PORT 4520 - [Aesthetic Theory and Participatory Act]

(crosslisted)
(also COML 4205, VISST 4520) (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

Next offered 2015-2016.

P. Erber.

We explore the theoretical underpinnings of the transformations of art within the postwar avant-gardes and discusses the innovations of participatory art as a historical rupture with the tradition of European aesthetics. We will examine classical texts of eighteen-century aesthetics, critical pieces, artist’s writings, and visual works. Special attention will be given to the Brazilian Concrete and Neoconcrete artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Materials range from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment to Mario Pedrosa’s essays on geometric abstraction and Yoshihara Jiro’s Gutai Art Manifesto, from Jacques Ranciere’s Aesthetics and it discontents to records of Allan Kapprow’s Happenings and Oticica’s Parangoles.