Core Course Descriptions

Strategies
This course is a survey of the key texts, thinkers, concepts, and theoretical approaches that influences the study of visual culture and the production of criticism. It is an opportunity for students to engage with the ideas that are deployed in these conversations, while gaining the ability to use these resources in their work. The course is by design interdisciplinary, drawing upon the theoretical advances made in fields as diverse as philosophy, linguistics, art history, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. We also attend to how these discourses are creatively transformed by those working within feminist and/or queer theoretical frameworks. The guiding thesis of this course is that the visual is situated within larger fields of cultural production, which require carefully defined strategies to make explicit their ontological, epistemological, historical, and political assumptions.

Identities
The politics of identity continues to be a compelling and hotly debated topic in visual culture. Students explore the construction, negotiation, and contestation of identity and difference in visual and critical studies. The theoretical scope includes postcolonial theory, race theory, gender studies, and whiteness studies. Students investigate how theorists and artists address the complex intersections of race, sexuality, gender, class, health, and nationality in light of such subjects as immigration, transnational media, diasporic communities, disidentification, belonging, and desire. Special attention is given to critical and visual perspectives that challenge monolithic views of identity. We privilege diverse, multiple, and intersectional approaches that connect lived experience, social critique, and artistic practice. Focuses include cultural diversity, critical analysis, and visual literacy. Students also sharpen their research, verbal communication, and writing skills.

Reviews
Students are introduced to critical writing within the field of Visual Studies, specifically the review process. Students complete a series of writing assignments of progressively greater length and scope of research. We train our focus on the book or catalogue; the artifact, art site, or monument; the moving image; and the exhibition in order to develop skills of observation and analysis. We take into account physical, historical, and historiographic context; strategies of representation and narration; and the politics of spectatorship and display as we hone our critical skills within a range of genres. Weekly readings drawn from contemporary critical literature provide models and countermodels for generating the reviews. Students critique these readings and others' writings in class.  Typically direct observation of the object under critical review (e.g., exhibition, site, film, performance, environment) is required.

Perceptions
The contemporary primacy of the visual and the virtual, with its multiple effects not only on our everyday life but also in our larger ability to understand the world we live in and the one that is emerging, invites us to a serious meditation on how this came to be so. The seminar is an effort to engage in some historical, cultural, religious, political, philosophical, aesthetic, cognitive, and scientific excavations that may guide us through the survival labyrinths first explored by the old technicians of the body-soul dichotomy. Like it or not, this dualism is the "footnote," the windmill, we have been jousting with for a few millennia now. We argue that it largely mimics our cultural evolution form cave dwellers and shamanic hunters and painters to Stanley Kubrick, The Animatrix, and The Flintstones. Is the world real or is it an illusion? Is there a "there there"? Do animals or humans or plants perceive alike? Balinese, Americans, Kenyans, or Chinese? Are we Zhuangzi's butterfly going through the rabbit hole, or mere quanta in the latest cosmic brane? Is Sarah Palin's Russia more real because she can "see" it and we can't? What about Magritte's pipe, the swoosh or the swaps, and the Wall Street bailout?

There seems to be more than ever a profound social and psychological need to cut through the fog which clouds our hold on life and our grounding in the world, leaving us estranged from each other and the planet, increasingly fragmented, packaged, and sold. We seem to simultaneously inhabit inside and outsideÑalienated and sensuousÑin the realms of desire, being and becoming a result of our biology and neurophysiology and also of our cultural, political, and environmental histories. The "Doors of Perception," variously understood or felt as the conduits that would literally and figuratively bring us to our senses, that would invite an opening to our common senses as organs of awareness, erotic joy, and active aesthetic and political engagement, have been used to navigate this quandary time and again. Thus, in this vein the seminar examines contrasting ideas of "perception," and attempts to mine a few of the aesthetic possibilities embedded in the nature-versus-nurture mesh formed by our plastic brains and plastic arts. It proposes extending the purely visual and virtual experiences of our commodified iron cage to a more empirical and phenomenological, critical and ecological, sensitive and sensuous embodiment of our lives.

Sites
We will discuss the "spatial turn," as well as the phenomenon of place and site as it relates to identity and memory in such academic disciplines as cultural studies, architectural theory, sociology, film studies, planning, and philosophy. Through close readings from such fields, students explore the origins, forms, and uses of different types of sites—buildings, cities, landscapes, monuments—and their various cultural frameworks throughout the last two centuries. We'll investigate how artists, architects, designers, and writers shape culture and cultural identity through their depictions of place and placelessness, site and nonsite. Students evaluate the utility of ideas presented in the readings in light of the following questions: how have we tackled, transformed, and transcended diverse sites by means of representation, narration, and architecture? and what do these sites reveal about our physical and subjective relationship to the space that surrounds us?

Master's Project 1, 2 & 3
The Master's Project is the capstone of the Visual and Critical Studies Program. Students apply their advanced knowledge of visual culture and their facility in visual criticism to an individual research/creative topic. Students hone their research, writing, and verbal communication skills through the development of a master's thesis. Individual research is augmented by support from a primary thesis advisor, as well as several external advisors. The process also involves collaborative exchange through group writing critiques. The project comprises four required elements: a written thesis, a symposium presentation, preparation of a poster for display during the season of graduate thesis events, and publication in the Sightlines journal.

Course Requirements

• First Year, Fall
• Reviews (3 units)
• Strategies (3 units)
• Identities (3 units)

• First Year, Spring
• Sites (3 units)
• Perceptions (3 units)
• Elective (3 units)

• Second Year, Fall
• Master's Project 1 (3 units)
• Electives (6 units)

• Second Year, Spring
• Master's Project 2 (3 units)
• Master's Project 3 (3 units)
• Elective (3 units)