ARTH 450 Advanced Seminar in the History of Art and Architecture: Art and the Senses

• Thursdays, 11:45 am-14:15 pm
• Course delivery TBA
• Instructor: Dr. May Chew

This course examines the role of the senses in art and cultural theory, focusing on how artists accommodate the body in their works and how audiences are summoned through sensorial engagement. We will also investigate how sensorial encounters have been choreographed in public, exhibit, and institutional contexts. In doing so, we will ask: how do we think with the body, but also beyond dominant understandings of what a body is, and can do? While focusing on the body as a locus of meaning in discourse and practice, the course will also examine how sense and sensation have been socially and historically constructed in the first place. This includes examining how sensory hierarchies have been shaped by imperial histories; informed by discourses of race, gender, class, ability; and augmented through technological mediations. One underlying thread of this course includes what it means to be “moved” by art, how this happens through the senses, and how such experiences can reaffirm or challenge bodily and subjective boundaries. In this class, we will work towards developing a sensitivity to multisensorial experiences, at the same time expanding our linguistic & conceptual capacities to a understand and analyse such experiences. Students will also have opportunities to discover the ways in which curatorial and creative practice might accommodate diverse histories and forms of embodiment.