History and Theory of the Arts Seminar

Professor : Magali Michaux

This course will focus on practices of minority artists in a Western context in order to problematize 5 aspects of artistic practice - the artist, the subject/theme, the form, the language and the audience - in order to complexify these notions and their constant interactions.

How to situate oneself as an artist without sinking into identifications established in and by unequal power relations? How to make exist in art horizons of experience and affective structures considered without value? How to speak in art in a language that has been built - in its subjects, its objects, its hierarchies, its networks, etc. - on exclusion or fetishism? - How can we take into account, in our address, the needs of the audience? How can we take into account, in our address or in our devices of monstration, the differences that the homogeneity of the word public hides - majority public, counter-public, affective public and its strategies of reading? How, in this mobile and constantly interacting constellation, can we create a form?

The course will obviously not propose a totalizing reading of these notions, nor will it give solutions to these questions. On the contrary, it aims to unfold the way in which certain artists articulate these aspects in their work. To do this, the course will function through collective readings of texts related to the works, whether they be interviews with artists, critical readings (For example: why can the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres be representative of the strategies of disidentification theorised by José Esteban Muñoz?) or theoretical texts that allow us to put an artistic work and a theoretical notion into tension (For example, how can we think about the notion of interpellation as taken up by Judith Butler in relation to the work of Catherine Opie?)

The texts will be, as far as possible, in French, with texts in English if there is no translation.

The evaluation will be in the form of a theoretical work.

Extract from the artistic corpus: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Catherine Opie, Zoe Leonard, David Wojnarowicz, Ellen Gallagher, Claude Cahun, Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs...

Extract from the theoretical corpus: José Esteban Muñoz, bell hooks, J. Halberstam, Isabelle Alfonsi, Lucy R. Lippard, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Kevin Floyd, Judith Butler ...

Workshop related course : Master Art Practice - Critical Tools.