John Corso-Esquivel

From its beginnings in the 19th century to its deconstruction in the 20th, modernism instigated a series of seductive, often totalizing narratives about the role of aesthetics, progress, and power in the industrializing world. Those “Grand Narratives,” as philosopher JF Lyotard called them, allowed Euro-American art historians and artists to afford themselves central positions within an exclusive canon of modern art history. In Europe and later North America, avant-garde challenges to earlier styles and bourgeois aesthetics formed a dominant motif in these art historical narratives. Artists created ways of visualizing the world that reflected scientific and political revolutions-from Symbolism and the birth of Freud’s psychoanalysis to Abstract Expressionism and American Exceptionalism after WWII. We will explore how these modern revolutions unfurled and consider critiques that developed after modernism to question colonialism, empire, and exoticism. We will trace how images played central roles in ideological battles that led to both world wars. We will look at how governments in the postwar era deployed artistic programs to solidify soft power both at home and internationally. Finally, we will end with Neo-Dada and Pop Art, which proved to be harbingers of modernism’s successor: the plural voices of postmodernism. This course format features active lecturing, weekly discussions, and writing workshops. Assessment is based primarily on critical essays seen through several stages of revision.

In this course, we will read a wide collection of texts that have come to constitute "critical theory," both in its specific meaning (the Frankfurt School) and its broader meaning (theoretically grounded methods of analysis circulating in literary and social theory, art praxis and criticism, and visual culture.) We will hone our ability to discuss complex texts in visual and critical studies within an intense, proseminar environment. We will also develop advanced expository writing skills through a series of focused writing assignments, each involving writing workshops, significant revision, and peer review. 

Artgoing publics traditionally revere museums as secular temples for aesthetic appreciation and repositories to safeguard cultural heritage. But are these assumptions---which have their roots in the Enlightenment---reasonable? In this course, we will interrogate the positivist origins of the art museum. We will consider how museums have long participated in highly interested projects of nation-building and cultural imperialism. We will ask how the artistic representation of gender, race, and class has yielded collections structured by exclusion. Since museums are drastically rethinking their organizations, these problematics function as springboards to identify theoretical opportunities in curatorial and museum studies. Using Problem-Based Learning (PBL), we will work on three problem cases, each dealing with one of the following ethico-political themes: looking, collecting, and showing. We will use writing as a primary mode to learn, and we will produce several types of writing in traditional and new media formats, written collaboratively and individually. Our projects will address how museums today might navigate the critical problems in displaying art and visual culture intentionally designed or institutionally appropriated for public consumption.

By its very name, postmodernism claims to be modernism’s successor, but some are not so sure. Is postmodernism, theorists like Jürgen Habermas ask, actually modernism by another name? In this course, we will take a tour of the important ideas that influenced European, American, and international artists since 1960. Most of these ideas fall into varying themes challenging modernism, a term that arguably coincides with high and late capitalism. We will interrogate this word in the context of “postmodern” responses to modernism and modernity. We begin in 1960 during major civil rights and feminist movements in the US. We look at identity politics, the politics of representation, post-structural upheavals, and postcolonial critiques. The course will repeatedly problematize the concept of postmodernism and other theoretical approaches to art in the information age. We will end with questions about where the art world is headed, including discussions of globalization, the metamodern, and social justice. This course format features active lecturing, weekly discussions, and writing workshops. Assessment is based primarily on critical essays seen through several stages of revision. 

This course considers the ways that the cataclysmic meeting of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultures in the area now called Latin America affected art, architecture, and visual culture. From a brutal invasion by conquistadors to an established network of conventos and viceroyalties, art and architecture were instrumental in converting the Indigenous populations to Christianity and establishing colonial control. As the colonies won their independence, art again played a political role in envisioning new patriotic narratives in fledgling nations. Finally, as Latin American countries modernized, their art, architecture, and visual culture proclaimed the region’s technological and artistic advancement to the world. This course addresses colonial, independence, post-independence, and modern art in Latin America. It pursues an art history characterized by syncretism, hybridity, resistance, and innovation by the diverse peoples of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. Course assessment is based primarily on biweekly quizzes and Problem-Based Learning media projects.