Time Schedule:
Jeanne D. Heuving
BISIA 319
Bothell Campus
Investigates relationships between the study and making of art. Explores connections among written, visual, and performance arts and engages their intellectual, social, and aesthetic dimensions.
Class description
This course will engage written, visual, and performance arts as separate as well as overlapping endeavors. It will ask what does it mean to study and practice art within an interdisciplinary program that attends to art practice as multi-disciplinary, multi-media, and multi-genre or form. While some artists become proficient in multiple arts and other artists concentrate on one art form only, almost all artists are influenced by an array of arts in creating their own work. In this course we will concentrate on two of the most basic components of art works, namely, human beings and their actions—or what Aristotle called characters and plots. Just imagine how many different ways there are of presenting, engaging, and eliciting human beings and then just think of all the things they do. In order to focus this rather broad area, we will concentrate on one kind of human being and one kind of action. How do artists depict how artists become artists and what kind of actions are defining for this becoming. We will begin with an early artist story that has been defining for Western art, Orpheus and Eurydice, and that has itself been engaged by multiple artists, multiple theorists and critics, and multiple art forms.
Student learning goals
to explore relationships among written, visual, and performance arts
to explore relationships among perception, emotion, thinking, and kinetics in making and responding to art.
to study how new forms of media, beginning with photography and film and including the most current technologies, are altering the terrain and possibilities for the arts
to study relationships between arts and art practices in relationship to larger cultural and social definitions
to identify various human formations in art works: heros, anti-heros, posthuman subjectivities, doubles, twins, avatars
to identify various actions or plots as they concern how artists become artists
General method of instruction
lecture, class discussion, small groups
Recommended preparation
The most important quality you can bring to this course is an interest in the arts and a willingness to engage the question: what makes creative arts creative? If you think that creativity is something work on as an "app," this course isn't from you. But if you are willing to engage with art through close attention to the achievements of other artists and a willingness to try things out for yourself, this course is for you. If you have prior experience with the making of art in any form--written, visual, performance--this should serve you as most excellent preparation for this course
Class assignments and grading
During the course of the quarter, you will have the opportunity to engage in several art experiments and will be required to write several short response papers and one or two take home written exams. You will be expected to participate actively and regularly in the course.
25 per cent grade on an art project 25 per cent grade on course participation 50 per cent grade on written work and papers
