SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 720, Expressive Culture: Images
Prof. Silver (Art History) syllabus*
Avant-Garde New York, from the Armory Show to Andy Warhol. New York emerged as the center of avant-garde art making in the period just after the World War II, although the city had preparing for its modernist ascendancy since the early years of the 20th century. We focus on the artists—native New Yorkers and out-of-towners, Americans and foreign-born practitioners—who helped to shape and refine New York’s extraordinarily rich avant-garde “tradition.” We study significant painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, graphic artists and designers in the context in which their work came into being and flourished—museums, galleries, art schools, patrons, salons, neighborhoods, professional organizations, ad hoc associations, and artist “hangouts.” Topics include: the Stieglitz Circle and 291; The Armory Show (1913); Marcel Duchamp and New York Dada; the Paris/New York connection; the founding of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum; New York Street Photography; Avant-gardism in Washington Square: from the “Republic of Greenwich Village” to the birth of Abstract Expressionism and the Judson Dance Theater and Gallery; and the crossing-over of Pop Art, from Madison Avenue to 57th Street.
SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 720, Expressive Culture: Images
Prof. Soucek (Institute of Fine Arts)
Indian Court Painting: 1400-1800. Before the twentieth century, many painters were supported by the rulers of India’s kingdoms and principalities. During these centuries, depictions of courtly life and celebrations were executed in several media including wall paintings and works on paper or cloth. These paintings fused devotional elements with celebrations of court life and rituals. In some cases the paintings narrate stories but in other cases they illustrate emotional states, the moods associated with seasons, or even times of day. Primarily they are intended to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of the rulers for whom they were produced. Other examples portray the lives and personalities of various gods and heroes. The Metropolitan Museum has an important and varied collection of Indian court paintings and visits to those galleries will be used to give students a direct appreciation of this important artistic tradition.
SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 721, Expressive Culture: Painting & Sculpture in New York Field Study
Prof. Broderick (Art History) syllabus*
New York's public art collections contain important examples of painting and sculpture from almost every phase of the past, as well as some of the world's foremost works of contemporary art. Meets once a week for an extended period combining on-campus lectures with group excursions to the museums or other locations where these works are exhibited.
SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Beckerman (Music)
We start by looking at how pieces of music begin and by exploring short pieces of music like Happy Birthday and simply constructed popular songs. We conclude by studying endings, cadences, and closure and listening to works of gargantuan length to ask questions about musical form and meaning. In between we look at the power of middle sections, encounter gradually larger compositions, and explore the use of form in film, literature, painting, and dance. We also travel around the globe to see whether "Western" concepts of form actually are Western, or whether there are certain shapes and approaches that have more to do with the structure of the human brain and less culturally-bound aspects of cognition. As part of our inquiry we ask whether dividing something into parts helps us to understand the whole, or whether it moves us away from such understandings. Finally, considering that so many pieces of music have many parts or sections with contrasting affect, tone, and style, how do we decide which sections, if any, are "central" to the nature of the thing we are investigating and which may be ephemeral, transitional, or secondary?
SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Daughtry (Music) syllabus*
An exploration of the sound and significance of human and nonhuman voices. The very ubiquity of the voice makes it a somewhat elusive topic: as something that most of us have, and as a sonic presence that permeates the urban soundscape, our voices are easily taken for granted. The character of your voice helps you and those around you understand something profound about your position as a unique individual, as a participant in various collectives, and as a member of the human species. Your ideas, your personality, your history, your fears, your affinities, your sense of humor—all of these are brought into the world by your voice. More broadly, the concept of voice has regularly (though not globally) been used as a metaphor for essence, presence, human agency, authenticity, and truth. In recent years, technological advances have created “virtual,” “cyborg,” and “machinic” voices that put pressure on all of these metaphors; and recent scholarly attention to birdsong, whalesong, and other nonhuman voices has revitalized and complicated the conversation on voice. Through a multidisciplinary, cross-cultural introduction to many labors that human and nonhuman voices perform, we render voice—this most familiar of human attributes—thoroughly, provocatively, and deliciously strange.
SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 740, Expressive Culture: Performance
Prof. Meineck (Classics) syllabus*
Why do we still go to the theatre to watch plays? What is it about drama that can often seem to express so much about the tensions and stresses found in a given culture? Why does classical drama in particular continue to be performed and speak to so many different audiences? What is a classical play and how do theater artists interpret them for contemporary spectators, and why have so many works of drama been used to reflect the social, political, and economic situations of peoples all over the world? We explore the cultural significance of classical theater and how and why it continues to be performed today. We examine theater from four distinct period--ancient Athens, Elizabethan London, early modern Europe, and contemporary America--focusing on plays that are still regularly performed on contemporary stages. Students also take part in readings, exercises, and demonstrations, but they do not need to have any acting or performance ability.
SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Polan (Cinema Studies)
Howard Hawks was a consummate director of action film. Working in genres such as the western, the war film, the detective story, and the adventure tale, Hawks crafted engaging narratives of men on a mission working together, their endeavor externalized into dramas of physicality, of bodies on the line, and rendered through a clean, tight cinema focused on movement, men’s corporeal craft, and team-work. This body of work is balanced, or perhaps even challenged, by a set of other Hawks films focusing on energetic, adventurous women who subvert masculine supremacy and even show up men as infantile about violence, rough play, and machismo. A musical like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes shows weak men at the mercy of over-the-top powerful women (Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe), while a screwball comedy like I Was a Male War Bride centers on a demasculinized man (Cary Grant) who spends much of the film in drag. We examine these contrasts in Howard Hawks’ films: masculine action versus feminine challenges to male empowerment, stories of action versus critiques of violence as simplistic solution. The content of Hawks’ films is also considered against issues of style and cinematic expression: what resources of crisp story-telling does he employ to convey tales of men in action, and how are these undone in the comedies and musicals? Looking at Hawks’ specific place in the Hollywood studio system, we see him as a case study of how American narrative film functioned thematically and stylistically as popular art.
SPRING 2017 CORE-UA 760, Expressive Culture: Topics—Fascism and Antifascism in Modern Art and Architecture
Prof. Merjian (Italian Studies)
The terms “fascism” and “culture” frequently resonate as opposites. We think immediately of sterile, bunker-like architecture, book burnings, and reactionary archaisms. Much fascist culture certainly entailed these. Yet we ignore the centrality of advanced culture to fascist ideas—both in the early twentieth century and beyond—at our own peril. We begin by addressing the history and theory of fascism, then examine specific case studies: Italian Futurist art and literature and its relationship to the founding of Fascism; the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome; National Socialist (Nazi) aesthetic policy, Nuremberg rallies, and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935); John Heartfield’s anti-fascist photomontages; Picasso’s Guernica at the 1937 Exposition Internationale; the 1937 Degenerate ‘Art’ Exhibition in Germany; and revivals of anti-fascist rhetoric and protest in the events of 1968 in the US and abroad. In the context of neo-fascist resurgence, we also consider more recent manifestations of fascism in cultural discourse, from Timus Vermes’ compelling book Look Who’s Back (2012), to the nationalist populism of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.