SOME LECTURE TOPICS
Cycle-Logical Art: Recycling Matters in Art and Ecology
Recycling has infiltrated contemporary art making through artists’ material choices, their career choices, and their conceptual considerations. Reuse replaces innovation. Used materials substitute for new materials. Cycling the art work takes the place of preserving it. Six contemporary artists provide evidence of this challenging arena of art.
Environmental-Schisms: Eight Perspectives on Eco-Art
Dissimilar strategies are summoned by people who share the common goal of assuring the ecological vigor of the environment. Each approach utilizes a contrasting strategy to support a different set of priorities. In this lecture, artists represent eight distinct approaches to environmentalism: preservationist, conservationist, enviro-therapist, sustainist, aestheticist, nostalgist, opti-mysticist, and pessi-mysticist. As Alan Sonfist, Ellen Harvey, Ashley Bickerton and others demonstrate, each has something worthwhile to contribute.
ECOcentric Topics: Pioneering Themes for Eco-Art
Art conjoins with ecology each time artists synchronize non-human organisms, the non-living environment, and human actions. This encompassing mandate revamps, and sometimes reverses, cherished cultural values and entrenched cultural norms. Damien Hirst, Catherine Chalmers, and Superflex are among the artists who address conventional concepts from eco-centric perspectives and exemplify this daring arena of artistic exploration.
Animal. Anima. Animus.
Eight contemporary artists seek to reclaim kinship with animals that is typically associated with pastoralists, hunters, herders, and fishers. This rapport is not common in cultures where people encounter animals as pets, meat, nuisances, dangers, or zoo occupants. Artists include Marina Abramovic, Xu Bing, Dennis Oppenhiem, Carolee Schneemann, and others.
Blind Art? Blind Art!
Five fully-sighted artists integrate blindness into their creative process defying the famous dictum by Leonardo DaVinci, “The eye is the window of the body through which it… enjoys the beauty of the world.” Why artists withdraw from seeing?
What aspect of the human condition or the state of the world are these artists communicating about our time in history?
Free Radicals:Why Do Artists Innovate?
Art is a visual embodiment of a cultural condition. Artists who were contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson reflected the values derived from an era of coaches, home-baked bread, and quill pens. Today’s artists are in tune with cyberspace, mega hurts, digital imagery, microsecond communications, virtual reality, cloning, satellite transmissions, space explorations, and environmental degradation.
Janine Antoni: Affliction and Release
Antoni embodies plights that beset people who enjoy material abundance and social opportunity, especially middleclass women.
I Am an Artist Because………: Defining Your Artistic Mission
By selecting a profession as amorphous as art, each artist is at liberty to choose to be a trickster, philosopher, mentor, prophet, saint, prankster, documenter, commentator, interpreter, designer, inventor, dreamer, theorist, critic, role model, idealist, pragmatist, beautifier, and so forth.
Art Pedagogy: Teaching an Unruly Discipline
Art exists without boundaries, without qualifying characteristics, without established standards, and without a definition of itself. This lecture presents ideas about selecting the content and skills to help students navigate this amorphous field of operation.
Avant-Garde Art: You Are an Expert, Although You May Not Know It
Check your expectations about art in the museum cloak room and explore contemporary art wrapped in contemporary experience. You may discover that vanguard art looks odd if it is compared with historic art, but it looks normal when compared to surfing the internet, worrying about global warming, using nano-technologies, globe-trotting, etc.
Choice: Opportunity? Burden? Privilege? Curse?
Citizens in the contemporary environment confront an unprecedented proliferation of options provided by the media, the marketplace, and the Internet. It has not always been possible to choose a profession, a place of residence, a partner, a religion, a style of dress, and so forth. Art maximizes alternatives. It is essentially limitless.
Art What Thou Eat: Images of Food in American Art
Grouping art works chronologically according to theme generates a visual record of American social history as seen through the eyes of each period’s most astute observers – its artists. The themes include rituals, technology, markets, packaging, lunch-breaks, death, sexuality, and so forth.
The Maximal Implications of the Minimal Line
A straight line, the single most elementary visual unit, is the formal denominator that unites the surprisingly diverse work of fifty-eight artists from the 1960-1980s. They dramatize that the extreme reduction that characterizes the aesthetic code of Minimalism inspired intense creativity and enabled artists to convey concepts related to gender, nature, and industry with wit, humor, elegance, and/or banality.