Special Topics in Modern Art (368-0-1)
Topic
Transnational Avant-Gardes: Imagining the Future
Instructors
Jessy Bell
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-319: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM
Overview of class
This course explores the movement of future-oriented art practices across the overlapping geopolitical spaces of modernity, 1900-1968. We focus on five paradigms that sought to place art in the position of the vanguard of social and political change. We engage these movements and their use and claims of art and architecture as "avant-garde" forces against established conventions. We examine Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, and Socialist Realism, tracing their formations and transformations across multiple geographies, including the Soviet Union, the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere.
We will engage these practices first from a historical perspective, examining the broad spectrum of new and critical art that emerged in the twentieth century. Our historical lens will focus on the transnational movement and connectivity of people and ideas, taking into consideration how the global economy of an unequal distribution of resources contributed to these practices. Secondly, and interconnected to these historical and economic shifts, we will adopt a historiographic perspective, questioning how the avant-garde has been depicted and acclaimed—assessed for meaning—for historians, artists, and collectives during various periods of transformation and resistance (and even revolution). Rather than drawing a strict division between the historical and so-called "neo" avant-garde movements, our aim is to recognize the continued exchanges and interplays between the avant-garde projects that preceded World War II and those that emerged after. This trans-temporal line of inquiry allows us to contemplate the continuation of avant-garde practices as artists navigated new contradictions and contexts in the ostensibly bipolar Cold War order.
Class Materials (Required)
No textbook required.
Class Notes
Waitlist information for this course: https://arthistory.northwestern.edu/courses/2024-2025/registration_waitlist.html
Class Attributes
Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Historical Studies Distro Area
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area