HNR 133 VISION AND DIFFERENCE: ART, HISTORY, AND IDENTITY

How can studying the ways that visual objects construct, perform, and deconstruct identity help us think differently about our own contexts and identities? Or the way people have framed and defined those objects, their makers, and their periods? What relationships do seeing and being seen have to our identities, our histories, and the way we understand and learn? This course will explore the intersections of art objects and makers, their historical contexts, and categories of personal and group identity, particularly gender, sexuality, and race. Artists and the art historians who write about them both work within and also challenge, through subtle subversions or direct attacks, the normative identity constructs of their historical contexts. We will look at several case studies across a variety of contexts and analyze the strategies taken by these artists and historians. Much is being made of our own current context as one of heightened individual visibility in a landscape itself increasingly visually oriented; what is at stake in this supposed change, and how can art history’s focus on these very issues be deployed to understand it?
CIVILIZATION