Art after 1945: Film, Video and the Self

ART 908: Seminar in Art (meets with AH 800: Seminar in Art History)

This course explores how video and film have impacted the practice of self-representation within contemporary art.  We will begin by working with and against the art historical proposition that these media have a privileged relationship to narcissism. We will then examine of how video has become the preeminent, or named, medium for critical analysis, leaving us to wonder what the difference between film and video might be rhetorically.   Finally, we will diagram models of the self that emerge after 1945, including those termed post-structural, to consider how contemporary film and video works relationship to them.  The hope of the course is to consider some extraordinary contemporary artwork that uses the projected, televised, and fluxing media of film and video to talk about the projecting, changing, and material entity called the self.