VISA 480 Readings & Schedule

READING LIST
The following readings have inspired the big concepts and directions of the course.  However, the following is not an inclusive list of all references on the topic, and some may be considered “stretches” of which I am interested in for its relationship to artistic practice.  Required readings are in bold below.

NOTHING TO HIDE

  • Heidegger, Martin trans. by Albert Hofstader The Thing in Poetry, Language, Thought 1971 (p. 163-169)
  • Peters, Gary Ahead of Yes and No: Heidegger on Not Knowing and Art in On Not Knowing 2013 (p.110-119)
  • Heidegger, Martin Chapter one – Fundamental Questions of Metaphysics in Introduction to Metaphysics 1953

NOTHING CHANGES

  • Irigaray, Luce This Sex Which is Not One in This Sex Which is Not One 1985 (p.23-33)
  • Krauss, Rosalind E The Destiny of the Informe in Formless: A User’s Guide  1997 (p. 235-252 & 285-287)
  • Kristeva, Julia Approaching Abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 1982 (p. 1-10)
  • Foster, Hal Obscene, Abject, Traumatic* in October 1996 (p. 107-24)
  • Krauss, Rosalind E Chapter four from The Optical Unconscious 1993 (p. 149-178)
  • Krauss, Rosalind L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism 1985
  • Winnicott, D.W Chapter 1: Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena from Playing & Reality 1971
  • Randolph, Jeanne The Amenable Object from Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming 1991 (p. 21-35)
  • Adams, Parveen The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference 1996
  • Berlant, Lauren Affect Is the New Trauma from the minnesota review 2009 (p. 131-36)
  • Grosz, Elizabeth Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming in parallax 2005 (p. 4-13)
  • Phelan, Peggy Developing the negative: Mapplethorpe, Schor, and Sherman in Unmarked:  the politics of performance 1993 (p.34-70)

NOTHING TO LOSE 

  • Ferreira da Silva, Denise 1(life)/0(blackness)=&-& or &/&: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value from e-flux 2017
  • Adusei-Poku, Nana On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear from e-flux 2017
  • Sexton, Jared All Black Everything from e-flux 2017
  • Lippard, Lucy Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America 1990

NOTHING MORE

  • Sontag, Susan The Aesthetics of Silence Available here: ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#sontag
  • Fraser, Andrea Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry? in Grey Room 22 (p. 30-47)
  • Cage, John Silence: Lectures and Writing 1961
  • Burgin, Victor The Absence of Presence (excerpt) in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas Edited by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (p. 1097-1101)
  • Lee, Pamela On the Holes of History: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Work in Paris in October Vol. 85 (p.65-89)
  • Baas, Jacqueline Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art 2004

ALL OR NOTHING

  • Agamben, Giorgio The Man Without Content 1994
  • Groys, Boris Under the Gaze of Theory from e-flux 2012
  • Charney, Leo Chapter 1: Drift in Empty Moments 1998 (p. 5-25)
  • Noys, Benjamin The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory 2010
  • Roelstraete, Dieter The Business: On the Unbearable Lightness of Art from e-flux Journal #42, 2007
  • Crary, Jonathan 24/7 2013

NOTHING LASTS FOR EVER

  • Baudrillard, Jean Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? 2011 (p.9-77)
  • Baudrillard, Jean Passwords 2003
  • Baudrillard, Jean Chapter 7 in Simulacra and Simulations 1981
  • Galloway, Alexander Are Some Things Unrepresentable? From The interface effect 2012
  • Ranciere, Jacques Are Some things Unrepresentable? From The Future of the Image 2007 (p.109-142)
  • Haraway, Donna A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism and the Late Twentieth Century in Simians, Cyborgs and Women:  The Reinvention of Nature  (p. 150)
  • Lyotard, Jean-Francois Can Thought go on Without a Body? in The Inhuman 1988 (p. 8-23)
  • Deleuze, Gilles trans. Eliot Ross Albert The Actual and the Virtual in Dialogues II 2002 (p. 148-152 & 157-159)
  • Zizek, Slavoj Organs without Bodies 2004

ART, LITERATURE & ART HISTORY:

  • Copeland, Mathieu (editor) Voids: a Retrospective 2009
  • Gould, Claudia The Big Nothing 2004
  • de Duve, Thierry The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas in Kant After Duchamp 1996 (p. 199-230)
  • Rugoff, Ralph On Invisibility in Art from Invisible:  Art about the Unseen 1957-2012 2012  (p.100-111)
  • Bhabha, Homi K. Making Emptiness (on Anish Kapoor’s web-site, no date given)
  • Sharp, Chris The Concert Was Not a Success: On the Withdrawal of Withdrawal in fillip 2013 (p.94-101)
  • Groom, Amelia There’s Nothing to See Here: Erasing the Monochrome from e-flux 2008
  • Baas, Jacquelynn Unframing Experience from Learning Mind: Experience Into Art 2009 (p. 216-229)
  • Ilya Kabakov On the Subject of ‘The Void’ from Total Enlightenment: Moscow Conceptual Art 1960–1990 2008, (p.366–375)
  • Perec, Georges trans. By Gilbert Adair Void 1969 
  • Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man 1952
  • Beckett, Samuel Stories and Texts for Nothing 1946, Endgame 1957
  • Rumold, Rainer Reading the Illegible 2003

OTHER

  • Esposito, Roberto Community and Nihilism from Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5 no. 1 2009 (p.24-36)
  • Kenning, Dean Art Relations and the Presence of Absence in Third Text 23, 2009 (p.435-446)
  • Foucault, Michel The Historical a priori and the Archive from The Archaeology of Knowledge 1969
  • Freud, Sigmund Negation from Sigmund Freud Standard Ed 19, 1925 (p.235-239)
  • Badiou, Alain Three Negations 2008
  • Houdt, John Van The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou from continent 1.4 2001 (p.234-238)
  • Roberts, John On the limits of negation in Badiou’s theory of art in Journal of Visual Arts Practice, vol.7 no.3, 2008 (p.271-282)

 


Schedule

Week 1 – September 8th                       INTRODUCTION

Introduction to the course, syllabus, assignments and schedule.

Week 2 – September 15th                     NOTHING TO HIDE

We will discuss a phenomenological perspective of nothing, via Heidegger’s “The Thing” (which seems opposite the nothing but it completely made up of it) and apply this to the art-making process and decision making that comes with entering the not known. 

Discussions on:

  • Martin Heidegger trans. by Albert Hofstader The Thing in Poetry, Language, Thought (p. 163-169)
  • Peters, Gary Ahead of Yes and No: Heidegger on Not Knowing and Art in On Not Knowing (p.110-119)
  • Plant, Sadie Eleven Thoughts on Nothing in Voids (p. 365-66)

Due:

  • Journal #1 (Due: September 13th, 11:59pm)

Week 3 – September 22nd                    NOTHING CHANGES

Towards a more psychoanalytic context, today’s class will propose different terms and developments of a behavioral perspective or subject by other means on a loose idea of nothing, developed in the language of feminist theory by way of French philosophy.

Discussions on:

  • Irigaray, Luce This Sex Which is Not One in This Sex Which is Not One (p.23-33)
  • Krauss, Rosalind E The Destiny of the Informe in Formless: A User’s Guide  (p.235-252 & 285-287)
  • Kristeva, Julia Approaching Abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (9 pages)

Due:  Journal #2 (Due:  September 20th, 11:59pm)

Week 4 – September 29th                     NOTHING TO LOSE

Delving into problematics of power and identity, this class brings in art works and academic writing to the idea of nothing by way of understanding how value and ‘mattering’ are allocated and how.

Discussions on:

  • Ellison, Ralph Prologue in Invisible Man (p.3-4)
  • Ferreira da Silva, Denise 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value from e-flux Journal #79, 2017
  • Adusei-Poku, Nana On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear from e-flux Journal #80, 2017

Due:

  • Journal #3 (Due: September 27th, 11:59pm)

Week 5 – October 6th                             NOTHING MORE

Turning towards artistic practice, this class articulates the moment of which a work does so little, towards abolishment, negativity, towards the mystical, spiritual, affective or emotional.

Discussions on:

  • Sontag, Susan The Aesthetics of Silence Available on www.ubu.com
  • Fraser, Andrea Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry? in Grey Room 22 (p. 30-47)

Due:

  • Journal #4 (Due: October 4th, 11:59pm)

Week 6 – October 13th                           STUDIO VISITS

Today class will be held in the Audain studios, please be prepared to have studio visits with your peers today, focusing on upcoming mid-term work.

Due:

  • Dictionary Page due via dropbox upload, see assignment description for details, be sure to use template.

Week 7 & 8 – October 20th & 27th     CRITIQUES

Mid-Term Critiques (12 each day) – Mid-Term projects due

Week 9 – November 3rd                        ALL OR NOTHING

Towards a more cynical or nihilistic concept of nothing, we will discuss the role of theory in artistic practice and a self-aware perspective of art-making that may touch on irony.  Overall, we will be talking about quite a lot, that turns self-negating.

Discussions on:

  • Agamben, Giorgio The Man Without Content 1994 (p.52-58)
  • Groys, Boris Under the Gaze of Theory from e-flux 2012TOTAL PGS. 29

Due:

  • Journal #5 (Due: November 1st, 11:59pm)

Week 10 – November 10th                   NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

Looking towards the virtual, we will end the class on Baudrillard’s final piece of writing called “Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?”  The writing is a poetic summary of what it at stake as we go towards hyperreality and pure simulation, when abundance should result in disappearance.

        Discussions on:

  • Baudrillard, Jean Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? 2011 (p.9-77)

Due:

  • Journal #6 (Due: November 8th, 11:59pm)

Week 11 – November 17th                   STUDIO VISITS

Be prepared to have studio visits with your peers, focus on upcoming mid-term work.

Week 11 & 12 – December 1st & 4th CRITIQUES

Final Critiques (12 each day) – Final Projects Due

Due:  ‘Nothing’ essay due via email (pages or word doc please!) by 11:59pm, December 10th

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