ART 320 - Early Modern Art Beyond the Visual

From its beginnings as an academic field of study in the 19^th century, art history has taken for granted the primacy of the visual in the study of art and artifacts. As art history as a discipline has begun to move beyond its European colonialist roots, its practitioners have likewise sought to think about art and artifacts in more expansive terms than the purely visual. In this course, we will study medieval and early modern art (roughly 13^th-18^th centuries) from around the world using methodologies that prioritize non-visual ways of thinking about and understanding works of art. We will focus primarily on works of art and craft that were not meant to be understood or interacted with using the physical sense of sight, and thus our methodologies and the artworks to which we apply them will be aligned. We will begin by thinking about how the discipline’s prioritizing of the visual has its origins in the beginnings of race thinking in the west in the 15^th and 16^thcenturies, before discussing the instrumentalization of vision in the 19th century as a part of the western imperialist project. We will then move on to study how works of art produced meanings and relationships with their users and audiences that transcended the visual. For instance, we will consider objects that were explicitly not intended to be seen by human eyes, ones that prioritize process over product, art that was meant to be consumed and destroyed, objects that primarily appealed to physical senses other than sight, or used sight simply to access other sensory experiences, and conceptions of sight that are spiritual rather than physical. Throughout the whole semester, we will keep in mind the social implications of sight’s ascendancy in the west: who has the power to see vs. who is surveilled and disciplined? Which traditions, values, and ideas are visible and thus available for study or acknowledgement, and which are made invisible, and thus for all intents and purposes, nonexistent?

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): ART 201
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).