A Very Unusual Course in Art History

Art History Professor Kim Paice is teaching a very unusual course this quarter called Art, Architecture, and Spatial Politics.

We are fortunate to have artists, art historians, a social worker, architects, designers, and urban planners. While 20 students are currently enrolled for the course, approximately 7 people are auditing (including one professor). Thus far students have completed journal writings and we have attended a performance of a visiting Lebanese artist (sponsored by the Taft Foundation and Women's Studies).

The final assignment will allow students to work in media of their choosing so there will be good pictures to send. For now, there are no photos of student work but attached are related photographs taken by one student (Chris Whitley) last spring when we were touring Cincinnati with Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Chris and several of the students on that tour are in the course this quarter and we are discussing the CLUI.

Art, Architecture, and Spatial Politics University of Cincinnati Winter Quarter 2008 23 Art H 584 001 (Elective Studies in Art History) taught by Professor Kim Paice

Description and Objectives: This course provides an overview of art and architecture from the 1950s to today in relation to understandings of place and spatiality that have dominated critical debates in recent decades. Topics for discussion will include urban dérives or strolls, the advent of the phenomenology of everyday life, Henri LeFebvre on cities, and Beat poetry (Allen Ginsberg) and music (Bob Dylan).

We will consider matters of privacy, institutional and public spheres, discursive spaces, exile, and media, including performance art, video art, Web art, architecture, and installation. Our discussions will bridge cultural criticism and legal-political theory. Readings therefore include transdisciplinary studies of land use, architecture (Giorgio Agamben, Eyal Weizman), contemporary artist collectives (Gregory Sholette, Blake Stimson), and geography, prisons, and art (Trevor Paglen, Angela Y. Davis), museum exhibition catalogues on interventions in contemporary art (Nato Thompson, Gregory Sholette), and writings of artists and cultural critics, such as Greil Marcus and James Baldwin.

With sensitivity to the displacement within communities, civic life, and territories, the art and architecture in this course will be situated in relation to specific places and political understandings of spatiality. Focus will fall to contemporary cultural works, places, and terminology. While the primary objective of this course is to introduce students to individual cultural works, we will also attempt to situate these works within specific historical and critical contexts. Another priority in the course will be to introduce methodological models of writing about history. The format of meetings will include instructional lecture, discussion, presentations led by students, and screenings of films and videos. There will be one optional field trip (performance work by Lebanese artist Leila Farrah).