Issues in Contemporary Art. We will approach contemporary art from a topical point of view. While a chronology will be followed, we will not survey the period as a linear narrative but as a field of problems, questions and events. Rather than focusing our analysis on the successive emergence of artistic movements and styles in Europe and America, we will pose questions about the dynamics of modernity and postmodernity, the analogies and differences between artistic practices, in the center and the periphery. We will also investigate how the legacies of the prewar avant-garde (constructivism, the readymade) were assimilated in different locations and why it becomes increasingly difficult to speak of artistic categories such as "movement" and "style," as the century advances to its end and globalization sets in. What is the relationship between art and culture, art and critical theory, and how this relationship has influenced the reconceptualization of the art object, are questions that will be addressed in class.

The Architectural and Public Dimension of Contemporary Art. This course will investigate postwar art practices that emerged out of a discontent with the ideals of functionalism and progress preached by international architecture on the one hand, and technoscientistic oriented pictorial and sculptural practices on the other. Throughout the Americas and Europe, the postwar situation was marked by both a crisis of rationalism and an ethics of reconstruction: in Europe, the horror of mass extermination; in the U.S., the eminence of capital and mass consumption; and in the Americas, the clash between modernity and underdevelopment. In these countries, the reconstruction (or construction) of avant-garde practice operated around this critical matrix giving rise to interdisciplinary approaches characterized by a critique of monumentality and self-sufficiency, an investigation of social and phenomenological space, an embrace of pop culture references, and an interest in public space.

In subsequent years, artists as disparate as Helio Oticica, Dan Graham, and Constant, in their efforts to supercede conventional object-based sculptural and pictorial paradigms deployed various architectural strategies such as the use of real space, environmental scale and temporal conditions, an engagement with urban experience, a concern with spectator involvement and public address, and the incorporation of the vernacular. These are current concerns addressed in the work of contemporary artists who have to cope with increasing globalization, new urban formations, and the fragile boundaries between private and public space.

What is the relationship between socio-economic urban structures and emergent visual practices? How does work from forty years destabilize the architectural legacy that we associate with modernity? What models of spectatorship are embodied? How is the city and the global administrative network that regulates it, subverted or foregrounded? These are some of the questions that we will address in class.

Art, Interior Design and Domestic Space (1990-2005) This course will explore recent proposals in the visual arts which attempt a dialogue between the architectural interests of the sixties and seventies (among artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham) and the more recent fascination with design of the last fifteen years. A desire to foreground new ways to interact with everyday space and blur the distinction between disciplines characterizes the work of artists such as Pedro Cabrita Reis (Portugal), Andrea ZIttel (USA), Jorge Pardo (Cuba-USA), and Atelier Van Lieshout (The Netherlands). In the work of these artists, an interdisciplinary impulse that mixes the realms of design, art, and architecture attempts to redefine conventional ideas about the production, circulation, and reception of works of art. Oscillating between the more public/collective work of artists such as Atelier Van Lieshout and the more private/subjective proposals of Absalon (France-Israel), the course will engage concepts dealing with contemporary space and place, the institutions of art, design, and architecture, and the public and the private.

Sites, Places and Monuments: A Sense of Space in Contemporary Art (1970-2005). This graduate seminar will explore the thorny issues of site specificity, memory, and monumentality in contemporary art. Sessions will be organized around readings and specific works. We will trace site specificity's genealogy in the work of the sixties and seventies (Smithson, Matta-Clark, Serra) and will map the experimental terrain they engendered in the sculptural reversals that followed: (Wodiczko, Jaar, Whiteread). Issues of memory and representation in public space will be addressed by case studies of artists engaging the notion of the "countermonument" and monumentality and of exhibitions which attempted to articulate similar issues (Mary Jane Jacob's "Culture in Action," 1993). Finally, we will discuss "aesthetic agency," community oriented work, and collaborative projects produced in the last ten years. The seminar will also familiarize students with crucial texts on the topic such as Rosalind Krauss's "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1986), Pierre Nora's "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," and James E. Young's "Memory/Monument" (2003) among many others.