GERST 6620 - [Reassembling Culture: Montage and Collage]

(crosslisted)
(also VISST 6620)

4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

P. McBride.

This course examines montage and collage as labels encompassing disparate practices of assemblage, layering, and juxtaposition that helped to destabilize the boundaries of traditional media and art forms in the course of the twentieth century. In analyzing the forms of contamination and hybridity that montage and collage enact, we will interrogate modernist theories of representation, mimesis, narrative, subjectivity, parody, and performance in view of the challenges they posed to dominant ways of articulating the relation between the visual and the verbal, realism and abstraction, ‘high’ art and mass culture. In surveying the theoretical discourse on montage since the 1960s we will also query the usefulness of the concept in re-envisioning artistic practice in the digital age. Particular attention will be devoted to the case of Weimar Germany. Possible texts include works by T.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin, P. Bürger, M. Duchamp, S. Eisenstein, K. Hayles, J. Heartfield, H. Höch, R. Krauss, J. McGann, L. Manovich, L. Moholy-Nagy, J. Rancière, H. Richter, K. Schwitters, T. Tzara, and D. Vertov.