This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

Registration process:

First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.  

Major Requirement | BFA

This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

Registration process:

First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.  

Major Requirement | BFA

 This course will examine cinema as a culture text to be read for its various meanings: formalist through socio-ideological. As such, it will also introduce students to the basics of formalist film analysis, from editing techniques to sound production. We will focus on perhaps the best cultural and cinematic movement for critical inquiry: Surrealist cinema. While cinema was only one of many arts utilized by the 20th century surrealists (in Paris and elsewhere), it was clearly the most fetishized and experimented with of all the various enactments of the movement, becoming the ultimate surrealist “dream” experience as Andre Breton and others commented throughout the movement’s main decades (1920s and 30s). What fascinated the Parisian surrealists was the “otherness” of the cinematic experience, and they approached film as the perfect medium for producing a communion with otherness (alterity) and for subversion of bourgeois European culture that, in their eyes, had left Europe and the World only violence and colonial dominance. Film became, therefore, the link between not only surrealism’s formal experiments but also its decolonial tendencies. Such postcolonial crossroads also intersect with surrealism’s other fascination with otherness: feminism and the subversion of heteropatriarchy. And hence, surrealist film becomes the perfect mode for the critical study of modernisms both in Europe and in the Global South, and for the study of alternative forms of artistic and cultural vision. This course will center its studies upon these frames for a revision of surrealist film: formal experiment, modernisms and decolonial resistance, and radical reworkings of identity. To do so, we will begin with the ending: Afrosurrealism and “Black” surrealism in the Global South, and then work backwards to Parisian Surrealism (and Dada) and its developments particularly in the films of Jean Cocteau and Luis Bunuel. We’ll end the course with a look back “out” at postcolonial surrealisms (Marvelous Realism and Magical Realism) and avant-garde cinema at the crossroads, from American avant-garde to global.

Elective

 This course will examine cinema as a culture text to be read for its various meanings: formalist through socio-ideological. As such, it will also introduce students to the basics of formalist film analysis, from editing techniques to sound production. We will focus on perhaps the best cultural and cinematic movement for critical inquiry: Surrealist cinema. While cinema was only one of many arts utilized by the 20th century surrealists (in Paris and elsewhere), it was clearly the most fetishized and experimented with of all the various enactments of the movement, becoming the ultimate surrealist “dream” experience as Andre Breton and others commented throughout the movement’s main decades (1920s and 30s). What fascinated the Parisian surrealists was the “otherness” of the cinematic experience, and they approached film as the perfect medium for producing a communion with otherness (alterity) and for subversion of bourgeois European culture that, in their eyes, had left Europe and the World only violence and colonial dominance. Film became, therefore, the link between not only surrealism’s formal experiments but also its decolonial tendencies. Such postcolonial crossroads also intersect with surrealism’s other fascination with otherness: feminism and the subversion of heteropatriarchy. And hence, surrealist film becomes the perfect mode for the critical study of modernisms both in Europe and in the Global South, and for the study of alternative forms of artistic and cultural vision. This course will center its studies upon these frames for a revision of surrealist film: formal experiment, modernisms and decolonial resistance, and radical reworkings of identity. To do so, we will begin with the ending: Afrosurrealism and “Black” surrealism in the Global South, and then work backwards to Parisian Surrealism (and Dada) and its developments particularly in the films of Jean Cocteau and Luis Bunuel. We’ll end the course with a look back “out” at postcolonial surrealisms (Marvelous Realism and Magical Realism) and avant-garde cinema at the crossroads, from American avant-garde to global.

Elective