080040 SE Seminar: The Fate of National Culture: Art between Local and Global (nst.K.) (2017W)

Course Description:
This seminar examines contemporary artistic practices that treat the multivalent notion of ‘national culture’ within the contexts of modernity and globalization. In our current historical moment, what aesthetic forms, techniques, and strategies are artists of different generations, genders, and backgrounds inventing and deploying to make ‘national cultures’ manifest? How are artistic practitioners responding to efforts by states, governments, and museological institutions to construct various narratives of national culture? How are they confronting an intensifying politics of identity in which national culture – specifically the categorization of groups according to belief systems, customs, and behaviors -- becomes a field of contestation and the site for both progressive and reactionary agendas? And what is the role of market forces in the articulation of national culture as it relates to the construction of the local and the global? Finally, what is the role of a dominant, Western model of art history in establishing the criteria through which national culture is affirmed or denied as part of universal (or global) culture?

Course Aims: The aims of the course are to 1) familiarize students with the practices, histories, and theories of Contemporary Art; 2) engage with the issues raised by these practices along multidisciplinary pathways, including urban geography, sociology, cultural studies, feminist criticism, postcolonial theories, and political philosophy; 3) introduce students to methods, models, and theories for the critical analysis of contemporary art.

Course Methods: This is a conceptually and theoretically driven seminar that approaches the study of contemporary art as an expanded and entwined constellation of representational artifacts, discursive objects, and material practices. Within this multidisciplinary constellation, we will be attentive to the ways in which artistic production relates and responds to forces, techniques, and effects of power and is implicated in the constitution of new subjectivities.

Specific pedagogical methods include: Close textual and visual analysis; class discussions, oral and written components, field trips.