Category: Liberal Arts Electives

This seminar explores the following: (i) art becomes modern when art is rejected; (ii) there is no modern art without poetry, philosophy, ethics or the political; (iii) art becomes modern when the poet Charles Baudelaire realizes the city as an active subject in art; (iv) the city and anti-art produce an avant-garde which claims to refuse art. Broadly speaking, the course is not concerned with the claim of a particular movement or artist as the beginning of modern and/or avant-garde activity; instead the course is concerned with the practices, attitudes and values that make for distinctively modern conceptions of artistic activities, of which the following are emphasized:, the city, poetry, spectacle and performance. There is a special section in the course devoted to the city and film. Students will be encouraged to devise creative responses in film, photography, digital media, drawing, painting, sculpture etc. to their environment.

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: Take one 3.0 credit, 200 level course from one of the following subjects: DAH (Art History), DEN (English), DAS (Academic Studies), DVC (Visual Culture).

Madness has been of interest to philosophers, psychologists, social scientists – as well as to artists. The history of art, culture and literature is filled with “mad or romantic geniuses.”, This course proposes a comparative examination of the transition of “marginalized” forms of representation from “insanity” into the field of aesthetic and cultural practice by a consideration of the art and drawing of the insane (from asylums), short story (Edgar Allen Poe), poetry (Sylvia Plath), painting (Van Gogh, Surrealism, de Kooning), and film (Ingmar Berman’s ”Through a Glass Darkly”). The course seeks a balance between critical theory (Plato, Romanticism, Avant-Garde, Feminism), close reading (engaging each person’s affective response), and developments in the changing status of the scientific, social and intellectual situation of works. Course credit may be used as English or Philosophy.

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: Take one 3.0 credit, 200 level course from one of the following subjects: DAH (Art History), DEN (English), DAS (Academic Studies), DVC (Visual Culture).

This interdisciplinary course is an examination of the cultural systems, history, and art of human beings who espouse the world’s great religions:, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The broad course objective is to introduce students to the differing ways that humans organize and express their culture and beliefs, their relationship to nature and the cosmos, and to each other, through the making and use of religious concepts, ideologies, art and architecture.

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: Take one 3.0 credit, 200 level course from one of the following subjects: DAH (Art History), DEN (English), DAS (Academic Studies), DVC (Visual Culture).

Since classical antiquity in the Western tradition there has been a central dialogue between philosophy and poetry on the question of genre: What is philosophy?, What is poetry?, In what way might philosophy and poetry be related?, Do philosophy and poetry point to different kinds of experience or different kinds of knowledge? Through a selection of texts from Plato and Aristotle to Heidegger, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe along with the poetry of Surrealism, Paul Celan, J.H. Prynne and Anne Carson, this course will look at the way in which the mutual interrogation of poetry and philosophy has been central to the thinking about modernity and the nature of experience as social or resistant to the claims of the social.

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: Take one 3.0 credit, 200 level course from one of the following subjects: DAH (Art History), DEN (English), DAS (Academic Studies), DVC (Visual Culture).

Care of the City: Detroit is an introduction to Social Practice and Post-Studio art which through an exploration of spaces of marginality and collapse in cities in relation to durational collaboration with communities as a response to collapse and as evidence of an ethics of care. The main question pursued: what does it mean to care for a city? And: is care a choice? We shall make numerous visits in Detroit as well as extended comparisons with Chicago (Theaster Gates), New Orleans (Paul Chan and Joshua Decter), Houston (Rick Lowe), and Los Angeles (Suzanne Lacy). We shall explore the image of the city in Social Practices through music (Marvin Gaye), poetry, and film (the League of Revolutionary Black Workers). Short readings in philosophy, theology, and psychology will complement cultural, historical, and aesthetic texts in an attempt to develop a critical practice distinctive to the new experiences emerging in Social Practice and post-studio forms and the ethics of care.

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: Take one 3.0 credit, 200 level course from one of the following subjects: DAH (Art History), DEN (English), DAS (Academic Studies), DVC (Visual Culture).