This class is an introduction to the diverse practices gathered under the category “Visual Art.”
This world of visual art includes sound installation and performance, and happens not only in galleries and museums, but also on streets, parks, rivers, in nail salons and rowboats. Artists now are hybrid beings, bringing into their work personal orientations of race, class, gender – even interspecies interests, focuses ranging from law, neuroscience, beekeeping, and the legacies of 125 years of “modern” experimentation.
Whether you want an introduction to art-making and the concerns that inform it, or have an established practice, this class is an opportunity to workshop new approaches for your own work, and begin to encounter the strategies and contexts of established artists working in the fields filed under Art.
“Art Strategies” connects your studio practice with a survey class. In the spirit of “borrowing” or trying on, you may find newly resonant connections between your desire for expression, and an introduction to the practices and
theoretical contexts of established artists.
This 12-week class will cover 6 art strategies, combining research with bi-weekly assignments. You will work individually on assignments, and in teams to present research. The assignments are structured as responses to the strategy topic – for instance, how can you create a quick prototype for a project using appropriation as your framework? How can you use a lens of feminist critique?
The class will be rich in individualized resources and critique, and will provide a topical survey of artists working in diverse ways. We will be conscious of the ways in which these practices integrate and challenge the uses of technology, and will also briefly address funding models, presentation, and contexts.
Example strategies include agit-prop, appropriation, corporate drag, counterfactual fiction, ethnography, expanded cinema, fictional documentary, identity politics, institutional critique, intervention, irony, kitsch, post-internet, procedural actions, social practice, the archive, theater of the absurd.
Movements we will look at include animal studies, bio-art, bio-politics, collectivism, Dada, environmental art, feminism (first-third wave), Fluxus, the post-natural, post-structuralism, post-black, occupy, queer theory, Situationists.
Marina Zurkow