First Year Research Seminar: The Politics of Abstraction

(4 Credits)

Abstraction has been a valuable artistic style for artists seeking to escape visibility, legibility, surveillance, and other forms of identification that would limit their work. For that reason, abstraction has been a terrain of freedom for artists. However, abstraction can also diffuse meaning and render politics unrecognizable. For example, abstraction has a role in the story of the Cold War: the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism as a vehicle for ideologies of American freedom. In this class, we will study these ambivalent potentials of abstract art in order to think about how art-making and interpretation are linked to power. We will use this case study to reflect on students’ own developing practices of research and interpretation.