Matthew Jesse Jackson, Andrew Perchuk, and Christopher P. Heuer’s participation in the collective Our Literal Speed were among the examples that, together with the issues to which contemporary art itself gives rise, spurred the students to develop the projects presented in Visualizing Art History. The class worked collaboratively in small groups over the course of the semester researching topics of shared interest. They then conceptualized, proposed, critiqued, tweaked, and, finally, executed their plans for sharing what they discovered in a variety of different mediums. The results of their work consider contemporary art’s relationships to themes of broad scope and import including human identity, technology, space, time, and art’s own status and standing in the world today. Some of these projects solicit active participation, while others invite a more reposed contemplation. Each endeavors to confront big-picture issues about what contemporary art is, what it means for us to study it historically, and how we can, by way of experiments that both respect and cross disciplinary boundaries, expand the ways that we have available to discuss it and make it matter.
VISUALIZING ART HISTORY AHI 3663 CONTEMPORARY ART SPRING 2018
Abigail Agosta, Batool Almoghalliq, Samantha Babb, Julia Blasdel, Meredith Brander, Houston Brassfield, Caitlin Burdick, Austin Childers, Katelyn Cook, Caroline Corley, William Cramer, Braden Crumly, Jacob Cullum, Caylee Fletcher, Rachel Funkhouser, Olivia Gerard, Alyssa Howery, Madison Kay, Crystal Kunze, Alexandar Leasaū, Scott Lemaster, Lauren Lightholder-Betz, Angie Maidt, Patricia Miller, Noelle Moon, Torrey Parker, Addison Rosenquist, Montserrat Ruffin, Rachel Russell, Bianca Ryckert, Chloe Wade, Olivia Walton, Madeline Wichryk, Jacob Young
I would like to thank Melissa Ski for the invitation to exhibit in the Learning + Engagement Gallery at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Brad Stevens and Christopher Mackie for designing and installing the exhibition, and all of the students in AHi 3663 Contemporary Art during the spring of 2018 for learning alongside me about visualizing art history.
Robert Bailey is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma.
Summer–Fall 2018
Visualizing Art History is an outcome of the AHi 3663 Contemporary Art course that I taught during the spring semester of 2018 at the University of Oklahoma. An upper-division lecture course covering the history of world art from 1989 to the present, AHi 3663 introduces students to key themes and issues that have animated the art of the last several decades. Owing to its focus on current concerns in art, the course is popular with art and design students. Because of that, I had the idea to collaborate with the students taking AHi 3663 on an experiment concerning something that has been of interest to me lately in my own research: visualizing art history. Though art historians have considerable familiarity with the visual aspects of things, they tend themselves to present their work linguistically, speaking and writing in the company of images. This unnecessary constraint limits the places to which art historians have access, the kinds of audiences available to them, and the capacity for the knowledge they produce to meaningfully impact the world. Visual means, including those associated with art, can indeed bear knowledge, including art-historical knowledge, despite art historians being, as a whole, reticent to embrace them. Were they less so, what sorts of possibilities would arise for the discipline of art history? And who better than a group comprised primarily of art and design students not yet conditioned by art history to explore the possibilities for thinking through how knowledge about the history of art, in this case, the history of contemporary art, can be visualized within the context of a museum exhibition?
Accordingly, I prepared a syllabus full of the usual lectures I give when teaching a course about contemporary art, but with space reserved in the schedule for sessions exploring the history of efforts by art historians (and others whose thinking intersects with art history) to give visual form to art-historical knowledge. This meant that we accomplished the usual work of considering how modernism becomes contemporary in the Euroamerican context, comparing that to similar transitions happening in other contexts around the world where postsocialist and postcolonial conditions often prevail, and reflecting on the sets of concerns that result and animate today’s art worlds, including globalization, climate change, and digitization. However, it also meant that we devoted considerable attention to a range of projects that pursue visual strategies for presenting knowledge about art’s history. Together, we talked through how, in addition to writing and talking, art historians can also document, essay, design, map, collage, montage, disseminate, archive, perform, and exhibit in visual ways that exceed and, therefore, compliment the capacities of language. Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Marshall McLuhan and Quinton Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Sylvia Kolbowski’s An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art, Boris Groys’s Thinking in Loop, Svetlana Alpers’s partnership with a painter and a photographer to study Tiepolo, John Onians’s efforts to map world art history, Kenneth Goldsmith’s stewardship of Ubuweb, Molly Nesbit’s collaboration with an artist and a curator on Utopia Station, Alison Langmead’s digital humanities work at DHRX, and