ANSC 100 Syllabus
Professor James R. Beniger
301 Annenberg School
(by appointment only)
 213-740-0913 (o)
310-546-3040 (h)
beniger@rcf.usc.edu

OVERVIEW

This course explores the nature of art, in particular the questions of what is or is not art and what, more generally, art is or is not. Classical answers to these questions began to be complicated by 19th century industrialization and the resulting technological and cultural revolution in the media of communication: photography, mass publishing, motion pictures, television, video and computers. For this reason, we will pay special attention in seeking to understand the nature of art to the modern material economy of mass production, distribution, communication and consumption, its relationship to popular culture, and the resulting impact on our visual environment, the forest of symbols and associated meanings in which we live.

As context for our quest to understand the apparently universal human impulse to create art, we shall begin with a brief examination of the foundations and history of Western art and culture from Classical Greece and the Gothic Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods. Particularly informative, for our purposes, will be the development of photography after the late 1830s and its impact on academic painting into the 20th century. We will follow this "crisis of realism" from the work of Courbet and Manet, pioneers of modern art, through Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism to the current Post-Modern Age, ever mindful of the Galassi thesis that painting (the figurative) helps to invent the language of photography (the literal).

Mass cultural influences on our ways of seeing including industrial design and high fashion, the built environment, standardization and packaging, and television advertising will also be considered. The goal here is to unravel the causal interrelationships among technology and economy, popular culture and art, and the various criteria of aesthetics that might exist both in our world and in our heads. Classical conceptions of art as the imitation of nature, from Plato and Aristotle, will be challenged by views emphasizing the creative, symbolic, cathartic and socializing aspects of art. Debated throughout will be opposing views of the good in art as objective (inherent in content) and subjective (peculiar to each observer). Our central question remains, however, not what is good art but what art is -and why.

READINGS

This syllabus lists readings to be completed in preparation for each lecture. Reading ought to be done in the order listed whenever possible. There is method in this madness! Required reading assignments average 40.8 pages per meeting (10.3 pages per calendar day) but range from 20 to 83 pages per meeting; planning ahead to accommodate longer assignments is strongly urged. To be read in their entirety are four books, all available in paper: Readings to be used only in student discussion sections--or that are recommended but optional--can be found in the following four books: All of these readings are available on undergraduate reserve at Leavey Library, and for purchase at the University Bookstore and at Tam's. If you wish to purchase some but not all of the assigned readings, the recommended priorities for ownership for the purposes of this class are:

OUTLINE OF THE LECTURES

    1. Introduction to the Course Wednesday, January 10
    2. Introduction to Media, Art, and Culture Wednesday, January 17

  1. Foundations and Early History of the Arts

    3. Origins of Graphic Communication and the Arts Monday, January 22
    4. The Renaissance Wednesday, January 24
    5. Baroque and Romanticism Monday, January 29

  2. The Impact of Industrialization and Mass Media

    6. Photography and the Crisis of Realism Wednesday, January 31
    7. Origins of the Avant-Garde Monday, February 5
    8. Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Wednesday, February 7
    9. Movies Transform the Mass Media Monday, February 12

  3. The Birth of Modernism

    10. Emergence of the Modernist Impulse Wednesday, February 14
    11. From Abstraction to Cultural Revolution Wednesday, February 21
    12. Art Confronts World War Monday, February 26
    13. Designing the Faces of Power Wednesday, February 28
    14. MIDTERM EXAMINATION Monday, March 4
    15. DISCUSSION OF MIDTERM Wednesday, March 6

  4. The Aesthetics of Modernism

    16. Impressionism: Landscapes of Pleasure Monday, March 18
    17. The Impressionist Legacy Wednesday, March 20
    18. Utopian Architecture Monday, March 25
    19. The Modernist Legacy Wednesday, March 27

  5. Modernism in Decline

    20. Television as the New Cultural Center Monday, April 1
    21. Surrealism: Threshold of Liberty Wednesday, April 3
    22. Expressionism: The View from the Edge Monday, April 8
    23. Completing the Agenda of Modernism Wednesday, April 10

  6. The Rise of Post-Modernism

    24. The Ideology and Imagery of Advertising Monday, April 15
    25. Culture as Nature: Advertising and Pop Art Wednesday, April 17
    26. The Challenges of Post-Modernism Monday, April 22
    27. The Future That Was Wednesday, April 24
    28. Conclusions: Looking Forward and Back Monday, April 29

LECTURE-BY-LECTURE SYLLABUS

1. Introduction to the Course (Wednesday, January 10)
Aims of the course. Overview of the 28 meetings. Structure of each individual meeting. Required and optional readings. Other requirements and assignments. Grading. Student discussion sections. Scheduling sections. Paper topics.
No Required Reading

2. Introduction to Media, Art, and Culture (Wednesday, January 17)

Introduction to the Communications Revolution and its relationship to the arts. The effects of mass media on ways of perceiving art and on the unique art object. Popular art and fine art. Art as icon: images that reflect basic cultural values. Perception: the "intelligence" in human sight. Child art. The crises of realism. Native art. Dogon art and architecture. Art as icon: Creating, affirming, sustaining, and destroying culture. Escape to nature: the natural man myth. Escape to technology. Prehistoric visual communications. The cradle of civilization and the invention of writing. Egyptian hieroglyph, papyrus and writing, and the first illustrated manuscripts. The Chinese contribution: calligraphy, paper, printing, and movable type.
Required (29 pages)

I. FOUNDATIONS AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE ARTS (3 lectures)

3. Origins of Graphic Communication and the Arts (Monday, January 22)
Ancient Sumer (c. 2500 BC). Cretan pictographs. Classical Greece. Greek painting: legends of lifelike images. The Greek cosmos. Vase painting and sculpture: icons for private and public spaces. The Parthenon: cosmic geometry adjusted to the human eye and its naturalism. The crisis between the geometries of the cosmos and of the eye. Images that deceive. The Phoenician, Greek, and Latin alphabets. The medieval manuscript. Classical style. Celtic book design. The Caroline graphic renewal. Spanish pictorial expression and the late medieval illuminated manuscripts. The Gothic Middle Ages: Christianizing the Greek cosmos. The Gothic cathedral: model of the Christian cosmos. Chartres: sacred geometry of the Middle Ages. The windows and sculpture of Chartres. Medieval monasteries: the first "factories" of the West. Villard de Honnecourt (c. 1250).
Required (26 pages)

4. The Renaissance (Wednesday, January 24)

Brunelleschi's experiment. Origins of the Age of Perspective. The vanishing point. Perspective objectivity. Paolo Uccello (1396-1475). Problems of the perspective image. Northern vs. Southern Europe. A subjective self at the center of an objective world. Religious images: from the space of eternity to that of the present. Eternity: Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337). The present: Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516). Objectivity: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Leonardo's notebooks: from nature to technology. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564): the individual as the source of creativity. Michelangelo's Moses and Last Judgment: changing the rules and meaning of art. Printed pictures, mass medium of the Age of Perspective. Albrecht Durer (1471-1528): printed images as fine art. John Berger on oil painting as a means to possess.
Required (58 pages)

5. Baroque and Romanticism (Monday, January 29)

The telescope and Western art: The artist confronts a new cosmos. Michelangelo de Caravaggio (1573-1610). Saint Peter's Basilica (1506-1667): from Renaissance to Baroque. Andrea dal Pozzo (1642-1709): fusing spaces architectural and painted. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669): subjectivity and human personality. Seventeenth-century Dutch art: the new social portrait of democracy. The camera obscura. Jan Vermeer (1632-1675): painting the world of the lens. The eighteenth century transition to a cosmos of machines. Printed images in Diderot's Encyclopedia: icons of freedom via machine. Propaganda and art: icons for the modern nation state. The cult of personality: Jacques Louis David (1748-1825). Subjectivity and Romanticism: The artist becomes a projector. Francisco de Goya (1746-1828): A subjective vision of hell. Theodore Gericault (1794-1824): society as madness. Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863): the sensation of newness. The Galassi thesis: Painting helps to invent the language of photography. Photography's origins.
Required (28 pages)

II. THE IMPACT OF INDUSTRIALIZATION AND MASS MEDIA (4 lectures)

6. Photography and the Crisis of Realism (Wednesday, January 31)
The arrival of photography. Academic painting imitates photography. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867): classicizing the middle class. Photography as icon. The machine as symbol of civilization and progress. Academic painting responds. The Great Exhibition of 1851: celebrating the myth of progress via the machine. The Crystal Palace: cathedral to the machine. Industrial revolution: organizing society around the machine. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867): an appeal to the bourgeoisie. Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and the origins of modern art. John Berger on the difference between nakedness and nudity in the European tradition.
Required (45 pages)

7. Origins of the Avant-Garde (Monday, February 5)

The Salon of 1863: shock of the new. Edouard Manet (1832-1883): modernizing high art subject matter. Severing connections with the ideal world. Manet's Olympia (1863): unwelcome "Venus" for modern Paris. The new language of artistic form. Manet and popular art: mass media begin to influence high art. Lithographs, the most powerful early mass images. Honoré Daumier (1808-1879): the public easel of the mass media. Emile Zola (1840-1902): words to focus the new visual language of the avant- garde. Zola's defense of Olympia. The dilemma of being modern.
Required (18 pages)

8. Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Wednesday, February 7)

John Berger--following Walter Benjamin--on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Claude Monet (1840-1926): moving beyond Manet. Monet's Impression Sunrise (1872). Impressionism: painting as the response of an active eye. Monet's laboratory of the eye: haystacks and cathedrals. The color wheel. Cool and warm colors, successive contrast, hue and value. Monet's water lilies and gardens: nature from perspective's other side. The Post-Impressionists: search for reality beyond the eye. Georges Seurat (1859-1891) and pointillism. Seurat's La Grande Jatte (1884-86). Paul Cézanne (1839-1906): creating an architecture of color and light with the density of matter. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890): art as self-revelation. Van Gogh's Starry Night (1889). Paul Gauguin (1848-1903): creating the myth of the noble savage. Henri Rousseau (1884-1910): wilderness and innocence in Paris. Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy (1897) and The Dream (1910).
Required (58 pages)

9. Movies Transform the Mass Media (Monday, February 12)

American roots of motion pictures in academic painting. Thomas Eakins (1844-1916): beyond the academy, toward the movies. Eakins in America. Photographic realism: pushing the image toward moving pictures. Scientific roots of motion pictures. Georges Méličs (1861-1938): movie magic. Edwin S. Porter (1870-1941) and the editing of real time and space. Porter's Great Train Robbery (1903) and the rise of the nickelodeon. D.W. Griffith (1880-1948): film as visual epic. Lighting, landscape, color tinting, camera movement. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977): cinema's mythic autonomous individual (still alive in IBM marketing?). Hollywood and the "talkies." Walt Disney (1901-1966): from free-form to "imagineering." Halftone: the photograph as mass media icon. Mass media photography and the myth of the news. Time (1923- ) and Life (1936- ) magazines. Advertising and the civilization of desire. McCloud introduces the "invisible art" of comics: A film, before it is projected, is just a very, very, very slow comic.
Required (47 pages)

III. THE BIRTH OF MODERNISM (4 lectures)

10. Emergence of the Modernist Impulse (Wednesday, February 14)
Metaphor for social change: The Eiffel Tower (1889), engineered object of the new mass audience. Machine aesthetics: horizontal space, succession and superimposition of views, unfolding of flickering surfaces, and an exaggerated sense of relative motion. The new world as seen from the new Tower. A sense of accelerated rate of change in art. New problems for artists. The first response: Cubism, the still-life of manmade objects. A new view of perspective. Cézanne as the father of abstract art. Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Toward the objective abstraction of analytic cubism. Synthetic cubism: putting the subject back into painting. The birth of collage: products of mass manufacture-- oilcloth, newsprint, wallpaper, product packaging--inside the traditional hand-made object. Juan Gris (1887-1927) and Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and his 30 views of the Eiffel Tower.
Required (32 pages)

11. From Abstraction to Cultural Revolution (Wednesday, February 21)

Futurism: cubism transformed into the visual language of the machine. Technology and the new man, a class of machine visionaries. Other Cubo-Futurist art of the period. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and the application of sequential photography. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), canonical image of modernism. Duchamp's Large Glass (1915-23). The influence of modern art on graphic design: Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Photography and the modern movement. The new avant-garde: toward abstraction and icons of cultural revolution. Toward subjective abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). The autonomous individual as mechanized superman. Universal dynamism as artistic language. Art as propaganda for violence, speed, and war. Constructivism: Russia welcomes the avant-garde. Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948). German expressionism: protests of the social nightmare between world wars. Dada: the avant-garde turns against culture. Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948). Surrealism: exploring the inner world through art. The influence of Freudian psychology. Max Ernst (1891-1976) and collage. Salvador Dali (1904-1989): artist as publicist and celebrity. McCloud on the vocabulary of comics: insights into what Magritte called "the treachery of images." The triangle of reality, language, and the picture plane, the realm of the art object where shapes, lines and colors cannot pretend to be other than themselves.
Required (80 pages)

12. Art Confronts World War (Monday, February 26)

World I ends the sense of promise of modernity and the optimism born of industrial technology. The words and images of art changed, radically and forever. War propaganda. The first of the conflicts of generation that would mark modern culture. Zurich and the Café Odéon as a haven for intellectual refugees, including Lenin, Joyce, and the Dadaists. Dada: seeking spontaneity in childhood and chance. Duchamp's attempts to de-mystify art: Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal, and LHOOQ (1919), a moustache on the Mona Lisa. The readymade: art by context. The Berlin Dadaists and photomontage: tricks of film editing to combine the documentary "truth" of photography with the grip of dreams. The new emblem of art: Prosthetic man, re-formed by war, part flesh and part machine. George Grosz (1893-1959) and his Republican Automata (1920). Weimar Germany as the leader of modernist culture. Art to amuse and please versus art to incite social revolution. The didactic art of icons: religious tradition and the hope for political art. The art of Agitprop: agitation and propaganda.
Required (30 pages)

13. Designing the Faces of Power (Wednesday, February 28)

Lenin reinvents "monumental" art. More practical if no less successful efforts: ROSTA posters, street theatre floats, and parade decor. Russian Constructivism: articulation of materials, modernity, and the dynamic unfolding of forces. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) and the Monument to the Third International (1919). The "monumental" architecture of Fascist Italy and Germany. Albert Speer (1905-1981) and the Berlin Dome: architecture eclipsed by mass media. Aesthetics and authority: the architecture of regularity. Albany Mall, New York. Surviving art of dissent: the murals of Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Picasso's Guernica (1937). War photography usurps the role of war artist. The end of effective political art? McCloud on "blood in the gutter." Closure as the grammar of sequential art.
Required (59 pages)

14. MIDTERM EXAMINATION (Monday, March 4)

No Required Reading

15. DISCUSSION OF MIDTERM (Wednesday, March 6)

No Required Reading

IV. THE AESTHETICS OF MODERNISM (4 lectures)

16. Impressionism: Landscapes of Pleasure (Monday, March 18)
Art as the ecstatic contemplation of pleasure in nature. Paradise as a world full of meaning. The influence of the new bourgeoisie. Impressionism: the most popular of all art movements. The impressionist view as the essence of realism: one thing in an instant, the fugitive effect of light and color. Lack of system (and therefore intimidation) is a source of popular appeal. Dictatorship of the eye over the mind. Basis of Seurat's theory in scientific studies of color and visual perception. Aureole interference and Pointillism. The act of seeing transcends religion: Monet treats Rouen Cathedral like a haystack or a tree. Cézanne, an artist who influenced almost everyone: Symbolists, Late Impressionists, Cubists. Painting from nature as realizing one's sensations. Gauguin establishes independent, symbolic color in art, foreshadowing the future of impressionism. The influence of Fauvism (1905-7): dissonant color, crudity of surface, distorted drawing, raw-looking sensation. Henri Matisse (1869-1954). His Music (1910) and The Dance (1910).
Required (30 pages)
17. The Impressionist Legacy (Wednesday, March 20)
The educated Bourgeoisie as audience for advanced art. Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). Matisse's découpages or "cut-outs": The Swimmingpool (1952) and Large Decoration with Masks (1953). Resurgence of the decorative art of pleasure in America after 1950: Helen Frankenthaler (1928- ), Morris Louis (1912-1962) and Kenneth Noland (1924- ). The tradition of Symbolism in which poetry or painting might parallel the satisfactions of the world without necessarily describing it. The modernist ideal of direct equivalences among sensation, color, sound, and ideated memory. McCloud on time frames.
Required (47 pages)

18. Utopian Architecture (Monday, March 25)

Architecture as the home of the Utopian impulse in art. The critical period 1880-1930, when the language of architecture changed more radically than in the previous four centuries. Social transformation through architecture and design as a driving force of modernist culture. Art Nouveau versus the International Style. Technology implies planning. The "House-Tool" or mass-production house. Adolf Loos (1870-1933) launches the attack on decorated architecture. His essay, Ornament and Crime (1908), and Steiner House, Vienna (1910). Futurist architecture: the house as machine. From the sense of the monumental to a taste for the light, practical, and ephemeral. Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871: architecture as distinct from engineering. Louis Henry Sullivan (1856- 1924) and the aesthetic of the load-bearing steel frame. Balloon frame and bearing-wall construction versus Sullivan's lyric theme of verticality. Modern skyscrapers. Reinforced concrete and the Century Hall, Breslau (1913) of Max Berg (1870-1947), the world's largest dome. McCloud on living in line: Art does not reproduce the visible, but rather makes visible.
Required (32 pages)
19. The Modernist Legacy (Wednesday, March 27)
Sheet glass, the supreme Utopian material. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and the face of the modern corporation: glittering films hung on steel skeletons. The Mies aesthetic as the epitome of reason: straight lines, rational thought, extreme refinement of proportion and detailing. Mies's German Pavilion, Barcelona (1929) and Seagram Building, New York City (1956-8). His extraordinary influence on two generations of designers: toward the city without noodles. The aesthetic of prefabrication. Town planning and the obsession with social hygiene. Le Corbusier (1887-1965), great aesthete of architecture. His Villa Savoye, Poissy (1929-31) as the zenith of International Style. The Bauhaus and Walter Gropius (1883-1969). Making tangible the modern corporation with a complete package of visual style, from buildings to letterhead. Bauhaus furniture. The Dutch idealist design group de Stijl. Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). The urban redevelopment movement. Learning from Brasilia (1960).
Required (37 pages)

V. MODERNISM IN DECLINE (4 lectures)

20. Television as the New Cultural Center (Monday, April 1)
The advent of television. Video aesthetics: pure painting versus pure television. Various ways to manipulate the video image. The home as filter. The filters of drama and personality. Removing the filter of personality: television as pure fact. The background of the video image: breaking the closed circle of television. The uniqueness of the video image: the background emerges. Television background: the shock of the news. From stereotypes to real images. New stereotypes to fit the news and the new status of women. Manipulating background: the role of feedback from real events. Television's impact on the popular arts. Beyond the networks: video democracy or segregation? New video forms and new opportunities for avant-garde artists. McCloud on show and tell: the collision between pictures and words when art moves away from resemblance toward ideas and meaning while writing becomes more pictorial. On the balance between pictures and words, resemblance and meaning.
Required (44 pages)

21. Surrealism: Threshold of Liberty (Wednesday, April 3)

The Surrealist impulse: the intellectual quest for absolute freedom. Art for probing forbidden areas of the mind--the Unconscious. The hope that chance, memory, desire, and coincidence might be made to meet in a new reality--a sur-reality--of previously hidden interrelationships. The surrealist impulse in Romantic art: Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). His Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914) and Disquieting Muses (1916). Max Ernst's The Elephant Celebes (1921) and Two Children are Menaced by a Nightingale (1924). The problem that irrationality has no given form. Three Surrealist solutions: child art, the art of the mad, and "primitive" art--all untutored and therefore uncensored. Henri Rousseau as major primitive stylist. The Ideal Palace, Hauterives (1879-1912) of Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924), a sacred spot for the Surrealists. The best pure painter among the Surrealists: Joan Miró (1893-1974). Miró's Farm (1921-2), Tilled Field (1923-4), Harlequin's Carnival (1924-5), and Dog Barking at the Moon (1926). Work of two of Miró's fellow countrymen, Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926), including his Sagrada Familia, Barcelona (1903- ), and Salvador Dali, including his Persistence of Memory (1931) and Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937). Realism, pressed to extreme detail, to subvert one's sense of reality. A new art form: the Surrealist Object. Meret Oppenheim's Luncheon in Fur (1936). René Magritte (1898-1967), master of the narrative impulse. His Treason of Images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) (1928-9) and Human Condition I (1934) as examples of his lasting influence on the formation of images and on their interpretation. Surrealist forerunners of documented performance pieces. The boxes of Joseph Cornell (1903-1973). Surrealist influence on Abstract Expressionism: psychic automatism. Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) as bridge between the two movements. The Surrealist legacy: work of Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Christo, and various forms of irrational confrontation, solipsistic performance, happenings, and body-art.
Required (57 pages)

22. Expressionism: The View from the Edge (Monday, April 8)

One great theme of 19th-century Romantic art: the interplay between world and spirit. This leads to a search for images of states of mind embodied in nature but outside of conscious control. As the influence of religion wanes, in the 20th century, Expressionists seize such explorations with special intensity. What van Gogh called his "terrible lucidity." His Sunflowers (1888). The "pathetic fallacy" in painting. Between 1886 and 1890, van Gogh opens the modern syntax of color to pity and terror, thereby bridging 19th-century Romanticism with 20th-century Expressionism. Edvard Munch (1963-1944), the first modern painter devoted to personality as created by conflict. Munch's Scream (1893) and Puberty (1894-5). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and his At the Moulin Rouge (1892-5). German and Austrian Expressionism. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Die Brucke. Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) and his Tempest (1914). Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and Chaim Soutine (1894-1943). Kandinsky's interest in "synesthesia," the direct transfer of responses from one sense to another so that one might "see" sounds and "hear" colors. Der Blaue Reiter. Paul Klee (1879-1940): blurring the distinction between writing and art--the hieroglyph in emblematic space. McCloud on the six steps to the creation of any work in any medium: idea/purpose, form, idiom, structure, craft, and surface.
Required (61 pages)
23. Completing the Agenda of Modernism (Wednesday, April 10)
De Kooning's Women of 1950-53: linking the idea of the primitive idol to both Expressionism and to the vulgarity of mass media imagery like that of Life magazine and Times Square billboards. Francis Bacon (1909-1992). Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957): combining forms from Rumanian peasant culture, African tribal sculpture, and machine technology--a modernist reduction of form. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). The striking innovations of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and his action paintings. His Lavender Mist (1950). Abstract Expressionism. The large and solemn fields of color of its "theological" wing: Clyfford Still (1904-1980) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). The Rothko Chapel, Houston (1964-7) as the last silence of Romanticism. From rituals to art: private rituals become public myth. Pollock and the mass media: Public myth destroys the private self. Abstract expressionism: personal abstractions of Franz Kline (1910-1962) and Willem de Kooning (1904- ). The subject returns: Robert Rauschenberg (1925- ). Pop Art: embracing the mass media. Andy Warhol (1930-1987): celebrity as commodity, commodities as celebrities. Roy Lichtenstein (1923- ): modern art as "Newspeak." Painting completes its language of abstraction and realism: Minimal Art and Op Art. Exploring the uncertainty of seeing. Photo-Realism: processing photographic information into art. The dilemma of modern art's successes.
Required (20 pages)
Optional for Video (18 pages)

IV. THE RISE OF POST-MODERNISM (4 lectures)

24. The Ideology and Imagery of Advertising (Monday, April 15)
Advertising art. New power and personality for technological products and organizations. The television commercial: the medium's ideological center. The 30-second commercial: icon of American culture. Commercials as movies, myths, and personal experiences, and as dramas for experiencing commodities. Experiences of patriotism, family, and fun. The product as erotic experience. Absorbing the tradition of Western art. The tradition of the avant-garde: high priority to personal expression. Attaching the myth of personality to a product. Judy Chicago's Dinner Party (1979). Modern art in the media age: icons of individuality and openness. Corporate identity and visual systems come of age. John Berger on advertising and glamour. McCloud on color.
Required (49 pages)

25. Culture as Nature: Advertising and Pop Art (Wednesday, April 17)

Nature replaced by the culture of congestion, of cities and mass media. This overload changes art, forcing it to compete with a new forest of stimuli. The problem for art becomes how to survive. Inevitable cloning of famous objects like the Mona Lisa, so that they lose their singularity and come to resemble signs. Paintings educate but signs discipline--mass language tends to speak in the imperative voice. Art's defense: to graft its own wilting language onto the vitality of mass media. Stuart Davis (1894-1964), the only American artist between the wars to look only to Culture. His Odol (1924) as ancestor of American Pop art. Robert Rauschenberg: A work of art can exist for any length of time, in any material, any place, for any purpose. His Monogram (1955-9), the goat in the tire. Jasper Johns (1930- ) and his principal motifs (1955-61): targets, stencilled words and numbers, flags, rulers, and fragments of human anatomy. His White Flag (1955) and Target with Plaster Casts (1955). The theme of sign versus art. Pop art. The role of celebrity. Andy Warhol and the cultivation of publicity. His art of machine repetition and the inert sameness of the mass product. Inverting the process on which advertising depended: art as container for celebrity, the avant-garde in the world of fashion and commercial manipulation. Roy Lichtenstein draws from print media: distancing an image with enlarged printer's dots. James Rosenquist (1933- ) draws from the billboard: art as a torrential sequence of images. Art's increasing dependence on the museum. The Las Vegas strip. Claes Oldenburg (1929- ): The world not as function but as form. His Clothespin, Philadelphia (1976). Conceptual art and Photo-Realism. The conceptual image. Art Spiegelman and the post-modern comic book. Beginning Maus: "The Sheik" and "The Honeymoon."
Required (73 pages)
26. The Challenges of Post-Modernism (Monday, April 22)
Post-modernism: experimental, encyclopedic, eclectic. Post-modernism's roots: questioning the rectangles. Happenings: art becomes process instead of product. Robert Smithson (1938-1973): harnessing a work to processes beyond art. Concept art: Is art what artist does? Feminist art--more than simply more women artists? Post-modernist painting: the search for subject matter. Romare Bearden (1914-1988): collages of the Black experience. Masami Teraoka (1936- ): bridging East and West. Carlos Almaraz (1941- ): expressionism from the Los Angeles barrio. Christo (1935- ): fusing Earth, technology, and the mass media. Christo's Running Fence (1976). Avant-garde television: the era of portable video begins. Ed Emshwiller (1925- ): from painting to video. Nam June Paik (1932- ): video as happening. MTV and the VCR: a new audience and a new generation of musical and video artists. Carol Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen: bridging the gap between avant-garde and commercial video. Continuing Art Spiegelman's Maus: "Prisoner of War" and "The Noose Tightens."
Required (76 pages)

27. The Future That Was (Wednesday, April 24)

The end of modernism and "The Age of the Avant-Garde"? Cultural avant- garde as a 19th-century invention of the rising European bourgeoisie and its liberal beliefs. The role of didactic art before mass literacy. The 19th-century French salon as free market of ideas. Courbet's mission and impact. Other origins of the avant-garde in Manet's quest for formal perfection without hope of changing the world. George Segal (1924- ) and Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). The meaning of avant-garde art gutted by the market. Pricing's influence on aesthetics. The eclipse of art movements after 1965. Kineticism. The sense of cultural pluralism dissolves the hope for an avant-garde. Conceptual art: legacy of Duchamp's infra-mince. The museum supplants the Church as the American city's focus of civic pride. Museum as accomplice of vanguard art. Minimalism. The successful museum as low-rating mass medium. Implications of land-art and body-art. The revival of realist painting in the early 1970s. David Hockney (1937- ) and Philip Pearlstein (1924- ). Conclusions: signs of the constrictions of novelty. Continuing Art Spiegelman's Maus: "Mouse Holes."
Required (57 pages)
Optional (21 pages)
28. Conclusions: Looking Forward and Back (Monday, April 29)
Concluding Spiegelman's Maus: "Mouse Trap." McCloud puts it all together. Reviewing McCloud's theory: comics as the invisible art. Extending the theory to all art. The artist and the work of art, the eye and the mind. Reconsidering the nature of art and questions of what is or is not art. Complications of 19th- and 20th-century technologies reviewed. What relationships have we found among technology and economy, popular culture and art, and the criteria for art and--possibly--good art as well? Is art the imitation of nature, as Plato and Aristotle believed, or is it the recording of subjective impressions, the expression of creativity or emotion, or the presentation of cultural (mythical or iconic) symbols? Is the good in art objective (inherent in content) or subjective (peculiar to each observer)? Looking forward: art in the Age of Computers and beyond. Looking back: What since the paintings at Lascaux, if anything, has changed?
Required (58 pages)

Home Page Class Project Syllabus Image Library Bulletin Board Class Web Resources