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CS92PROD
Contemporary Art Since 1980
ARHA 252
Spring 2025
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: AMST 287

This historically-rooted introduction to contemporary art sets an anchor around 1980 and moves through the major debates of the last 35 years. This period gave rise to a bracing range of historical transformations: a post-communist Europe; an economically prominent China; queer and antiracist activism; increasingly molecular degrees of technological mediation in everyday life; assymetrical consolidations of a globalized network of travel, communication, and capital; climate and refugee crises; and a state of seemingly perpetual war, to name only a few. This course attends to the changing vocabulary of approaches by which artists intervened in these conditions and positioned their work in relation to a longer view of the history of art. Far from a comprehensive survey, the course acknowledges the inherently recursive and unstable condition of contemporary art history, a field of research and inquiry defined as a work in progress. The course is nonetheless structured in a loosely chronological fashion, sequenced according to formal techniques that emerged as timely responses to specific historical moments (photographic appropriation, moving image projection, social practice, painting, institutional critique, web-based art, etc.). Our work throughout will attend to theoretical frameworks that have remained influential in recent practice (postcolonial, feminist, poststructural, etc.).
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ART
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(ARHA-MN)(ARHA)(ARST)
Past Enrollment Probability: 75% - 89%

Last Updated on OCT-04-2024
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