OOO at Carnegie-Mellon

If memory serves, Melissa Ragona and Mike Witmore team-taught something in a similar vein at CMU when Mike was still there, maybe in 2006 or so.

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“How is Art More than a Thing?: Performativities of Objects, Technologies, and Temperaments — MFA Academic Seminar 2011″

In this seminar, we read a selection of both historical and contemporary theoretical texts with an eye to the network of texts and practices covering discourses of (1) the possible “freedom” of the work of art (material relations in the art market, new political discourses addressed by contemporary artists, radical form vs. subversive content) (2) the new discourse on the performativity of objects in painting, sculpture, video, and new media; (3) the future of the image in relation to apocalyptic discourses/the accident of art/ theories of new technologies. We explored these motifs across the work of Paul Chan, Martin Heidegger, Graham Harman, Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, and Paul Virilio (just to name a few).

Special focus was given to (1) so called, “revolutions” in public practice (i.e. what comes after “Relational Aaestheics”), (2) theories of affect, (3) contemporary forms of performance and performativity (and historical precedents), and (4) emerging aesthetic forms inspired by the use of new technologies in contemporary practice. Most importantly, we attempted to figure out how and why these texts and works were meaningful to our own art and critical practice.

All the papers “sampled” below should be considered, “works in progress.” These presentations are intended to be preliminary “snap shots” of the contextual section of the MFA written thesis (an academic project that parallels the MFA exhibition in a Graduate’s third year). The theses tested out here will morph and expand over the next few years, culminating in a substantial thesis paper that grounds each student’s work in the historical and theoretical discourses that inform and frame their MFA exhibition project.

– Melissa Ragona, Associate Professor of Art & Critical Theory, MFA Academic Seminar faculty