080040 SE Seminar: The Art of Pedagogy, the Pedagogy of Art (nst.K.) (2019S)

Course Description:
This course examines contemporary artistic, curatorial and exhibitionary practices that situate themselves as contributing to modes, techniques, and discourses of pedagogy. We will engage with practices that make visible, expand, and critique conditions and institutions of knowledge. These will be analyzed in relation to historical precedents emerging from multiple modernities and current sociopolitical and cultural conditions of production and reception in neoliberal global capitalisms.
Some preliminary questions framing our study include: 1) How do artistic practitioners and cultural workers in diverse contexts transform issues surrounding educating and learning into representational, spatial, discursive, and material phenomena? 2) How do they give form to the intertwined challenges of “learning” and “living” together and grapple with the need to shape renewed imaginations, practices, and methodologies towards diverse ways of knowing and collective change? 3) What are some images of the ‘people’ that emerge from these practices and how do these intersect with both dominant and minor fictions produced by other disciplines and institutions?

Course Aims: The aims of the course are to 1) familiarize students with the practices, histories, and theories of contemporary art that focuses on issues of pedagogy; 2) engage with the issues raised by these practices along multidisciplinary pathways, including critical ethnic studies, gender studies, post colonial studies and decolonization; 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, events.