111 - 120 of 187 results for: ARTHIST

Many iconic works in the history of art draw their power and significance from the place in which they are sited or installed. The cave paintings of Altamira, Spain; Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and the monumental "earthworks" made in the deserts of the American Southwest during the 1960s are just a few examples showcasing the important relationship between art and place. In this seminar we will explore how works of art throughout history create a sense of place; and how place, in turn, changes the interpretation of works of art. We will learn how to analyze works of art in terms of their immediate contexts and surroundings, whether temples, museums, spaces of the city or unexpected environments, charting the historical meanings of place in the process. We will look at a range of examples throughout time, from prehistory to the present day. A critical feature of the seminar will be to consider works of art outside the classroom, on both the Stanford campus and beyond. Possible field trips include visits to Alcatraz Prison (where the famous Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, will install a new work in the fall of 2014)

This course investigates multiple histories of photography. It begins in early nineteenth-century Europe with the origins of the medium and ends in the United States on September 11, 2001, a day that demonstrated the limits of photographic seeing. Rather than stabilizing any single trajectory of technological iterations, the course is more interested in considering the ¿work¿ performed by photography. Through historical case studies, it considers how `to photograph¿ is to order and to construct the world; to incite action and to persuade; to describe and to document; to record and to censor; to wound; to heal.

This course focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in American art and criticism from 1972 to the present. How have the terms of racial identity and sexual difference shaped the production and reception of contemporary art across the last four decades? What status has the body--and more specifically, the body of the artist--been accorded within recent work on identity and difference? Throughout the course of the semester, we will be particularly attentive to issues of racial and sexual stereotype. What critical or subversive uses have contemporary artists found for pictorial stereotype? How have stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality been recycled in order to be mocked or deconstructed?

Although art and science are often characterized as "two cultures" with limited common interests or language, they share an endeavor: gaining insight into our world. They even rely on common tools to make discoveries and visually represent their conclusions. To clarify and interrogate points of similarity and difference, each week¿s theme (time, earth, cosmos, body) explores the efforts of artists and scientists to understand and represent it and the role of technology in these efforts. Focus on contemporary examples.

Major figures, themes, and movements of contemporary art from the 80s to the present. Readings on the neo-avant garde; postmodernism; art and identity politics; new media and technology; globalization and participatory aesthetics. Prerequisite: ARTHIST 155, or equivalent with consent of instructor.

Changes marking the transition from medieval to early modern Japanese society that generated a revolution in visual culture, as exemplified in subjects deemed fit for representation; how commoners joined elites in pictorializing their world, catalyzed by interactions with the Dutch.

A mixture of lecture and discussion, this course presents a chronological introduction to some of the defining monuments in the history of Japanese visual culture from prehistory to the mid-19th century. This introductory class presumes no prior knowledge of art history or of Japan. We will emphasize certain overarching themes like religious life; notions of decorum appropriate to various classes (court, warrior, and commoner); the relationship between and among the arts, such as the visual and the verbal, or the symphonic assemblage arts as seen in the tea ceremony; pervasive cultural tropes like nostalgia, seasonality, or the sense of place; and broader issues such as censorship, patronage, gender issues, and the encounters between Japanese and foreign cultures.

Narratives of conflict, pacification, orthodoxy, nostalgia, and novelty through visual culture during the change of episteme from late medieval to early modern, 16th through early 19th centuries. The rhetorical messages of castles, teahouses, gardens, ceramics, paintings, and prints; the influence of Dutch and Chinese visuality; transformation in the roles of art and artist; tensions between the old and the new leading to the modernization of Japan.

The recent rapid urbanization and architectural transformation of Asia; focus is on the architecture of Japan and China since the mid-19th century. History of forms, theories, and styles that serve as the foundation for today's buildings and cityscapes. How Eastern and Western ideas of modernism have merged or diverged and how these forces continue to shape the future of Japanese and Chinese architecture and urban form.