Critical Studies

The Critical Studies/Humanities is an academic program and degree requirement that is developed each year anew from the rich stew of ideas permeating the studios. The lectures and accompanying readings challenge students with new strategies of intellectual engagement in the shifting terrain of art and design. Without a formulaic curriculum, we consider how meaning is constructed and revised, made new each day in a complex maelstrom of influence. This makes for a rich dialogue about the implications of one’s work in a larger world. The program tangos around different themes, with artists, art historians, philosophers, writers, scientists, historians and social activists invited to be part of the conversation.

 

 

Eduardo Kac
Artist Eduardo Kac lectures in deSalle Auditorium for Critical Studies

 

Critical Studies/Humanities Program 2007-2008
Producing Culture: Creators and Creativity in the Contemporary World
Coordinated by Vince Carducci

Thursday, October 4, 3:30 pm
George Ritzer “Art, McDonaldization, and the Globalization of Nothing”

Thursday, October 11, 12:30 pm
Carl Pope Jr.“Carl Pope: Public Projects”

Friday, October 19, 1:00 pm
Robert Hobbs “Making Networks Visible: Reflections on the Art of Mark Lombardi”

Friday, October 26, 1:00 pm
Timothy Morton “The Cultural Logic of Early Environmentalism”

Thursday, November 1, 7:00 pm
Tom Otterness “The Public Artist as New Town Crier”

Friday, November 9, 2:00 pm
Cynthia E. Smith “Design for the Other 90%: A Curator’s Perspective”

Wednesday, November 14, 7:00 pm
Constance C. Bodurow and Grace Lee Boggs in conversation “Re: Designing Detroit: Theory and Practice”

Friday, December 14, 1:30 pm
Maria Elena Buszek “Extra/ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art”

 

 


2006-2007 Critical Studies/Humanities
Size Matters: Perception at the Edge of Space

Henry Moore said “There is a right physical size for every idea.” But twenty-first century digital and scientific projects have created new filters for our perception of scale. Can a shifting artifice of scale be codified by where you stand in relation to the mountain, and what does this mean in the history of pictorial and architectural space? Has physical reality ever mattered more, or has the search always been philosophical and internal? Discoveries in physics - dark matter, fractals, string theory - only take us deeper into the bowels of tenebrous bodies and galaxies. Yet sensorial perception, framed in that liminal threshold where the body meets the world, absorbs scale conjugations into surprise, pleasure, maybe even chiasmatic truth. Spatial disposition in matters of scale are one way that art disrupts perception to help us re-interpret the grand illusion.


2005-2006 Critical Studies/Humanities
Nostalgia: Temporal Hybrids and Rifts

Nostalgia, first described as a disease in the nineteenth-century, is a word that conjures paradoxical and layered associations among contemporary artists. Often considered a pejorative term, it referenced a retrograde attitude that idealized history and was anti-progressive. Yet a new breed of nostalgia is surfacing in contemporary work. Rejecting the aspirations of modernism and post-modernism, artists sample and assimilate the material excesses of global capitalism with the deep psychic contradictions of ecstasy, melancholy, and annihilation. Skeptical, reflective, often voyeurs, they illuminate the space of longing. The inextricable locus of longing - the interior liminal space at the edge of the abyss – defies time and its agents, the products of culture and their eventual entropy. Drawing from the past - collective memory and deliberate misremembering – these artists redefine their present condition in hybrids of consciousness that recognizes multiple temporal dimensions. Mediating between past, present, future, they re-imagine a world where their unfixed and ambiguous messages are not perceived as an embrace of chaos, but that of wonder and the sublime.

 

Fred Wilson
Artist Fred Wilson at a department dinner after Critical Studies lecture


2004-2005 Critical Studies/Humanities
Resisting Monoculture

Artists develop questions and strategies to critique and radicalize a social order of domination. This is not new. But today they absorb a jet stream of foreign images infiltrating cultural awareness, via news networks purchased by entertainment empires that exercise ideological coercion through the flow of information. Homogeneity has been encouraged in the interests of globalization, equally in art as much as the pop culture marketplace. Are the particularized cultures of individual countries being subsumed in the golden blur of commerce and supranational branding? Is there any possible advantage to geographic and economic marginality for artists, or must artists distance themselves from their origins of cultural experience to be successful in an international art market? Art can offer highly developed local vernaculars that reconnect art to culture for a true intercultural dialogue, not a bland, market-driven, false multi-culturalism that dilutes the influences and values of other cultures not to mention the language of the individual. Can art be the place where local authenticity and global intelligibility make good bedfellows?
At the beginning of the 20th century, artistic movements such as Dada grew from geographic and political dislocation, a response to patriotic energies that manipulated nationalistic sympathies. Now new maps are being drawn along economic lines, not the traditional geopolitical boundaries. Economic power is increasingly in the hands of multi-national elites, oddly enough some of the same people elected to govern in a democracy. The lectures addressed the economic and political forces that shape culture, and the resistance of art, literature and cinema to methods of global homogeneity and control.


2003-2004 Critical Studies
The Nature of the Real

While technology has impacted the practice of art, looking still engages a relationship between viewer and subject, whether the subject is realized in physical reality as object, installation, video projection, or interactive Web site, among others. Design and architecture wrestle with similar angels via different genealogies. While virtual reality and simulations of various ilk permeate the art world as rapidly as the larger culture, the truth-bending that artists employ often is a critical response to the academy and/or the political-economic-entertainment status quo. Within this milieu, is there any relevance to the timeless philosophical idea of truth, not as moral judgment but as guide to navigating an increasingly confusing concept of reality? Drawing from the philosophy implied in pop culture’s film The Matrix - metaphysics and the classic “brain in a vat” problem - to the discourse of critical theory in Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real, this series presented different conceptions of the many ways reality is located and redefined.

 

2003-2005 Humanities
Agents of Change

The relationship between art, artist, and viewer is a complex social interaction, where the work of art can easily become glorified or vilified without a discussion of the belief systems that created the work. Artists have widely divergent intentions - sometimes social or cultural confrontation, other times purely aesthetic aims, and many other motivations as well. Yet all manner of dissonant material and concept becomes labeled with the same word, art. This series offered several views for how artists may consider the future social context for their work, recognizing intent is not the only criteria for the way the work ultimately functions in the world.