ARTH 4761 - Art and Social Histories

(crosslisted)
(also AMST 4306, VISST 4761) (CA-AS)

Fall, spring. 4 credits.

Permission of instructor is required. Enrollment is limited to: not open to freshmen. Co-meets with AMST 6761/ARTH 6761. Auditing not permitted.

L. L. Meixner.

Topic for Fall 2011 Caricatures, Political Cartoons and Laughter.
This seminar explores the place of caricatures, political cartoons, and comics in everyday life. Our focus is on modern images and their historical origins in the grotesque body, the fool, lowlife genre painting, physiognomic theory, and carnival. Our group discussions will proceed from Goya’s Los Caprichos, Hogarth, Daumier, Nast, Ensor, Dix, and Grosz, to cartoonists for the Masses (American socialists), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and the Great Dictator, WPA printmakers in the Great Depression, American Social Realists (themes include fascism, racism, labor strife), and Krazy Kat. Students are encouraged to work across cultures, and explore photomontage, posters, agitprop, graffiti, comic books, les bandes dessinées, and new media. Larger themes are lithography as a subversive medium; public laughter as power; political upheaval and government censorship; social media and global transmission of political images. We will work directly with the outstanding print collection at the Johnson Art Museums well as on-line resources such as Cornell’s Collection of Political Americana. Readings include Baudelaire on caricature and urban modernity, Bakhtin on carnival and laughter, and Umberto Eco on ugliness.
Topic for Spring: Public Culture & the Great Depression
Seminar explores public art and popular entertainments as the means for everyday people to politically engage or escape the Great Depression (1929-41). Discussions include Living Newspapers, the Federal Theater Project, Union-sponsored theater including Pins and Needles, WPA muralists and printmakers, FSA photographers, Social Realists including Ben Shahn, Reginald Marsh, and Philip Evergood, alongside Grant Wood and the Regionalists. Connecting these is FDR’s New Deal and its controversial government support for the arts. We consider Big Bands and swing, pulp and comic strips, star tabloids, Depression-era Hollywood gangster films, “screwball” comedies, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers spectaculars. Will examine the importance of early radio in the home through FDR’s fireside chats, soap operas, and serial thrillers such as the Shadow. Students will draw on the American Memory Project, documentaries, and the Johnson Art Museum collections. Films include It Happened One Night, Gay Divorcee, Double Inemnity, and Woody Allen’s Radio Days.