ARTH 394 - Seminar in Art History

FDR: HA
Credits: 3-4

Winter 2020, ARTH 394A-01: Art and Technology (3). An investigation of the multiple intersections of technology and modern visual culture from the 19th century to the present. It is telling that the term “technology” derives from the ancient Greek word technê, referring to any manufactured object of art or craft. Taking this shared history as a point of departure, we consider how technological developments have shaped the making and viewing of art from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of net.art in the Digital Age. Students attend to the role of technology in re-shaping visual experience more broadly, asking how different innovations have successively altered the way that humans understand and engage with the world. (HA) Lazevnick.

Winter 2020, ARTH 394B-01: Ancient Cultures, New Markets: Modern and Contemporary Asian Art (3). Meets simultaneously with ARTH 245. Students may not register or receive credit for both. This course has additional upper-level assignments. An examination of the art movements of the last one hundred years from India, China, Tibet, and Japan, primarily through the lenses of the larger sociopolitical movements that informed much of Asia’s cultural discourses: Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Socialism, Communism, and Feminism. We also address debates concerning “non-Western” 20th-century art as peripheral to the main canons of Modern and Contemporary art. By the end of the course, students have created a complex picture of Asian art/artists, and have engaged broader concepts of transnationalism, as well as examined the roles of galleries, museums, and auction houses in establishing market value and biases in acquisition practices. (HA) Kerin.

Spring 2020, ARTH 394-01: Seminar in Art History: “Little Magazines”: In the Archives and on the Web (3). Between 1880 and 1950, hundreds of small-press, non-commercial journals were published in cities around the world, their pages filled with a mixture of radical poetry, fiction, avant-garde art, manifestos, and criticism. These so-called “little magazines” were small in publication run but not in ambition. In fact, many scholars believe that little magazines were the single most important factor in fostering modernist and avant-garde thought during the period. Through an in-depth exploration of little magazines, this seminar brings together two types of scholarly research: archival and digital. We first explore these journals in-person and then examine their “digital” afterlives in the archives. What are the advantages and disadvantages of migrating historical material to a virtual platform? What new kinds of scholarship are made possible due to increased accessibility to digitized little magazines and how might access to such materials change our ideas about modernism? Students make trips to Special Collections at W&L and the University of Virginia, and maintain a personal website based on their research. (HA) Lazevnik.

Spring 2020, ARTH 394-02: Technical Examination of Paintings (3). Prerequisite: CHEM 156. An examination of the intersection of various imaging modalities and/or the study of the materiality of European and American paintings with their art history. We focus on publications from the technical art history literature and on research projects in which the professor has been involved. Uffelman. [applicable to Museum Studies]