FINAR604 GE: Ground Up

This course will focus on the student's work. But instead of looking at the final product and determining whether it is successful, this course will start at the other end - what might be called the beginning. This course will explore the ground from which the artist's project has sprung. This will be a research seminar in which the student, class and instructor will investigate operating principles, purposes, experiences and goals that generate the student's work. What that ground is, in each case, remains to be seen, and anything is possible. The concurrent conversation might delve into seminal experiences, the nature of the work of art, the capacities of the work of art, certain political and social commitments, religious ideas, sexual and gender identifications, the sensual importance of the work of art, sexual engagements with an abstract audience, philosophical constructs, and so forth. Because new beginnings, reformulations and radical self-consumption are the very stuff of interesting art, we will ask the student to propose and make the next step, however large or small, in the presence of a set of live interested viewers. There will also be some minimal reading and writing assignments that will be used to help excavate this foundational material. This course fulfills the following Graduate Learning Objectives: Program-Specific Concepts and Knowledge; Methods (critical analysis, interdisciplinary, professional development); Skills ( research, collaborative, discipline-specific techniques); Understanding (ethics, visual literacy, cultural diversity); Communication (oral, written, visual); Leadership