Jan.

4, 2016

ROUGH DRAFT OF SYLLABUS

Critical Theory in the Studio (ART 301), Yale School of Art/Yale College
Spring 2016, Friday, 9:25 am - 11:15 am.
Instructor: Jonathan Weinberg, jonathanweinberg01@gmail.com
Syllabus
This course offers the art student and the non-art student alike, a chance to grapple with the ways artists, historians and critics make
sense out of contemporary and 20th Century art. A major interest will be the way that artists write about art, and the way that ideas
about gender, class, ethnicity, race, globalization and economics intersect with studio practices. Another key theme will be the
relationship of art to identity, both as a force behind the making of objects and performances, and the interpretations generated by their
production and effects.
Course Requirements
20% Class participation: Students are expected to do the readings and actively participate in the discussions. At least once in the
semester you will be asked to lead a class session on a particular reading.
30% Short Writing Exercises: At various points during the semester I will ask you to write short descriptive and/or interpretative
reactions to works of art, as well as responses to readings.
20% Public Journal/Internet Archive:
In a sketchbook or an internet blog or in a program like Evernote, I want you to keep a public journal in which you write brief one
paragraph responses to readings, exhibits and works of art and begin to amass a studio archive, (for the non-studio artists in the
class, a writers archive). This archive will be a collection of source materials, photographs, studies, swatches, fragments, sketches,
visual notes, etc, that should aid you in your working and thinking processes. It is often a good idea to start collecting images of your
visual and verbal influences, whether they come from art history, literary criticism, philosophy or popular culture and design, etc. For
many of you, the archive will be primarily visual, but this is not a requirement.
As part of this journal process I want you read, watch or listen to some sort of news every day. I personally read the New York Times
every morning, but you could use the Daily Show for this purpose, or a radio program like All Things Considered on NPR, or you
could read one of the internet websites like Slate or The Huffington Post. At least once a week focus on some aspect of the art world
in your news search, i.e. look at the Weekend section of the Times, or look at an art magazine like Art Forum. Send me links to things
you think we all might enjoy or need to see, and I will circulate it to the entire class.
Keep in mind that this journal or archive, or scrapbook is for public consumption. If there is some private thought you dont
want us to see, dont put it in the journal. Twice in the semester, we will take a peek into this project, so it is important that it can take
the form that we can look at it, either as a physical book, or online.
30% Emulation Project
Visual Artists: For the final project you will create an object that relates to a body of work by a painter, photographer, sculpture,
performance artist, or graphic designer that you are deeply engaged with. You can consciously try to imitate the style of the artist that
you are drawn to, or you might make something that only riffs on your inspiration or even critiques it. Along with this object you will
write a 1200 word discussion about the process and your relationship to the practice of the artist you are emulating.
Non-Visual Artists: I want you to pick a particular writer on art and emulate that writers approach to a particular work of art that
the writer never wrote about. You will research both the writers work, and its sources and the history and contexts of the art piece
that is the subject of your emulated approach. You will produce a 2000 word paper, along with a 500 word description of the actual
emulation process.
Everyone: You will present this project to the class at the end of the semester. As part of the project you are required to do research
beyond the internet that involves using books in the library and ideally engaging with works of art in galleries and museums. Your
final paper should include a bibliography, and endnotes.

Jan. 4, 2016

A three sentence description of your project should be submitted to me on via email.

All readings in the syllabus outline are available at https://classesv2.yale.edu/portal.
It is strongly recommended that if you have not taken a survey course on art since 1945 that you read one of the following text books
on contemporary art as soon as possible:
David Hopkins, After Modern Art
David Joselit, American Art Since 1945
Hal Foster et. al. Art Since 1900 Volume 2 Post 1945 (This is the most dense, difficult and doctrinaire. I do not endorse its positions
but it gives you a primer to what the school of contemporary art criticism associated with the journal October feels is canonical)
I.

Introduction: The Studio and the Academy (Friday, January 29)

Outline of the course and a focus on images of artists in their studios.

Due Wednesday, Feb. 3, email to me at jonathanweinberg01@gmail.com a selfie, in which you are making art or doing an activity
that you feel is intrinsic to your identity. Whatever image you send, it should show your face clearly to help me remember who you
are (to that end include your full name in the file name).
II.

Identity (Friday, Feb. 4)

Art as self-portraiture and expression of identity in the age of the so-called Death of the Author. Who gets to have an identity in the
art world? How are identities shaped?
Read Marlene Dumas, Why do I write (about Art), Thelma Golden, Whats White?, Judith Butler, Imitation and Gender
Subordination, and Rosalind Krauss The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
Optional: Roland Barthes: Death of the Author, Michel Foucault What is an Author?
III.

Form (Friday, Feb. 11)

Discussion of Modernism and the so-called autonomy of the work of art. The second part of the class will be in the Art Gallery
where we will break up into groups and describe works of art. work of art.
Read Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, Clement Greenberg Toward a Newer Laocon, Meyer Schapiro on van Gogh, and
Donald Judd on Barnett Newman.
Due Wednesday, Feb. 17 via email to jonathanweinberg01@gmail.com: 500 word formal description of the work of art that you
described with a small group in the art gallery (details of the assignment will be given in class).
IV.

History (Friday, Feb. 19)

How does the artist think about and use art history in the studio? How do other artists influence work? Has the history of art itself
come to an end?
Arthur Danto The End of Art, Olu Oguibe, In the Heart of Darkness, and Griselda Pollock, Modernity and the Spaces of
Modernism.
Take a look at New York Magazine 2012 How to Make it in the Art World http://nymag.com/arts/art/rules/
Optional: Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, and Modernist Painting.
V.

Ideas (Friday, Feb. 26)

Discussion of conceptualism and the so-called dematerialization of the art-object. How are intentions realized in a work of art?

Jan. 4, 2016

Read Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art: the Aesthetic and the Ends of Art, Sol Lewitt: Sentences and Paragraphs on
Conceptualism, Eva Hesse: Interview, Adrian Piper, Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-consciousness; Robert Smithson,
A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic.
VI.

Looking at the Self (Friday, Mar. 4)

How do we interpret the look of the self-portrait? Why are self-portraits of artists of continuing interest? Given the so-called death
of the author, why do so many contemporary artists image their selves?
Read T.J. Clark, The Look of Self-Portraiture, Rosalind Krauss The Aesthetic of Narcissism
Artist writings and interviews by Vito Acconci, Cindy Sherman
Due Wednesday, Mar. 10 via email to jonathanweinberg01@gmail.com: 750 word paper on an optional or orphaned
reading.
VII.

Copying (Friday, Mar. 11)

The role of photographic reproduction, the ready-made, and appropriation in contemporary art.
Read Sigmund Freud On the Uncanny, Marcel Duchamp, The Case of R. Mutt, and other artist statements and interviews from the
anthology Appropriation.
Optional: Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, bel hooks, Eating the Other and Boris
Groys, Visible and Invisible Sides of Reproduction.
VIII.

Politics (Friday, April 1)

Discuss the role of social justice, activism and so-called Agitprop art.
Read: Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, Lucy Lippard, Trojan Horses:
Activist Art and Power.
Artist writings by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Walid Raad, Maya Lin
Due Wednesday, March 31: 3 sentence description of emulation project
IX.

Erotics (Friday, April 8)

Sex and the body as a major theme of contemporary art. How do we define the erotic and the pornographic. The so-called Culture
Wars. What is the difference between work about the body and work about sex and where do they overlap? How does the erotic
differ from the pornographic. The body of the other as a site of fantasy and exploitation.
Read Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic, Kobena Mercer, Reading Racial Fetishism: the Photographs of Robert

Mapplethorpe, ORAN, This Is My BodyThis is my Software

Optional: Excerpts from Edward Said: Orientalism
X.

Money/Fame (Friday, April 15)

Focus on the global market and the celebrity artist. Disconnect between the prices of certain works of art and the canon of art history.
Relationship of the Museum, Biennials, and Art Fairs to artist practices.
Martha Rosler, Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on an Audience, Hito Steryl, Duty Free Art, Robert Hughes
The Rise of Andy Warhol, and excerpts from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B.
Optional: Thomas Crow: Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol
XI.

Networks (Friday, April 22)

Jan. 4, 2016

Rethinking of the spaces and role of art making in terms of community and in terms of relationships. Role of the Internet and digital
media in transforming the making and exhibition of art.
Read excerpts from Nicholas Beaurriud, Relational Aesthetics, Michel Foucault, Other Spaces and T.J. Demos The Politics of
Sustainability Art and Ecology
Read artist writings by Nam June Paik, Ai Weiwei
Optional: Deleuze and Guattari, Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus
XII

Final Presentations (Friday, April 29)

Orphan Readings
Merleau-Ponty, Czannes Doubt
Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Post-Modernist Repetition