Art Writing: Politics of Viewing and Making

In this seminar, we will examine texts in which the author writes about, toward, and to an art object. We will be interested in texts that demonstrate how writing about art reveals relations and politics. How does art orient itself toward various audiences, establishing intimacy, community, or antagonism, and how can art writing expose these triangulated relationships between the artist, art object, and audience? How do we live with art and how does it determine not only the content of our writing but our lives? Our readings will include a variety of ekphrastic texts, including poetry, memoirs, personal and lyric essays, academic essays, and theory, in addition to screening films and viewing visual art, performance, and digital media. We will connect aesthetics to theories of race, gender, decoloniality, diaspora, and queer and feminist of color critique.