As registration for Spring 2015 academic courses continues, I wanted to provide more information about courses I will begin teaching starting January. Please see detailed descriptions below. Please note that students do not have to take ARTH 2122 before ARTH 2222, nor do any of the art history courses have to be taken in order (sometimes it works well not to!). ARTH 2122 and ARTH 2222 are also perfect pre-requisites for the planned New York/Venice Biennale 2015 Field School. If you have any specific questions that are not answered here or in the links I provide you to the registration for the courses, you can contact me directly. I look forward to another rich and engaging semester with both new and familiar faces.
ARTH 2122: Art in Flux-- The Modern Period (1900-1945)
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
(Thursdays 7:00-9:50pm, Richmond Campus Room MAIN 2003)
Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians (1921)
This course offers a survey of changing ideas in the visual arts of Europe and North America during the first half of the twentieth century with special emphasis given to the movements of the historical avant-garde. Considering these major movements in the context of the social, economic and political upheavals of this complex and multi-faceted time period, key to the course will be the broader question of modernity itself and its transformation through a time of radical technological, social and political change. Topics such as the social and representative meanings of abstraction, the internationalization of art production, the development of Modernist theory, and the impact of new technologies on the production and dissemination of art objects will be explored. And while lectures will be organized around the familiar “isms” that have historically constructed the canon of modernism, careful consideration will be given to the fabricated nature of these designations, reading instances of art practice for aesthetic significance together with connections and responses to specific historical and social developments. Traditional media such as painting, drawing and sculpture will be examined alongside the newer media of photography, assemblage, film and collage.
ARTH 2222: Modern & Contemporary Art-- 1945 to Present
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
(Thursdays 1:00-3:50pm, Surrey Campus Room FIR 3414)
Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves of Grass (2012) exhibited at Documenta 13
ARTH 2222 offers a critical examination of international visual art and culture focusing on the role of art in consumerist society and the emergence of postmodernism. The course concentrates on visual art from the mid-1940s to the present day, with particular regard for historical events, factors of patronage and institutions—as well as changing attitudes to making and approaching art—in modern and postmodern art. We will consider the traditional media of painting and sculpture but must also take into account the addition of innovative media to art practice in recent years. From photography to video, collage to assemblage, installation to performance, such media have extended notions of what art could materially consist of, but have also affected the anticipation of audiences for that work, having social as well as aesthetic implications. Ultimately, our attention will be on the network where art is made, presented to and reacted to by different parties, and to the ways that portions of the art system―such as art history and cultural criticism―have conceived of and explained the workings of such a system and the society it exists within.
ARTH 1130: Introduction to Film Studies
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
(Fridays 4:00-7:50pm, Surrey Campus Room FIR 128)
Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Students will study the history and development of world cinema, and the comprehension and theory of film as a visual language and art-making practice from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the critical interpretation of the cinema and the various vocabularies and methods with which one can explore the aesthetic function, together with the social, political, and technological contexts and developments, of moving pictures. The weekly format of this course (as a 4 hour block) will normally entail a 1 hour lecture and the screening of a full-length film followed by a group discussion period. Each film will thus serve as a starting point and gateway for discussion about the course’s weekly theme.