U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES FALL 2008

Histart 286

GRADUATE SEMINAR: 20th CENTURY ART (4 units)
Wednesdays, 2-5
425 Doe , CCN: 05709
Anne Wagner

In his 1995 essay “’Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” Jeff Wall aimed to study both “the ways that photography occupied Conceptual artists,” and “the ways that photography decisively realized itself as a modernist art” in the experiments those artists carried out. Not surprisingly, this ambitious undertaking could only be briefly sketched in his text’s twenty pages: there is plenty still to be done, particularly if one does not assume, as does Wall, the need for photography ultimately to turn away from conceptualism to make Pictures again.

This seminar will begin where Wall left off: with the question of photography’s “indifference.” It will move beyond that framework, however, to consider “indifference” not just as a technological inevitability, but as a means to understand the relation between conceptual photography and the 20th century category of the Everyday. And while Wall sees conceptual photography as a practice limited to male Anglo-American artists working in the 1960s and 1970s, we will move past those artificial limits to by expanding the roster of artists considered, as well as our national and temporal frames. Such displacements are among those that the seminar’s title refers to. We will also consider the nature of the relationship between photography and place in conceptual practice; how installation and presentation practices inflect that mediation; how the look and effects of conceptual photography argue against the logic of the Picture; and to what effects that argument is pursued.

The final displacement that will matter to us concerns our own activities as viewers: during the course of the semester we will schedule several trips to Bay Area museums to view works first hand.

Enrollment by permission of instructor.