Teaching

Methods in Art History (taught McGill, Winter 2016, Winter 2018)

Why does the art historian need “methods”? What are methods? How do our methods enable and constrain the kinds of artifacts we study and the questions we ask of them when writing histories of art? This lecture course introduces key issues in art-historical methodology by exploring the following propositions: 1) “method” is not equivalent to “theory”; 2) questions of method are fundamentally questions of evidence; and 3) if they are matters evidence, then questions of method cannot be asked outside of the context of art history’s knowledge-making infrastructure (its media, institutions and publics, among others). Featuring several guest lecturers able to illuminate specific facets of the discipline’s evidence-building past and present, this course will trace an intellectual genealogy and broad historiographical overview of knowledge-producing techniques that now inform research practice in art history.

Elements of Art History: Propositions (taught McGill, Fall 2017)

Major cornerstones of academic art history were built in nineteenth-century German-speaking lands through opposition to materialist thinking and to technological explanations of art. Moving amidst renewed attention to materials in the academy and the devastating consequences of anthropogenic climate change in the world, this seminar explores the prospects of an “elemental art history”—a mode of investigation that would use the elements to approach the history of art (especially that of the long eighteenth century’s industrializing era) anew. But, what exactly are the elements? Whose conceptions of them might be useful for critical investigations? And could such elemental investigations in the present recuperate without nostalgia repressed traditions of materio-technical interpretation against which our discipline has been constructed? This seminar pursues the elements through a sequence of historical, historiographic, methodological, and political propositions. We will consider perspectives from fields including phenomenology and eco-criticism where explicit address to the elements is already afoot, while

also examining noted art historians’ elemental imaginings.

Liquid Intelligence: Thinking the Fluid Image in the Long Eighteenth Century (taught McGill, Winter 2012; Fall 2013; University of Chicago, Spring 2015)

In an influential essay, contemporary artist Jeff Wall has sketched a suggestive genealogy linking chemical photography to a range of wet, atavistic processes and their modes of “liquid intelligence.” Using Wall’s model as point of departure, this experimental seminar explores how liquid intelligence might be expanded and deployed as a broader category of art-historical investigation. What, we will ask, can be revealed by applying the analytical solvent of liquid intelligence to an expanded field of visual production? How might doing so enable us to reciprocally reconsider relations between photography and other visual media? Drawing upon a range of theoretical perspectives, novels and film, this seminar takes its focus from artists and visual practitioners of the early modern period and long eighteenth century (possibly including Leonardo, Cellini, Titian, Hooke, Reynolds, Turner, Fox Talbot, and Courbet) who engage significantly with the problematic of making and thinking watery images. We will also consider their work in light of historical dynamics of maritime empire, the sciences of water (geology, chemistry, fluid mechanics among others) and shifting conceptions of intellectual liquidity itself.

Artworlds (co-taught with John Brewer, Spring Quarters 2010 and 2011; Caltech)

Among theorists and practitioners of art, the "artworld" has come to be seen as a central force in the production of contemporary art. But what is the artworld? When and how did it come to assume this remarkable importance? Utilizing collectors and collections in greater Los Angeles as a "laboratory", this advanced, team-taught seminar will examine crucial moments in the formation and changing conception of the artworld. Topics include the relation of artworlds to the valuation, collecting and market for art; the ambivalent relations of the artworld to artistic avant-gardes; and the comparative strength of the artworld's position in the age of twenty-first century globalization. While the course will include a number of field trips as well as presentations by contemporary artists, readings will be drawn from fields including social history, philosophical aesthetics, artists' writings and anthropological theory.

Making & Knowing in Early Modern Europe (taught Fall 2012; Fall 2008; Caltech)

This course examines interactions between art, science and technological innovation in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period. Exploring influential arguments that have linked the growth of empiricism in the sciences to naturalism in early modern visual art, this course asks: what factors brought the arts and the sciences together ca. 1430-1700? What skills, techniques or processes did early modern artistic traditions contribute to the formation of scientific knowledge—and vice versa? Did art and science separate into 'two cultures' at the end of this historical period? If so, why and how? Readings will be drawn from both primary and secondary sources, while objects and images from local collections will be central to our analysis.