U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES FALL 2008

Histart 290

NOTATION (PREHISTORIC AND OTHERWISE) (2-4 units)
Tuesdays, 7-10
425 Doe , CCN: 05700
Whitney Davis

* Open to undergraduates at instructor's consent

This seminar will consider practices of visual-graphic notation, whether or not they would be regarded as pictorial or ornamental, as artworks, or as objects of art-historical analysis. What are the properties of notation? What is the relation between notation and marking, drawing, and writing? With tallying and counting? Exemplifying and exhibiting? How can notations be used in concert or in contrast with one another? Is there a history of notation--for example, a tendency for different notational systems, such as pictures and hieroglyphs, to devolve from a common basis, an Ur-notation, to shift from more "pictorial" to more "abstract" morphologies, or to simplify the catalog of notational characters? How might we describe the balance of utilitarian or instrumental (e.g. communicative) aspects of a notation and its formal or aesthetic aspects? How can important visual-graphic practices such as heraldry, cartography, sealing, and picturing be described as notation(s)? How do models of notation (for example, Nelson Goodman's) relate to other classifications of visual-graphic signs, such as the semeiotic triad promoted by C. S. Peirce (icon, index, symbol), the distinction between analog and digita signal systems, the seeming difference between figurative and abstract representation, or the Derridean model of ecriture? In what ways would a general theory and a global history of notation reorient the history of art or the study of visual culture? Addressing essential theoretical models (Peirce, Goodman) and crucial historical studies (Marshack, Schmandt-Besserat), the initial class meetings will focus on *early* notational practices in human history--so-called "cave painting" and the production of marked portable objects (sometimes interpreted as calendars) in prehistory; "rock art" in small-scale indigenous societies, prehistoric and otherwise; and pictographic traditions (pictorial representation and/or "writing") in the early horizons of major civilizations (e.g.,pre-hieroglyphic petroglyphic pictography in protodynastic Egypt). Later class meetings will highlight student research projects, ideally dealing with notational traditions from different historical contexts. Students with background in pictographic scripts or other systematic notational systems (history of cartography, technologies of calendrical notation, etc.) are especially welcome.