Critical Studies: Never Felt Like This: Painting After Performance

9 units · Undergraduate

Intermittent: 9 units This course traces intersecting dialogues around how performance (action-based practices) and performativity (gesture, discourse, and "language acts") have shaped and transformed contemporary painting. We will examine the provocative relationship between performance and painting from 1950 to the present, asking how experiments in postwar performance have challenged, influenced, and radically expanded what painting can be. We will follow a vast, stormy trajectory from Jackson Pollock's action paintings to Niki de Saint Phalle's Shooting Paintings, in which rifles were fired at plaster surfaces containing hidden bags of paint; from Sam Gilliam's draped, unstretched canvases to the serene surfaces of David Hockney's swimming-pool paintings; and from Torkwase Dyson's Indeterminacy series, which crosses the boundaries between architecture, sculpture, and painting, to the abject, performative treatments of painting in Leidy Churchman's work, where live bodies lie beneath unhinged canvases while paint, syrup, powder, potato chips, a whip, and other substitutes for conventional paint and brushes are wielded with equal force. We will also investigate more recent practices and debates swirling around "painting post-internet" in the work of artists such as Lena Trydal, Rachel Rossin, Petra Cortright, Lu Yang, Nina Chanel Abney, Tomokazu Matsuyama, and Mehreen Murtaza. The course title borrows directly from Trydal's recent exhibition, Never Felt Like This (2025), in which internet-sourced imagery is folded back into painting through a distinctly post-internet, post-Pop sensibility. Across these practices, we will ask what happens when painting ceases to function simply as a static image or autonomous object and instead becomes an action, event, gesture, environment, interface, or performative encounter.