PhD seminars

ARTH 805 Critical Examination of Artistic Context: Probing Peripherality: A workshop-seminar on para-academic methods

• Instructor: Dr. Rebecca Duclos

This workshop-seminar exposes and explores research methods that are not always associated with academic or scholarly analysis, but which predominate in everyday life and creative practice. What constructs have separated and hierarchized certain methods as “acceptable” over others in the academic sphere? As we probe this question we open ourselves up to ask: might intuition and improvisation be considered as methods? Is there a role for chance in research? What are bold forms of scholarly subjectivity? Are there other ways to find “voice” through experimental writing practices? As this is a hybrid workshop-seminar, we will not only read about and discuss a rich selection of these para-academic methods, but will actively try them out in practice together. We will investigate concepts and methods such as parataxis, unconscious scanning, digression, lucid dreaming, chance operations, improvisation, collective composition, dérive, détournement, and amanuensis. Participant presentations will be specifically directed at subjectively describing a method of choice that will be personally engaged, accompanied by a critical analysis of how the method “worked” and how it “worked upon” the participant. This analysis will intentionally draw from non-art world contexts such as neuroscience, psychology, poetry, philosophy, anthropology, ecology, urban studies, literary theory, library science, indigenous studies, etc, Students are encouraged to place their research questions and directions at the centre of this seminar but also to be open to workshopping their own and others’ ideas and approaches in an effort to unlock new realizations about ongoing projects.

ARTH 809 Theory and Methods of Art History: Sensory & Atmospheric Methods

• Instructor: Dr. May Chew

This seminar focuses on experimental and experiential methods mobilized by researchers, writers, and artists to grasp the ungraspable. Critical attunement to the realms of the sensory, affective, immersive, and atmospheric requires flexible, capacious, and interdisciplinary methods drawn from art history, media studies, critical theory, philosophy, and other fields. We first address how we think with and as bodies, while at the same time challenging dominant understandings of what a body is and can do. We will draw on theorists and practitioners who challenge theories predicated on Western-centric understandings of embodiment and subjectivity, and heed anticolonial theories urging for epistemic, sensory, and somatic realignments beyond colonial paradigms. From here, we will also turn to the growing field of affect and atmospheric studies which prods us to decenter the human and to attend to the porous terrain between bodies, environments, climate, emotions, and minds. Relatedly, we will explore how writers and artists approach that which might be termed “emergent sensibilities,” which have developed alongside targeted economies of attention and therapeutic management, and investigate how the latter continuously reshape our understandings of technology, embodiment, and agency. We will examine how the sensorial and atmospheric have also been understood as politically-laden terrains, paying attention to ways in which they are choreographed in institutional and commercial settings, and the everyday. An underlying thread of this course also probes what it means to be “moved” by aesthetic and sensorial encounters, and how such experiences can reaffirm or challenge bodily and subjective boundaries. This also calls for a study of how art can make space for diverse forms of embodiment and felt knowledges.

ARTH 809 Theories and Methods of Art History: Methods for Global Contemporary Art

• Instructor: Dr. Julia Skelly

The “global turn” in (Western) art history is relatively new. In this seminar, we will read a number of texts about this turn, some of them more cynical than others. The question of what constitutes global art history also necessitates the question: what is global art? One possible answer is that “global” has merely replaced “non-western” and thus does little to deconstruct the western/non-western binary in the western academy. Rather than accepting the assumption that “global art” and globalization are “new,” we will read texts that illuminate the fact that art has long been global due to histories of transcultural and transnational exchanges, whether part of the porcelain trade in the eighteenth century or in the context of TransAtlantic slavery. At certain points in the term we will pay particular attention to female artists of colour working in “global” contexts (that is, outside of Europe and North America). One of the objectives of the course will be to establish how scholarship on global contemporary art, or art in the “global world,” is different from scholarship on plain old “contemporary art” (that is, contemporary art produced in Europe and North America). What are the themes, issues, and problems that keep coming up? And how, as scholars, might we draw on art historical scholarship to think through and write about what is currently happening around the world, politically, environmentally, and affectively? Final essays can focus on historical or contemporary art, but you must provide and articulate your own definition/understanding of “global art” and/or “global art history.”

ARTH 801 Periods and Territories: Archival Inquiries in Black Diasporic Art

• Instructor: Dr. Joana Joachim

Archives serve a crucial purpose through their personal, social, academic, and historical contributions to our societies. Similarly, speculation, critical fabulation and archival inquiry in art open the possibility for artists and researchers to practice and investigate new perspectives on pressing issues, past and present. From a Black studies standpoint, archival inquiries peel back the layers of oft untold and misconstrued histories of African descended peoples. In this course, we will delve into the works of Black artists and scholars in and around Canada whose practices, theories and methods continue to map the shapes of Blackness in archival spaces. We will ask how the stakes and uses of archives in Black art practices developed and evolved across time. We will examine the contexts which yielded critical engagements with historical and contemporary archives in visual art and consider how it mirrors and is mirrors by Black studies in other areas.

Drawing from the works of Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt and Denise Ferreira da Silva, among others, this seminar will examine the slippery nature of Blackness in the Archive and we will contend with the stakes of archival inquiries in visual art as they relate to the collective project of Black liberation. As such, this seminar aims to align our reflections with cross-temporal gestures toward liberation. This seminar will take a Black feminist approach and conduct a deep study of creative texts which engage with Black liberation, critical fabulation, memory work, critical archival inquiry, poetics, and Black feminist hauntology. This course will explore the significance of critical archival inquiry in art history considering such creative texts as case studies. Questions about the stakes of archival inquiries towards liberation through Black visual art are particularly crucial given the continued impacts of historical and systemic anti-Black racism enmeshed in institutions such as art museums and galleries.