ARTH 354 Studies in Interdisciplinarity in the Visual Arts: The Senses in Modern and Contemporary Art

• Wednesdays, 11:45am-2:15pm
• Online: Access through Moodle
• Instructor: Melanie Schnidrig

In recent years, contemporary art has witnessed a turn toward increasingly multisensorial artworks, which are inherently performative, immersive, and interactive. However, as this course will demonstrate, this trend in contemporary art has been influenced by historical artistic experiments, which utilized the senses in an effort to redefine the relationship between the artwork and the viewer. With a special focus on movements in Modern art, including Dada, Futurism and Surrealism, students will learn how the sensory experiments of the historical avant-garde have informed contemporary art’s engagement with the senses. This course will underscore the connection between these periods through an exploration of how Modern sensory artworks contributed to developments in artistic methods. How these sensory movements have revolutionized the way art is experienced and exhibited will also be considered. The course will ultimately assess sensory shifts in art from Modernism onwards, in order to establish the critical and historical significance of the senses in art.