department calendar
degree programs
|
undergraduate
degree requirements | courses | seminars and special topics courses | departmental honors | studio hours | how to enroll
director of undergraduate studies: Pamela Bannos
Our department believes in the inherent unity between the practice and theory of art. Beyond the development of skills and training in techniques, the study of art involves gaining both an understanding of visual thinking and an awareness of the histories, issues and concepts that bear on the direction and role of the visual arts in our culture today.
Most of our courses are designed to serve all students regardless of their major area of study. AT&P enrolls about 80 undergraduate art majors, while approximately 1,000 non-majors take our classes every year. Our undergraduate courses cover both traditional approaches and newer media and alternative strategies. Painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography form the core of the undergraduate curriculum, giving students the opportunity to develop a solid foundation in the field's traditions and established media. The department also looks forward to experimental approaches and future developments in visual art making. We incorporate digital technology, video and conceptual art practice into our curriculum, thus blending newer trends with established practices. Also integral to our program are seminars in art theory, as well as critique classes in which enrolled students present new work for prolonged, in-depth analysis by the class. By the senior year, each department major is encouraged to elaborate his or her own self-motivated, individual studio practice in which artworks are produced independently of classroom assignments.
AT&P is also affiliated with the Animate Arts Program, and encourages undergraduates to pursue study across the visual and performing arts with particular emphasis on the links between the visual arts and other disciplines such as theater, film, music and computer science.
how to get into an at&p class
We realize how difficult it is for students to get into our undergraduate classes, but we encourage you to try. Every quarter, although our classes start off full, students drop out and we end the quarter under-enrolled. Here's what you do:
1. enter your name and email address on the waiting list in person, 3-400 Kresge
2. go to the first class (no matter how long the wait list)
3. if you don't get in at the first class meeting, go to the second class
If you have any questions, contact Maura Costa, department assistant
undergraduate studios
To insure safety and security, undergraduate work areas in Kresge Hall are available only to students enrolled in AT&P courses. Rooms are locked when not in use; see technician for access (technician location posted at Kresge 3-350).
technician
Michael Rea
3-356 Kresge Hall
847.491.4679
m-rea@northwestern.edu
hours
Mon 9 – 10
Tue 9 – 10
Wed 9 – 10
Thu 9 – 10
Fri 9 - 4
Sat 11- 6
Sun 12- 6
|
Art 390-0 Special Topics: The Land
Movement through, migrations over, territories within, stories from, connections to, and communion with the land: What does it mean to inhabit land? What are ways we can explore, embody, communicate and document this relationship? This course uses both seminar and studio components to examine current art practices and projects relating to the land against three historical times: The Trail of Tears of the 1830’s, The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s and the current homesteading revival. In addition to presentations and discussion of readings, there will be frequent outdoor activities that might include such things as animal tracking, food foraging, planting trees and monitoring rainfall, as well as a group overnight camping trip.
Prerequisites: 1 100 level and 1 200 level course in the department
ART 390 Special Topics: Collaborative Practices
This course will investigate how artists work in partnerships, collectives and in collaboration with larger social groups to affect some notion of social change. The first half of the course will be lecture and discussion based, looking at art historical precedents and discussing their relative successes and failures. In the second half of the course, students will attempt to put what has been discussed into practice by working collaboratively to create socially relevant projects. As part of this process, we will consider what might constitute social relevance in the broadest sense.
Prerequisites: 1 100 level and 1 200 level course in the department
Art 372-0 Seminar: On Looking, On Seeing, and On Being Seen
Much has been made of the hegemony of vision in the modern era and certainly, for visual artists, questions about the nature of vision seem especially relevant. Drawing on thinkers from a variety of fields including the sciences, philosophy, psychoanalysis and the arts, this seminar will explore what it is to see, what it might mean to look, and what it might mean to be the object of a look rather than its originator. We will discuss readings on early theories of sight, the neurobiology of vision, and writings by Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, deCerteau, Debord, Tomkins, Mulvey, Merleau-Ponty. and others. In conjunction with the readings, we will explore the work of certain artists in light of our texts.
Prerequisites: one course in department or permission of the instructor.
Taught by Jeanne Dunning in spring 2009
Art 390-1 Special Topics: Blow Up: Abandoned Utopias and the Inflatable
The pneumatic structure has historically symbolized a technology associated with visionary endeavors both fantastic and pragmatic. Architects and designers, inspired by the possibility of a world not contained by gravity, have speculated on the use of inflatable structures as a component in the colonization of other planets (as proposed during the burgeoning years of the space race) and as affordable housing solutions for the inner city. But the reality of indoor tennis courts, rooftop advertising balloons and recreational facilities punctuates the failure of the utopic urbanism often associated with Modernism. Blow Up will explore this history through studio production and parallel research. Students will build inflatable structures using a variety of methods. Lectures, readings and discussion will round out a studio environment where we will critically explore the application of this technology. The historical concept of utopia and resultant utopic societal models will serve as a starting point, while renewed needs and desires for utopia will be addressed and implemented.
Taught by Michael Rakowitz in winter 2009
Art 390-2 Special Topics: Everybody Moves Against Control: Studies in
Public and Social Mobility
Public space is a topic much discussed in contemporary art, architecture and urban planning. In an idealized conception central to the functioning of democracy, public spaces can be defined as common areas shared by a variety of people, and not controlled or regulated by any entity. These are the places, both physical and virtual, where resources can be shared and innovations can thrive. From garbage pickers to open source coders, the idea of truly public spaces is an important element for many individual's sense of both success and survival. Unfortunately, a number of factors have changed what was previously known as public space into completely regulated areas where autonomy is nonexistent and the fear of authority limits creative possibilities. What impact does this have on artists, those who choose to serve the public, and how we interrelate? How do we identify control and its negative consequences for our lives, art practices, and independent research? How have our daily activities been redefined by these constraints and the restructuring of our common areas? What role do aesthetics and ethics have in questioning and opening up shared city spaces to this ideal of public space? This class will explore - through readings, studio work, films, and public events - techniques that have been employed to challenge or alter expected uses of public space. This course is open to interested students from all majors. It may be of special interest to those working in urban planning, gender studies, economics, computer studies, and communications, as well as artists. At least one project will be a group project that the class works on together and that includes an event that is open to the general public.
Taught by Temporary Services in winter 2009
Art 390-3 Special Topics: How to Create a Melodrama in Total Darkness
In this course students will explore the melodramatic genre from early silent film of the 1920’s to avant-garde film and stage works of the late 20th C. We will look at the formal features of the melodrama such as its roots in the stage and the variety show, character types, clear distinctions between good and evil and the happy ending. Some questions we will investigate are: Is melodrama an energizing, democratic and transparent form or does its user-friendly nature conceal a darker aspect whose function is the shoring up of the powerful and an entrenched social order? In response to readings, screening and theorizing, students will create their own critical melodramas. The first half of the course will be lecture/discussion; the second half is hands-on in which students collaborate to create their own critical works of melodrama. Projects include two short papers and a final hands-on collaborative project
Taught by William Pope.L in fall 2008
390 Special Topics: The Technologies of the Archive: Power, Territories, and Communities
In this collaborative course, students will work with artist-in-residence Emily Jacir on the production of a video work that looks at lost and appropriated archives and histories in Palestine and Israel. Jacir herself lives and works between New York and Ramallah and her work often explores the voluntary and coerced movement between places and cultures. The course will introduce the students to questions concerning the various implementations of archives in contemporary art-making practices. It will explore the impact of technology on the physical space, access and structure of archives as well as questions concerning constructions of knowledge, history and identity that issue from archives—be they official, national, communal, public, or private. Each student or group of students will be asked to implement various technologies and art-making strategies to generate an archive, or create a project based on reforming, altering, or differently distributing an existing archive such that the alterations highlight something of significance vis a vis the archive's place in our construction of time and space, knowledge and identity.
Taught by Emily Jacir in winter 2008
Art 372-0 Seminar: Relational Aesthetics and the Instrumentalization of Everyday Art
The last decade has witnessed a rise in both awareness of and argument over "relational aesthetics" - a catch-all phrase that pictures today's most advanced artists as resourceful DIY bricoleurs who nurture myriad forms of convivial exchange. Think Jorge Pardo, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick and Andrea Zittel, or the several collaborations between Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, etc. This class will examine such artists as well as the critics and curators with whom they're most closely affiliated, in particular Nicholas Bourriaud, the author of Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction and curator of the influential 1996 exhibition "Traffic." We will analyze the emphasis in this work and its criticism on network structures, both in terms of people, as in social networking, and on the level of objects, namely the collaged everyday materials that, though personalized through the artist's intervention, also remain opened out and available to larger systems of culture and exchange. We will historicize these relational practices in terms of earlier avant-garde art; and also frame them using both poststructuralist theory as well as emergent post-Fordist business models. In what ways do the networked forms of recent art, from relational aesthetics to multiple and fictive artist-identities, oppose the New Economy's promotion of entrepreneurialism, flexible management, participatory architectures, and loose and mobile social commitments? In what ways can relational art be said to instead romanticize and idealize such current conditions and behaviors, thus serving as an ideological asset rather than a critique?
Taught by Lane Relyea in spring 2007
Art 372-0 Seminar: Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? Agitational Practices in Public Art/Life and The Contemporary Radical Moment
On November 22, 1968, five years to the day after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, The Beatles released their self-titled triple album, commonly referred to as The White Album. The recording sessions began on May 30, 1968, twenty-eight days after a student strike in France led to sweeping general strikes across the country that now stand as an emblem for a global moment during which left-wing factions prominently espoused their ideals and dissatisfaction with the administrators of power through creative physical and intellectual protest.
While the song Why Don’t We Do It In The Road represents a flippant contribution to The White Album (it is rumored that Paul McCartney was testing new recording equipment with the composition), we will consider the title as having special meaning in examining what was a new sensibility through which, in the case of Paris 1968, the spaces of the city, the roads, and all else public was appropriated, transformed and utilized in proposing new gestures through which popular participation could yield progressive social change. The charged era of the 1960s begat the interventionist tendencies of many cultural producers in the 1970s, and we will discuss, through accompanying texts and documentation of works the way in which agitation—central to the production of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia before and after October 1917—is recouped as a strategy in street art and affiliated political movements. This seminar will place a special focus in applying these historical examples in the evaluation and discussion of more recent emerging lineages of this practice including collectives, groups and artists operating in Chicago and elsewhere. Student s will be asked to conduct research into these groups and the larger movements, both political and social, with which they are aligned. A significant question as to what constitutes a radical moment or action in the contemporary sense will be addressed throughout the course. Students will be asked to either conduct a public discussion or lecture in a public setting of their choice or to contribute critical articles on agreed topics that pertain to the climate of our seminar discussions in community newspapers or other appropriate media that has a truly public readership. No one will be watching us. Why don’t we do it in the road?
Taught by Michael Rakowitz in Winter 2007
|
