Radical Women 1965-85. A Source Book (Eds. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley. Brooklyn Museum, 2018 New York, pp. 230-90.
Session 2: Race and Women’s Liberation
Reading: We Wanted a Revolution. Black Radical Women 1965-85. A Source Book (Eds. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley. Brooklyn Museum, 2018 New York, pp. 70-99.
Session 3: TALLER BORICUA AND THE PUERTO RICAN ART MOVEMENT IN NEW YORK
Reading: Paul Oritz. An African American and Latinx History of the United States. 2018 Beacon Press Boston.
28-29.10.2022
Session 4: Collective Artist Actions in New York
Reading: We Wanted a Revolution. Black Radical Women 1965-85. A Source Book (Eds. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley. Brooklyn Museum, 2018 New York, pp. 114-33.
Session 5: Just Above Midtown Gallery
Reading: Reading: We Wanted a Revolution. Black Radical Women 1965-85. A Source Book (Eds. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley. Brooklyn Museum, 2018 New York, pp. 139-68.
Session 6: ANNA MENDIETA’S DIALECTICS OF ISOLATION
Reading: Reading: We Wanted a Revolution. Black Radical Women 1965-85. A Source Book (Eds. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley. Brooklyn Museum, 2018 New York, pp. 210-29.
4-5.11.2022
Session 7: HISTORY OF ART HISTORY IN CENTRAL, EASTERN AND SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE: THE POST-NATIONAL IN EAST EUROPEAN ART, FROM SOCIALIST INTERNATIONALISM TO TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES
Reading: Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe (Eds. Ana Janevski, Roxana Marocci and Ksenia Nouril). The Museum of Modern Art. 2018 New York, pp. 366-370.
Session 8: EQUALITY DOMINANCE AND DIFFERENCE IN EASTERN EUROPEAN ART
Reading: Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe (Eds. Ana Janevski, Roxana Marocci and Ksenia Nouril). The Museum of Modern Art. 2018 New York, pp.283-289.
Collective Artist Actions in Yugoslavia
Reading: Impossible Histories. Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991 (Eds. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković) MIT Press 2003.
Session 9: SOLIDARITY IN ARTS AND CULTURE: SOME CASES FROM NON-ALIGNED MOVEMENT
Reading: Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe (Eds. Ana Janevski, Roxana Marocci and Ksenia Nouril). The Museum of Modern Art. 2018 New York, pp. 347-350.
11-12.11.2022
PRESENTATIONS OF LITTLE RESEARCH PROJECTS BY THE SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS
Additional sources:
Printed matters
Caragol-Barreto, Taina B. "Aesthetics of Exile: The Construction of Nuyorican Identity in the Art of El Taller Boricua." Centro Journal 17.2 (2005): 6-21.
Impossible Histories. Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991 (Eds. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković) MIT Press 2003.
Inside Out. Critical Discourses Concerning Institutions (Eds. Alenka Gregoric & Suzana Milevska). City Gallery Ljubljana 2017.
Piotrowski, Piotr. Art and Democracy in Post-communist Europe. London: Reaktion, 2012.
Ramírez, Yasmin. "Nuyorican Visionary: Jorge Soto and the Evolution of an Afro-Taíno Aesthetic at Taller Boricua." Centro Journal XVII.2 (2005): 22-41.
Caroline V. Wallace (2015) Exhibiting Authenticity: The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition's Protests of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968-71, Art Journal, 74:2, 5-23, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2015.1095535
Internet
https://daily.jstor.org/mexicos-radical-women-artists/
https://www.latinousa.org/2021/11/12/nuyoricanpoetscafe/
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-african-american-artists-fought-diversify-museums
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/black-artists-exclusion-museums-1980s-1234581315/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-frustration-behind-puerto-ricos-popular-movement
https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women
https://citylimits.org/2020/06/24/former-young-lords-reflect-on-protests-racism-and-police-violence/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/arts/design/latinx-art-el-museo-del-barrio.html
https://www.6sqft.com/the-social-and-cultural-history-of-puerto-rican-activism-in-the-east-village/