Welcome to ART'S DISCREPANT MODERNISMS

Julie Buffalohead, Trickster Showdown, ~2019

Professor Betsy Towns 

townsb@uncsa.edu 

office: 109 WWV 

office hours (at the library café, in my office, via walk-and-talk, or on zoom) by appointment- just email me with your available times. 

Online presence PTP CLass Blog will show weekly class notes, images, presentations CANVAS (for required readings, online syllabus, assignment portals, etc. )

& syllabus: for class policies, practices, and calendar

Visual Art:  includes forms such as painting, drawing, architecture, sculpture, installation, performance art, ceramics, photography, video and audio art, crafts, conceptual art....

Current usage of the term "visual arts" includes fine art as well as applied or decorative arts and crafts, 

Discrepant: lacking agreement; differing; at variance; inconsistent.

Modernism(s): in the traditional definition, a 19th and 20th century movement, in art, philosophy, and other spheres, seated in Western society. At center, the push for artists to, as poet Ezra Pound put it,  Make it New.  Modernist artists often do that by responding to one another's work, or to the modern world, or to a rethinking of another place or time. Modernism can often seem like the right word to capture the many-faceted movements of the present.

Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the last quarter of the 20th century and the first of the  21st. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 19th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or "-ism." Contemporary art tends to participate in dialogue with other contextual frameworks such as identity, family, community, and nationality.

How would you describe our time? What distinctive traits of the present, here, can you identify? 

Course Design and Syllabus intro.

Art History Map 

  John Ogilby's, Road from London to the Lands End 1675 (Wikimedia).

What does your map of art history look like?

Katsushika Hokusai Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga, ca. 1832 

Some reflections on Teaching –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

 A friend and colleague told me once that teachers often fail to state what they believe is obvious, and that this hinders the success of the class. So, you may find some of the materials on the rest of this page obvious, but I didn’t want to miss the obvious

I teach because I love having conversations about art and ideas. I look forward to meeting a new group of people each year, and I love learning settings. I teach because I like and respect my students, and enjoy hearing new ideas. Please share your ideas, opinions, insights, and observations freely, and listen to, reflect upon, and respond openly to those of others.

I believe learn is a verb…. Please come to class ready to think, ask questions, build bridges, make knowledge. So:

 

·       Please Talk. Ask questions. If you are curious, ask a question. If you don’t understand something, ask a question. If you hear a word you don’t know, ask a question. If you would like more info, ask a question. Asking questions provides the fastest way to get information.

 Please feel free to ask me any question about art, art history, writing, childhood, birds, animals, stories or anything not on my lists. I welcome all questions. 

·  Please take good notes… I believe in marginalia, in drawing your own connections between what happens in class and what you are thinking about and working on in your own time, taking a few moments to write down an idea that something in class triggered, making the material your own. Always have notebook and pencil in class, even if your computer is handy.

·       Listen actively and practice the art of conversation. Sharing ideas comprises the course’s most fundamental activity.

·       By talking and listening, we open ourselves to the course and to others, making ourselves vulnerable—to each other and to learning.

·       Learning takes hold through play, experimentation and reflection. Be willing to play with the materials, to take risks, and take time to mull over the ideas in your own ways.