ARTH 222(F) Foto Art: Germany 1960 to the Present (Same as ArtH 561)
Since its invention in 1839, photography has periodically challenged artists in traditional media to rethink their practice. Already in the nineteenth century, major painters such as Edgar Degas used photographs as an aid. There was also a widespread notion that photography could achieve a superior, "objective" knowledge of the visual world that would render representational painting superfluous and obsolete. What was not foreseen was the potential for unusual forms of intermedial cross-fertilization that began to emerge in the 1960s, as, for example, individual artists began working in both painting and photography, sometimes combining them in single work. Neither did one anticipate the use of photography-and even of painting-to interrogate and critique the photographic medium itself, nor its deployment in the new genre of installation art. These examples represent a new category of artistic practice, that of "artists who work with photography," as opposed to practitioners of "straight photography" or even of art photography. These practices have arguably found their richest embodiment in Germany: in the work of painters such as Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, in Joseph Beuys's expanded notion of sculpture, in the serial photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their pupils Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, in the installations of Hanne Darboven, and the work of Thomas Demand, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Andreas Gursky, and Katharina Sieverding among others. Their practices will be examined in both a historical and a contemporary international context.
Format: lecture and discussion. Requirements: a midterm, a short research paper, and a final.
Prerequisites: ArtH 101-102. Enrollment limit 25 (expected 18).
Hour: HAXTHAUSEN