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COURSES SPRING 2009

Histart 192F.2

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE DISCIPLE OF ART HISTORY (4 units) Mondays, 7-10 425 Doe, CCN: 05588 Whitney Davis

This seminar is designed for students who have taken History of Art 100 and who have plans to apply for graduate school in art history or related disciplines such as anthropology of art or film studies. It will address the work of scholars (mostly in North America and mostly mid-career) in a wide range of subfields of art history in order to assess what the
discipline of art history is doing today and what some of the intellectual and professional trends that will guide its next decade might be. The list of readings will be identified jointly by members of the seminar and the instructor. Meetings will focus on contextualizing the work of each scholar in the discipline and assessing its implications for renovation
and transformation in art history in relation, for example, to the rise of visual studies, of world art studies, and of media studies in many fields deeply informed by the new technologies. Admission is by permission of
the instructor.

It has been asserted that vision plays a particular role in the religions of India and that this leads to some qualities in the arts of the area. This seminar will address darshan (literally eye contact with a divinity) and other theoretical arenas for visualization, considering their relationship to Western concepts of the gaze, imagination, etc.. We will simultaneously consider whether and how these ideas play out in sculpture and paintings of a wide variety of kinds.

Possible paper topics:
The treatment of the eye in early sculpture, and the addition of enamel eyes to some icons
Tantric Buddhist visualization and imagery
Facial angles in Mughal painting
Implicit male gaze in Rajput painting?
Bengali folk painting, rural and urban
The work of Indian photographers
Hidden images (cf. Japan)

Read:
Diana Eck, Darshan
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Ch.6 “Nation and Imagination.”

 

 

 

 

 

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