Studies in 20th & 21st-Century Art (460-0-2)

Topic

Refusal

Instructors

Rebecca Zorach

Meeting Info

University Library 3370: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This course examines "refusal" in 20th and 21st century art, theory, and politics, mostly in the US, beginning with earlier short stories: Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" and his "I prefer not to" and Franz Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." The idea is to get at modes of resistance and negation that might be quiet, obdurate, modest, slow, sometimes withdrawing from view or barely legible. Topics include the labor, care, and negotiations involved in the production of so-called passive resistance; the deployment of silence, slowness, and immobility; artists' refusal of representation, of making objects, or of making art at all, in the case of individual artist projects but also strikes and boycotts; "anti-work" theory and practice; Arte Povera and analogues; activist practices of sitting in and occupying (in civil rights, environmental, and anticapitalist activism); techniques of reduction, withdrawal, coded language, obstruction, blockade, boycott, sit-ins and die-ins, cancellation, slowdowns and stoppages; queer/resistant temporality and care; slowdowns that work against capitalist time; forms of withdrawal that might include utopia, asceticism, voluntary exile, and withdrawal, or escape, fugitivity, and petit-marronage. Readings may include work by Theodor Adorno, Homi Bhabha, Tina Campt, Elizabeth Freeman, David Getsy, Fred Moten, Kathi Weeks, among others; readings and art and artist examples are open to the interests of the class. This is not intended as an endorsement of these modes of resistance over more confrontational approaches, but an interest in exploring them as a body of work that resonates across the divide of art and politics.

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Art History MA and PhD Graduate Students Only