Course description
Avant Guard Continued
A Course by Mark Coetzee
Syllabus: Summer 2009
Daily: 3 hours in class, 1 hour 30 minutes individual research hours (Total 4 hours 30 minutes per day)
11 AM to 2 PM
June 23 to 27, 2009
Course Classroom: 504
Instructor: Mark Coetzee
Email: mark@markcoetzee.com (email contact preferred)
Introduction: This course will allow you to explore current discourses in contemporary art. Discussing fundamental and complex ideas will heighten your ability to critically evaluate your own work and that of others.
Four days will be dedicated to class discussions on three selected themes. The fifth day will be used as a critique for your own work where we will use these and other “lenses” to discuss your own studio practice.
Performance Expectations: Attendance, Completion of prescribed reading materials, Participation in class discussions, Presentations.
Attendance Policy: As this is a short but intense course it is highly recommended that students do not miss any classes.So as not to disrupt discussions, latecomers will not be admitted into the classroom after the start of a session.It is the student’s responsibility to see his / her professor to make up any work due to an absence.
Gallery and Museum Visits: It is essential that on a daily basis you visit as many galleries and museums as possible. Looking at other artists’ work is an ongoing activity that should become a habit. In each of these visits you should try to use the discussions in class to look at the exhibitions, and the art they present.
Course Outline
Course goals and components:
1. Self-initiated gallery and museum visits.
2. Prescribed reading and discussions of those texts in class.
3. Class presentations.
4. Studio critiques.
Course Structure
Tutorial Learning:
This course is conducted through dialogue, rather than lectures, and is modeled on the centuries-old tutorial systems at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The instructor works with a very small group of dedicated and accomplished students through a demanding program of study and intellectual discourse. The emphasis is on independent learning.
In daily meetings of 3 hours, students bear equal responsibility for reading the assigned material, preparing presentations for the group, and leading the discussions.
The tutorial system provides self-motivated, creative and disciplined students with unprecedented opportunities for intellectual development.
A tutorial-based education lays the foundation for success in graduate and professional school, and in future career opportunities. It also sets the stage for life-long intellectual engagement.
Tutorial Structure:
A tutorial consists of a small seminar class of no more than 10 - 15 students. Such a setting provides for individualized attention and academic challenge, and serves to stimulate the intellectual growth of talented and creative students. A tutorial is meant to be an ongoing conversation where the tutor and tutee(s) move through the academic landscape of a particular discipline.
Tutees gain important fundamental knowledge, hone essential skills, and begin to develop an understanding of what inspires them.
Tutors often have their own intellectual horizons expanded by the observations and questions from students who bring fresh perspectives to familiar subjects.
One of the most important features of the tutorial is its inherent elasticity. There are, however, some fundamental expectations:
Tutorials meet a few times a week for a minimum of 3 hours.
Tutorials meet at a fixed time (11 AM - 2 PM) in a location that is free of interruptions and is conducive to the creation of a serious learning environment.
Tutees must exhibit a high degree of preparation. Tutorial assignments are rigorous, requiring a considerable amount of time spent in reading, writing, research, problem solving, and/or developing experimental techniques.
Required Books
We will be using three prescribed books for this class. The publication details are listed below. These books should be read cover to cover and in depth.
A URL link for each book has been included where you can download PDF versions of the books listed.
Coetzee, Mark. Eberhard Havekost 1996-2006: Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection. Miami: Rubell Family Collection, 2006.
http://rfc.museum/ebooks/EH_ebook/EH_ebook.html
Coetzee, Mark and Luisa Lagos. Memorials of Identity: New Media from the Rubell Family Collection. Miami: Rubell Family Collection, 2006.
http://rfc.museum/ebooks/MOI_ebook/MOI_ebook.html
Coetzee, Mark and Laura Steward Heon. Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection. Miami: Rubell Family Collection; North Adams: MASS MoCA, 1st ed. 2005, 2nd ed. 2007.
http://rfc.museum/ebooks/LAD2_ebook/LAD2_ebook.html
Schedule: Summer 2009
This schedule is to assist you with your time management. It lists class discussions for that particular day. It also lists presentations due on that date.
June 23:
Introduction of instructor and students.
Discussion of:
Syllabus.
Attendance policies and expected professionalism.
Performance expectations.
Gallery and museum visits.
Main themes and components of course.
Tutorial learning process.
Session One: Painting’s Ongoing Dialogue, and its Dependence on and Liberation from Technology
June 24:
Session Two: New Media as Chosen Media for the Discussion of Identity Politics—Its Impermanence and Fluidity, Part 1
June 25:
Session Three: New Media as Chosen Media for the Discussion of Identity Politics—Its Impermanence and Fluidity, Part 2
June 26:
Session Four: Painting’s Ongoing Relationship to Itself and History
June 27:
Studio critiques
Painting’s Ongoing Dialogue, and its Dependence on and Liberation from Technology
One Session, June 23
Since the invention of photography, painting’s supremacy has been both challenged and assisted by this very invention. This class will begin by looking at the accepted roles of a painter before the advent of photography. A short history of the beginning of photography will follow, along with a discussion of the role-panic that ensued in its early days. The course will demonstrate how, very quickly, photography and technologically-based image-making processes changed and liberated painting from mere narrative concerns, and how painting for its own sake developed, leading to traditions of modernism and abstraction. Painters began to adopt photography as a tool to assist their understanding of the visual. The very technology that at first threatened and then “liberated” painting within a few decades, established a new stronghold on how content driven or figurative work began to “look.” The traditions of hyperrealism in painting will be used as an example.
As a bridge between historical and modernist painting modes, we will explore the work of Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal, who projects photographic images onto his canvases, and then paints them in. Having digested the complex discussions above, we will then move on to a thorough examination of the work of German artist Eberhard Havekost. His work serves as an example of how the change from analog to digital photography, video and film, has profoundly influenced painting, perspective, and painter-subject-observer relations. The session will conclude with a discussion of civilization’s embrace of the digital age and how it has irrevocably altered the path of painting by altering what was historically the dependence between the eye and the hand of the creator.
Eberhard Havekost’s work critiques the proverbial dialogue between painting and photography by establishing a visual language that hovers in the grey space between the two. What is at once apparent in the juxtaposition of these two seemingly disparate media in Havekost’s hands, is their mutual dependence, despite their differences.
Working from personal photographs and found images, Havekost presents iconography that is familiar to all urban and suburban dwellers: bland modernist structures, featureless landscapes, and images of actual and impending violence. The significance of his work lies not in its subject matter, however, but in its execution. With a ready supply of images, artists like Havekost are as concerned with what to paint as they are how to paint. Resembling the generalization of color and tonal output of an inkjet printer, or a CCTV camera scanning our activities, Havekost’s works succeed in blending photography and painting—once rival genres. His creations are original work, by hand, but by digital processes too.
Required reading:
Coetzee, Mark. Eberhard Havekost 1996-2006: Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection. Miami: Rubell Family Collection, 2006.
http://rfc.museum/ebooks/EH_ebook/EH_ebook.html
New Media as Chosen Media for the Discussion of Identity Politics—Its Impermanence and Fluidity
Two Sessions, June 24 and 25
This two-part session will use seven artists (William Kentridge, Sigalit Landau, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Sven Påhlsson, Anri Sala, Fiona Tan, and Artur Żmijewski) to demonstrate the variable discussions of identity politics current in art discourse today. We will investigate the early use of photography as both form and documenter of the body, and as a political tool. We will look briefly at the early prohibitive costs of using New Media to understand why photography, graffiti and poster art held stead as the media of choice for artists dealing with social and identity issues. As video and DVD became more accessible many “issue” artists embraced the possibilities of the moving image. We will look at nine works by the artists (totaling 101 minutes of footage) and decode the various uses of symbolism, reference, memory, body and place.
The new media works we will study deal with issues of identity and quotidian reality. In these works, the artists individually explore memories, personal legacies and aspects of their backgrounds in an effort to express the political and historical realities of their countries. This juxtaposing of past and present helps them, and us, to define identity and meaning.
We will conclude with Stuart Hall’s assertion that although identities “seem to invoke an origin in a historical past,” they are not fixed, but are processes of becoming “constituted within, not outside representation.”
Required reading:
Coetzee, Mark and Luisa Lagos. Memorials of Identity: New Media from the Rubell Family Collection. Miami: Rubell Family Collection, 2006.
http://rfc.museum/ebooks/MOI_ebook/MOI_ebook.html
Painting’s Ongoing Relationship to Itself and History
One Session, June 26
This discussion will begin with social realism (an artistic tradition unfamiliar to the West since the 1930s) and its influences on contemporary art practice. Examples of social realism will be shown and a short overview on this state-mandated style will be presented. The fall of the Berlin Wall radically changed the hermetic academic traditions of social realism and brought attention to many artists not known outside of East Germany. It also elicited an identity crisis of sorts for younger artists still within the academic traditions at the time.
We will demonstrate how conceptual emphasis and the dominance of New Media in Western art academies had established a new “Academy” of the same proportions that resulted in the Salon des Refusés of the late 1800s. We will investigate the migration of some artists away from accepted norms of art production toward more traditional forms of art training. We will focus on what has become the “New Leipzig School,” and how this group of painters has integrated a rigorous academic training and its heavy traditions of realism and figuration, with the will to join a larger international dialogue about the relevance of painting and pictorial traditions. We will specifically look at the seven artists included in the exhibition “Life After Death.”
“Life After Death” positions the paintings and drawings in this exhibition in the afterlife—the afterlife of the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany), of social realism, and of painting in general. Traces of the GDR inhabit the grim interiors and muddled social modernist architecture in these paintings. Social realism, once the dominant style behind the Iron Curtain, possesses the figures who rarely make eye contact, keeping their thoughts to themselves. Painting itself (its death is an unlikely event that art critics proclaim every ten years or so) crops up in the emphasis on craft. You can see it in the use of classical gestures, graphite scaling grids, forced perspective, and careful attention to color.
These seven artists chose to study at the Leipzig Art Academy, in the former East Germany, in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This was an unlikely decision at a time when the inhabitants of Leipzig were leaving in droves for the West, and when the main currents of art flowed away from painting, toward video, photography, and installation art. The untimely embrace of a shrinking East German city and conventional medium is imprinted on the pictures, but rather than buckling under the weight of place, time, and tradition, they convey something surprising and subjective. The mystery of these pictures, with their out-of-date sources and classical techniques, is their utter and beguiling singularity.
Required reading:
Coetzee, Mark and Laura Steward Heon. Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection. Miami: Rubell Family Collection; North Adams: MASS MoCA, 1st ed. 2005, 2nd ed. 2007.
http://rfc.museum/ebooks/LAD2_ebook/LAD2_ebook.html
