INT 185HH-01/201HH-01
Criticality: The Politics of Evaluation
Instructor: Hugo Hopping, Artist in Residence, IHC, UCSB
Time and Place: TBA
This course is a study of criticism as a theory and practice in the arts and humanities. Students will be encouraged to think like an artist, use several different approaches to criticism, learn the value of taking a critical perspective, and investigate aesthetics through particular positions, practices, and events in politics. Students will be exposed different models of criticality and be expected to develop and evaluate their own critical perspective in relation to a major conference at UCSB titled 1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change, scheduled for Nov. 20-22, 2008 where attendance is encouraged as a platform to implement topics, evaluations, and points reviewed in this class. The course will consist of a dialogue between students and a series of guest speakers who deliver public presentations to the class on the fate of art and democratic politics and public culture in the run-up to the November presidential elections.
Requirements: Permission of the instructor. Attendance at all class meetings. Willingness to attend conference, 1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change, Nov. 20-22, 2008, and produce a critical analysis of some part of that conference to be scheduled. Open to undergraduates and graduate students of all disciplines.
INT 185HH-02/201HH-02
1968:2008 Post-Medium Collaborative Art Production workshop
Instructor: Hugo Hopping, Artist in Residence, IHC, UCSB
Time and Place: TBA
UCSB Students in Collaboration with artist in residence.
1968 was perhaps the height of the self-conscious use of graphic design to mobilize students, workers, and the middle class for political purposes. In this class, students will engage in action research and collaboration to generate a body of work that engages art production strategies from 1968, seeking to refresh their use-value in a contemporary inquiry of the banal forms of middle class public discourse that can be appropriated, critiqued, revised and expunged through conceptual art and graphic design. This class is conducive to implementing answers to questions such as “what does it mean to be a “political artist?”, “What is the purpose of art in a world that has become corrupted by the market such that almost all artists themselves are tempted to become a commodity themselves?”, and “What strategies exist for avoiding colluding with the market driven art and political market?”
Students will engage in an art practice implementing collaboration as a medium, designed to generate a visual interface around topics relevant to issues of importance to students on campus and in Isla Vista in regards to the actual political needs of the student-artist citizen in the wake of the current state of our political system and election cycle.
Requirements: Permission of the instructor. Attendance at all class meetings. Willingness to attend conference, 1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change, Nov. 20-22, 2008, and produce artwork in collaboration with Hugo Hopping as a strategy to seek engagement for the conference with the general student population. Open to undergraduates and graduate students of all disciplines.
INT 185HH-03/201HH-03
Curatorial Art Practices after 1968
Instructor: Hugo Hopping, Artist in Residence, IHC, UCSB
Time and Place: TBA
This is a master workshop for graduate students interested in curatorial practice. Students will examine a series of critiques of curatorial practices under modernism and postmodernism, develop criticality in terms of the politics of certain exhibitionary and curatorial strategies, and develop competency in thinking about art movements as a curatorial project. This class is an opportunity to work with an artist who has experience in all aspects of exhibition, including but not limited to work as an installer, designer, educator and curator of exhibitions. The course unravels the often hidden relationship between the artist and the curator, the art and the frame of the exhibition, and how contestation and synchronicity in those relationships often destabilize or insure the success of an exhibition. Indeed, this class problematizes the notion or asks the question: what is success in curatorial practice? The course will culminate in the exhibition of work produced by artists involved with INT185/201 01/02.
Requirements: Permission of the instructor. Attendance at all class meetings. Willingness to attend conference, 1968: A Global Year of Student Driven Change, Nov. 20-22, 2008, and evaluate topics or art practices as a theoretical or material curatorial project and the conference itself as a curatorial project. Open to graduate students in art history and related discipline.
INT 185IV / THTR 42/142
I.V. LIVE Staff
Instructor: Ellen K. Anderson (TA Jason Narvy)
Friday 6-10 PM EMBAR Hall
Monday 3-3:50 PM SNDCR 2609
This course produces a weekly performance series in Isla Vista. Students get first-hand experience in the rigors of theatrical production, as they learn to execute all logistical, technical and promotional details. The course is affiliated with Isla Vista Arts (www.islavista-arts.org). Enrollment: A maximum of 16 units of Theater 42 and 142 combined may be accepted for credit in the major.
For more information, contact eanderson@theaterdance.ucsb.edu.
INT 185ST
WORD: Isla Vista Arts and Culture Magazine
Instructor: Ellen K. Anderson and D.J. Palladino
Friday 3-5 PM
The course publishes a free quarterly magazine that is designed, compiled, researched, written, edited, and distributed by students. We explore the burgeoning artistic endeavors in Isla Vista and highlight topical issues uncovered by student editors. Attendance at all production meetings is mandatory.
For more information, contact eanderson@theaterdance.ucsb.edu.
INT 201GE / ENGLISH 274A
American Cultures and Global Contexts: Colloquium on Global Ecologies
Instructor: Stephanie LeMenager
Friday 10:00 AM-12:00 PM SH 2617
Prerequisites: Graduate standing
This is the first in a three-quarter, in-progress course (274A, B, then C) in which a final grade will be assigned after the completion of English 274C. Taking a cue from Arjun Appadurai’s naming of the “fluid, irregular shapes” of modernity, we will consider the ecoscapes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, meaning those biotic networks that make up the world in which we live, inclusive of species, living and dead, species marked as resource, natural or technological cycles of production and consumption, all that comes together from the etymology of “ecology” as oikos, economy and home. Our more specific foci will be systems of energy production and consumption, weather and water cycles, and the problem of sensing, imagining, and representing global ecoscapes, which we will pursue as both an aesthetic problem and a problem of “doing justice.”
Readings and film screenings constitute the bulk of the course, along with two special colloquia featuring internationally renowned scholars Catherine Gautier (most recently author of Oil, Water, and Climate Change) and Evelyn Hu, director of the Hu Research Group and former Scientific Co-Director of the California Nanosystems Institute. Films, drawn from the ACGCC 08-09 series “Documenting Globalization,” include: Up the Yangtze (2007), A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (2006), Mondovino (2004), and Life and Debt (2001).
Readings may include articles and chapters, collected in a colloquium reader, by Vandana Shiva (from Water Wars, Biopiracy), Naomi Klein (from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), David Harvey (from Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference), Ulrich Beck (from Risk Society), Joseph Schumpeter, Charles Jeanneret Le Corbusier (from The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Theodor Adorno (from Aesthetic Theory), Martin Heidegger, Elaine Scarry (from The Body in Pain, On Beauty and Being Just), Timothy Morton (from Ecology without Nature), Ursula Heise (from Sense of Place, Sense of Planet ), Lawrence Buell (“Ecological Affects”) and Julie Sze (“The Hummer: Race, Military and Consumption Politics”).
The course will meet twice Fall quarter and four times in Winter and Spring quarters. It is run as a colloquium, with participants expected to give two presentations and to turn in two approximately ten page papers that reflect the content of these presentations. The pass/no credit option best serves this style of course, though special arrangements can be made for those who wish to receive a letter grade. This year’s colloquium anticipates the end-of-year conference, Beyond Environmentalism: Culture, Justice, and Global Ecology, and readings have been chosen to include speakers or panelists involved in the conference and to anticipate the dialogues it might produce. Participants in the colloquium are invited to act as chairs/respondents for conference panels.
INT 594 AB
Ancient Borderlands
Instructor: Elizabeth Digeser, Christine Thomas
TBA HSSB 6056
This course is affiliated with the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group. The Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group unites UCSB faculty and graduate students with common research interests in the history of Mediterranean antiquity, broadly conceived. We are investigating the process by which groups define, create and maintain their identities over time. The creation of boundaries, among ethnic, political, or religious groups, is a dynamic activity that can be reflected, not only by changes in material culture, but also in the rhetorical strategies adopted by ancient authors and the political tactics pursued by those seeking power. As members of several departments, including Classics, History and Religious Studies, we are also interested in challenging the disciplinary boundaries between us, believing that we have much to learn from one another. During the 2008-9 academic year, this course will focus on the different research methodologies available for scholars of antiquity.
INT 594 ST
IHC Pre-doctoral Fellowship Seminar
Instructor: Ann Bermingham
TBA, HSSB 6056
This one-unit seminar is open to recipients of the IHC pre-doctoral
fellowship. Participants meet regularly throughout the year to present
work in progress. For more information on the course, contact Ann Bermingham: bermingham@arthistory.ucsb.edu. For information on Pre-Doctoral Fellowships see www.ihc.ucsb.edu or contact Associate Director Holly Unruh at hunruh@ihc.ucsb.edu.