Week 1:
Class 1. Course presentation, scope, and requirements
Class 2. The art of the times: an overview of contemporary art practice from 1990 to today
Week 2:
Class 1. Shifts, issues and trends in art from 1990 - 2000
Week 2 will begin by exploring more thoroughly issues and trends from 1990 – 2000, a decade bookended by two indelible events: the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11.
Class 2. The Brash, the Garish, the Notorious: Young British Artists
This class will focus on the loosely affiliated group of British artists who came into prominence in the late 1980s-early 1990s and went on to define an era.
Week 3:
Class 1. Postcolonialism, politics of identity and the vision of “self”
A focus on exhibition case studies that elucidate the burgeoning urgency in art to address, investigate and critique socio-political complexity through aesthetic enquiry.
Exhibitions in focus: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York, 1993; Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum, 1994
Class 2. Artists in focus: Matthew Barney, Mike Kelley
This class will concentrate on two of the most prominent artists of the 1990s, exploring both how their practices shaped the decade, and their continuing influence on subsequent generations of artists.
Week 4:
Class 1. Reclaiming the Political Project of the Avant-garde
This case study will examine prescient shifts in an exhibition’s traditional spectrum, from presentation and display to critical assessment and discussion.
Exhibitions in focus: Documenta X, Kassel, 1997; Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002
Class 2. Artists as facilitators, viewers as participants: Relational Aesthetics
This class will address the practice of making art based on interpersonal relations and their social context, a tendency that framed the art of the decade.
Week 5:
Class 1. Artists in focus: Felix Gonzalez Torres, Cady Noland
A further focus on key, influential artists of the 1990s.
Class 2. Biennial focus: The Biennial Boom
The 1990s was the decade when biennials, from Dakar to Johannesburg to Rotterdam, became central nodes in artistic production and transmission.
Week 6:
Class 1. Shifts, issues and trends in art from 2000 to 2010
This class will explore the major issues and trends that came to the fore in the new millennium, in part facilitated by the growth of visual culture as an interdisciplinary field of study that takes a multi-faceted approach to understanding the construction of identity, gender, class and power relationships.
Class 2. New Directions in Exhibition Making: the discursive and the flexible versus the immersive and the experiential
This class will consider the engagement of the viewer, as experienced in apparently opposing trends in exhibition making.
Week 7:
Class 1. Artists in focus: Maurizio Cattelan, Ai Weiwei
This class will concentrate on two of the most prominent artists of the 2000s, exploring how their practices shaped the decade.
Class 2. Midterm review
Week 8:
Class 1. Midterm Exam
Class 2. Once More, With Feeling: Performance and re-enactment
A focus on the resurgence of performance art as one of the most vibrant, topical, and discussed arenas in the arts.
Week 9:
Class 1. Artist focus: Marina Abramović
This class will concentrate on one of the most significant and influential performance artists.
Class 2. The Center Will Not Hold
An exploration of transnational connections and themes: geography, formal concerns, and collective aesthetic and political impulses.
Exhibition in focus: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MOCA, Los Angeles, 2007
Week 10:
Class 1. Art fair focus: the curatorial turn
More art festival than art fair, it becomes a breeding ground for research, discovery and activation, not necessarily originating from the market.
Class 2. Shifts, issues and trends in art from 2010 to today
This class will explore the most recent issues and trends of the now, an era that can already be defined as a reckoning in contemporary art.
Week 11:
Class 1. Post-Internet art: the techno sublime
The purview of art being made in the context of digital technology will be discussed.
Class 2. Artists in focus: Hito Steyerl, Zanele Muholi
This class will concentrate on two of the most prominent artists of the 2010s, exploring how their practices shaped the decade.
Week 12:
Class 1. Medium appropriation or immersive art forms?
The growth of visual culture into an interdisciplinary field of study.
Exhibitions in focus: Tim Burton, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009; Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2011; Bowie is, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2013
Class 2. On-site visit to an exhibition in Rome
Week 13:
Class 1. The long overdue: readdressing the canon with late-in-life retrospectives of women artists
Through a constellation of exhibition examples, this class will examine how the traditional artistic canon is being reevaluated and rewritten through the inclusion of once marginal practices.
Class 2. Artists in focus: Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa
This class will focus on two of today’s most ground-breaking and influential artists.
Week 14:
Class 1. Guest lecture
Class 2. Final Exam review + Research paper due
Week 15:
Final Exam Week
OVERVIEW OF KEY BIBLIOGRAPHIC WORKS FOR THE COURSE
Als, Hilton. "Are You Being Served?: An Oral History of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas's The Shop", frieze, No. 220, June/July/August 2021.
Als, Hilton. White Girls, McSweeney’s, 2013.
Altshuler, Bruce. Biennials and Beyond. Exhibitions that Made Art History, Volume II: 1962-2002. Phaidon Press, 2013.
Ault, Julie. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Steidl, 2006.
Bang Larsen, Lars. “The Long Nineties. Revisiting art’s social turn and the 1990s: the decade that has yet to end”, frieze, Issue 144, 1 January 2012.
Barney, Matthew, Nelson, Maggie, Spector, Nancy. Matthew Barney: Otto Trilogy. Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 2016.
Bishop, Claire. Artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso Books, 2012.
Bishop, Claire. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents”, Artforum, February 2006.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse Du Reel, 1998.
Broackes, Victoria, Marsh, Geoffrey. David Bowie is. Victoria & Albert Pubns, 2013.
Cornell, Lauren, Halter, Ed. Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, 2015.
Elger, Dietmar. Felix Gonzalez-Torres Catalogue Raisonne. Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1997.
Enwezor, Okwui, Basualdo, Carlos, Fisher, Jean. Documenta11_Plattform5: The Catalog. Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002.
Evans, David (ed). Appropriation. Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. MIT Press, 2009.
Foster, Hal, Krauss, Rosalind, Bois, Yve-Alain, Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. Art Since 1900: Modernism Antimodernism Postmodernism. Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Fullerton, Elizabeth. Artrage!: The Story of the BritArt Revolution. Thames & Hudson, 2016.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: live art since the 60s. Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Thames & Hudson, 2011.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century. Thames & Hudson, 2018.
Green, Charles. Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art. Wiley Blackwell, 2016.
Harrison, Charles, Paul, Wood. Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Pub, 2002.
Hoffmann, Jens. Theater of Exhibitions. Sternberg Press, 2015.
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art, 2000.
Jones, Amelia (ed). A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945. Blackwell, 2006.
Kelley, Mike. Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism. MIT Press, 2003.
Kocur, Zoya, Leung, Simon (eds). Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Blackwell, 2007 (2005).
Laing, Olivia. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. W W Norton & Co Inc, 2020.
Lingwood, James. Rachel Whiteread : House. Phaidon Inc Ltd, 1995.
Muir, Gregor. Lucky Kunst: The Story of the YBA, Aurum Press Ltd, 2009.
Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. W. W. Norton Company, 2011.
O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures. MIT Press, 2016.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Matthew Barney: The Conversation Series 27. Walter Konig, 2012.
Putnam, James. Art And Artifact: The Museum As Medium. Thames & Hudson, 2009.
Respini, Eva (ed.). Art in the Age of the Internet 1989 to Today. Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in association with Yale University Press, New Haven, 2018.
Rosenthal, Norman, Adams, Brooks, Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain). Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. Thames & Hudson, 1998.
Spector, Nancy. Maurizio Cattelan: All. Guggenheim Museum Publications; Revised edition, 2016.
Spector, Nancy, Neville Wakefield. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle. Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2002.
Stallabrass, Julian. Contemporary Art. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2006.
Stiles, Kristin, Selz, Peter (eds). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. UC Press, 2012.
Sussman, Elisabeth, Golden, Thelma, Hanhardt, John, Phillips, Lisa. 1993 Biennial Exhibition (Whitney Biennial). Whitney Museum of Art, 1993.
Sztulman, Paul. Documenta X: Short Guide. Distributed Art Pub Inc, 1997.
Waidner, Isabel. “An Alternative Art History of the 1990s”, frieze, Issue 220, 21 June 2021.
Welchman, John C. Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s. Routledge, 2003.
Welchman, John C. Mike Kelley, Interviews, conversations, and chit-chat (1986-2004), JRP|Ringier, 2005.
Whiteread, Rachel, Krauss, Rosalind, Bradley, Fiona, Tate Gallery Liverpool. Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life, Thames and Hudson, 1997.