RISD, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
2011-2015
Adjunct Professor
Contemporary Art and Its Critics (Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015)
The course will examine a series of canonical readings of contemporary art, focusing primarily on key writings published in the journal October and the magazine Artforum since 1975. We will engage in detail with such overarching critical concepts as postmodernism, neo-avant-garde, site-specificity, and relational aesthetics. We will also examine readings that draw on concepts such as the fetish, the abject, the informe, the gaze, primitivism, and postcolonialism. Finally, we will attend to issues of writerly style and method, seeking to understand the wide variety of tools that critics and art historians employ to understand, historicize, and enrich our understanding of works of contemporary art.
Performance Art: Between Media and Mass Media (Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2015)
The main feature of Performance Art is its immediacy. As other forms of time-based art, Performance depends upon its documentation. The course explores the history of Performance Art through the media used to document it: photography, cinema, radio, books, journals, posters, objects, video, digital technologies and the Internet. The goal of the course is to show how the history of Performance Art is deeply connected with the development of mass media and technology in our society. Performance artists have been exploring mass media both as an instrument and as the content of their practice since the beginning of the Modern era. The course has an historical and theoretical approach, considering Performance Art from a wide perspective including social and cultural events at large and crossing the boundaries between visual art, design, theatre and subcultures. We will start with historical avant-gardes like Futurism and Dada up to contemporary art and activist practices like parades, flash mobs and re-enactments, passing through Action Painting, Situationism, Body Art and Relational Aesthetics.
This is my faculty page on the RISD website.