Berlin by Agnetha Mortensen, 2014 student COURSE HANDBOOK EUROPEAN ART HISTORY: LONDON & BERLIN AUTUMN 2016 1
Teaching Institution Chelsea College of Arts Dates 5-23 September 2016 Tutor Dr Andrew Chesher, Dr Rosa Nogués and Dr Rye Holmboe COURSE OUTLINE Through lectures, visits and seminar discussion groups, this course offers you the opportunity to engage with the art, history, environment and culture of London and Berlin through an intensive three week programme. From the historic collections in the National Gallery, to the modern and contemporary displays to be found in the cavernous Tate Modern, London s collections of art and design offer an unmatchable resource for the course. Your learning will be enhanced by a four day trip to Berlin, accompanied by the course tutor, who will guide you through the art and culture of one of Europe s most dynamic cities. This visit brings a further perspective to your Study Abroad experience and will give you greater insight into the development of European society, through art and design. Flights, accommodation and entrance fees in Berlin are included in the course fees. AIMS This course will provide you with: A conducive learning environment with a variety of learning situations and content Acquaintance with a representative range of ideas and examples from European Art History A variety of study methods ranging from group lectures and visits to a solo project. OUTCOMES On completing the course you should be able to: demonstrate a broad acquaintance with European Art History understand the significance of key examples and ideas within European Art History carry out basic research and apply ideas from it to new examples engage in and contribute to seminar discussions and debates make a brief presentation to your peers write reflectively on your experience and practice LEARNING AND TEACHING METHODS Lectures Seminars Contextual visits and discussions Private study and research Reflective writing assignment Practical project Student presentation 2
ASSESSMENT Short pieces of reflective writing A practice-based project to brief Brief presentation of research and practice to peer group PROJECTS 3 PHOTOGRAPHS - Research and explore the modes of photographic practice introduced during the Photography lecture and seminar. Choose one these modes to experiment with and produce 3 photos that are related to it. Make a short presentation on what you researched around the mode and how you choose to explore it in your own images. 3 SPACES - Choose 3 venues from the list presented to you, and reflect in a short piece of reflective writing on the spatial experience they offer. Use the set text and its descriptions of spaces as your starting point. MATERIALS REQUIRED Digital camera (alternatively a good camera on your phone) Notebook and pen or pencil Laptop or tablet (for writing, researching, and uploading photos to a blog) Sturdy footwear (for walking through the city) Waterproofs and/or umbrella Small, day rucksack Street map of London (either a printed A-Z, or alternative on a mobile device) 3
WEEK ONE Monday 5th September Study Abroad welcome day Tuesday 6th September AM Introduction and Projects PM Visit Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age at Tate Britain Wednesday 7th September AM Visit Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity at the Photographers Gallery and Raphael Albert: Miss Black and Beautiful at Autograph ABP Rivington Place PM Seminar Thinking Identity, Difference and Representation Stuart Hall, Who Needs Identity?, in Hall, S. and Du Gay, Paul (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage Publications, 1996. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London: Routledge, 1993. Thursday 8th September AM Seminar Painting, Paris, Modernity This seminar will address the genesis of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and think about how the artists associated with these movements responded to what has been interpreted as the birth of modernity in Paris. We will think about how artists responded to rapid urbanisation as well as technological developments such as photography. Marshall Berman, Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Verso: 2010), pp. 131-173 PM Visit Courtauld Gallery Friday 9th September Independent study day WEEK TWO Berlin Monday 12th September AM Fly to Berlin PM Free time in the evening to explore Tuesday 13th September AM Visit 'Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place' & 'Capital: Debt, Territory, Terror' at Hamburgerbahnhof Museum AM Visit Caspar David Friedrich room at Alte Nationalgalerie AM Visit Neue Wache PM Visit Käthe Kollwitz Museum PM Visit Bundestag Dome visit Wednesday 14th September AM Visit New Jewish Museum PM Visit Contemporary art galleries 4
Thursday 15th September AM Visit Bauhaus Archive Free time to explore Berlin Berlin trip reading MacGregor, Neil, Snow White vs Napoleon, Germany, Memories of a Nation, London: Allen Lane, 2014, 113-130 Whitford, Frank, Bauhaus, London: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Kipnis, Jeffery and Vidler, Anthony, Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter, London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. De Certeau, Michel, Spatial Stories, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Friday 16th September Independent study day NB course fees include roundtrip flights from London to Berlin, travel passes in Berlin, shared accommodation and all entrance fees in Berlin WEEK THREE Monday 19th September AM Seminar Collage, the Readymade and Abstraction Developing from the work covered last week, this seminar will think about the ways in which artists responded to an ever-changing modernity. We address the development of collage in the work of Picasso and Braque, and think about the critical stakes of abstract art, asking whether abstraction constitutes a turning away from the world or an engagement with it. During the seminar we will also have occasion to think about how these artistic developments impacted film, focusing especially on Surrealist montage. Louis Aragon, The Challenge to Painting Clement Greenberg, The Pasted Paper Revolution PM Visit Tate Modern Tuesday 20th September AM Seminar Considering the Medium Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Marshal Mcluhan, 'The Medium is the Message', Understanding Media: The extensions of man, Corte Madera, Calif. : Gingko Press, 2003. Susan Sontag, In Plato s Cave, On Photography, London: Penguin, 2002. PM Visit The Infinite Mix: Sound and Image in Contemporary Video at the Hayward Gallery at the Store Wednesday 21st September AM Seminar What is Contemporary Art? Peter Osborne, The Fiction of the Contemporary, in Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London: Verso, 2013. 5
Terry Smith, Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question, in Terry Smith et al (eds), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. PM Visit Tate Modern Thursday 22nd September Independent study day Friday 23rd September Presentations, Discussion and Feedback on Student Projects TUTORS Dr Andrew Chesher lectures in Art Theory at Chelsea College or Art. He is currently coordinator of stage one theory on the Undergraduate Fine Art course. In 2010-11 he ran seminar courses in philosophies of meaning and the phenomenology of perception. The subjects he lectures on range from photography and film theory to philosophy and social theory. As a filmmaker Andrew has concentrated on documentary projects since 2004. His last two completed films were documentaries about music. Changing the System (2007) is an hourlong observational documentary exploring the score and rehearsal of an indeterminate composition by Christian Wolff. Knots and Fields (75 mins, 2010) looks at the history and ongoing relevance of the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, which brought together Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and Cage, among others, in 1950s. This documentary was produced in collaboration with David Ryan, includes interviews with Pierre Boulez, Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough. Andrew's PhD on documentary and dialogue, which he completed in 2007, was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College of Art, London, and an MA in the Theory and History of Modern Art from Chelsea, UAL. Dr Rosa Nogués is an Associate Lecturer in Art Theory at the Chelsea College of Arts, London. She obtained her PhD in 2013 at the Centre of Research in Modern European Philosophy (Kingston University). Her thesis, titled The Body of Sexuation: Feminist Art Practice in the 1990s examined the use of the female body in feminist art practice in terms of Lacanian theory of sexuation. She has lectured at Central Saint Martins (London), Middlesex University (London) and the Universität für angewandte Kunst (Vienna). Her writing has been published in n-paradoxa, Revista Mundo Crítico and the current issue of MIRAJ. Currently she is researching the work of the American film and video artist Shirley Clarke, focussing on Clarke s pioneering role in experimental filmmaking, radical documentary, and video art in relationship to her critical interpretation of the modernist principles of the New American Cinema, and within the context of the emergence of the Women s Art Movement in the US. Dr Rye Dag Holmboe is a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art Department at UCL (University College London), where he received his doctorate in 2016. He has published 6
several articles and essays on art and literature in magazines such as The White Review, Art Licks and Apollo as well as academic journals. A monograph about the art collective JocJonJosch was published by the Sion Art Museum in Switzerland in 2014. Holmboe is also the editor and co-founder of Matchstick Books, an independent poetry and art imprint. This summer he is in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, where he is writing a book about Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings in the Torre Bonomo. 7