January 25–27: Studying Visual Arts

Visitors appreciating the unique architecture of New York City's Guggenheim Museum.

Much like the other disciplines we'll be looking at over the next few weeks, the visual arts are a remarkably broad and complex subject that's not really all that easy to encapsulate briefly. Nonetheless, we shall do our best over the next two classes with a handful of foundational texts and an opportunity to look comparatively at a little contemporary art criticism.

For Wednesday, we'll start with two short pieces by Susan Sontag, originally published in the New York Review of Books in the fall of 1973. They'd later appear as the first two chapters in her landmark essay collection, On Photography (1977):

• "Photography" (later titled "In Plato's Cave"): [PDF]
• "Freak Show" (later titled "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly"): [PDF]

The former deals more generally with the medium of photography while the latter is a review of two collections of photos by Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, which frames its argument through the ideas of Walt Whitman. You should easily be able to Google some of the specific images Sontag describes for the sake of comparision.

Next, we'll read the first chapter of Ways of Seeing (1972), by recently-deceased critic John Berger, which starts with the provocative assertion that "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." As he openly acknowledges, many of his ideas are shaped by Walter Benjamin's iconic essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": [PDF]

For Friday, we'll begin with the first two chapters of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art (1993) — a book that (alongside pioneering works like Art Spiegelman's Maus) helped convince the general public that graphic narratives were more than capable of being legitimate literature. Here, we'll find a wide-ranging discussion of the comic artform and its implications, as well as a very useful introduction to the genre's lexicon: [PDF]

Keith Haring poses with one of his graffiti pieces in the NYC subway system.

Finally, we'll take a comparative look at several pieces of art criticism written in response to the same body of work: specifically "Keith Haring: 1978–1982," a wonderfully-constructed 2011 show highlighting the early development of the celebrated pop iconographer, which was co-curated by Cincinnati's own Contemporary Arts Center and later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum (where most of these reviews are from):

• Karen Rosenberg, "A Pop Shop for a New Generation: 'Keith Haring: 1978-1982' at Brooklyn Museum," The New York Times [link] (related slideshow [link])
• Rachel Wolff, "Where the Radiant Baby Was Born," New York Magazine [link]
• Matt Morris, "You Don't Know Keith," CityBeat [link]