Can art move you to understand the world in different terms?
How have feminist artists and critics looked power in the eye?
Do women really have to be naked to get into the Met?
Autumn 2012
Time: MTWTh 11:30-12:20
Classroom: MW Low 101; TTh MGH 295
Professor Sasha Welland
Office: Padelford B-110P
Office Hours: M 3:30-5:00 & by appt.
Email: swelland@uw.edu*
*Please note: Every effort will be made to respond to email within 72 hours.
Teaching Assistant
Noralis Rodriguez-Coss
Office: Padelfor B-111
Office Hours: M 1:00-2:00 & by appt.
Email: noralisr@uw.edu
Course Description
In 1989 the U.S.-based group of anonymous artists called the Guerrilla Girls issued the following question with their Metropolitan Museum poster campaign:
Guerrilla Girls ads like this one have been published in magazines, pasted on signboards for street protests, and plastered on bathroom walls in museums and theaters. Their work, which involves image-making, performance, and critical historiography, serves as one example of feminist art practice. Feminist art cannot be classified as a style, like impressionism or cubism; nor is it bound to a particular medium, like painting or quilting; nor is it simply art by women. Feminist art challenges artistic conventions and embraces multiple media; it expresses criticism of structural and ideological inequalities with regard to gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality, while proposing alternative, experimental solutions; and it does so through serious engagement with aesthetics and form. In other words, feminist art is a field of practice and inquiry that is neither simply social nor aesthetic, in which entanglements of form and ideology, representation and politics are questioned, turned over, and remade. This course takes that premise to the global level, asking how social categories like gender and sexuality are constructed in similar and different ways across cultures, and how the work of feminist artists responds to these powerful formations as shaped by local and global institutions. Rather than assuming that feminist art begins in the West, as important origin stories like the formation of the Guerrilla Girls sometimes suggest, we explore an art history of innovation and intervention grounded in centers like Beijing, Johannesburg, and Mumbai, which also asks if women have to be Western to get into textbooks of feminist art.
The first two weeks of GWSS 290 provides a grounding in basic questions such as “what is feminism,” “what is art,” and “what is feminist art,” followed by a history of the movements that have exposed prejudices in the art world, exploding canons of modern and contemporary art and of Western feminist art. After that, each week of the course presents a case study (China, India, Iran, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan). Students are introduced to debates about gender, nation, and artistic representation located in the history and politics of a particular place. With this important lens for understanding the context of an artist’s work, we then explore the work of 2-3 key artists and the configurations of power, gender, and sexuality they question through their aesthetic experiments and interventions. A final unit on transnational diasporic artists will unsettle the place-based framework of the course and push students to question national and cultural as well as gender boundaries. While this is a lecture-based course, close-looking exercises in the classroom are designed to sharpen students’ visual analysis skills and spark discussion.
The course is organized in conjunction with an international conference, New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia, and the World, which will be held at the University of Washington from November 15-17. It is timed to coincide with Elles, a major exhibit of feminist art originally installed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which will be at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) from October 2012 to January 2013. Combining scholarly presentations with artists’ and curators’ roundtables, this conference addresses the practice, circulation, and cross-cultural significance of contemporary feminist art from Asia. This unique opportunity will enable students to attend talks by four of the artists featured in the class: Navjot Altof (India), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), Hung Liu (from China, based in the U.S.), and Wu Mali (Taiwan). Students are required to attend and write a reflection paper about at least one conference lecture, panel, or roundtable, as well as one of the fall lineup of community events related to the conference. Two required Friday sessions (held at the same time as the lecture, 11:30-12:20) at the Henry Art Gallery on campus will feature a talk by museum staff members about feminist collecting practices, an on-site exploration of a video installation that is part of the Elles exhibit, and an introduction to the Henry Study Center, where students can view and research works in the museum’s permanent collection. Depending on student interest, guided exhibit tours of Elles at SAM, Shirin Neshat’s Tooba at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and Social Order: Women Photographers from Iran, India, and Afghanistan at the Photo Center NW may also be organized on Fridays; according to their schedules, students can participate in these guided tours to fulfill the course requirement to attend at least one community event. (There will also be events at the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the Seattle Public Library, among many others. A calendar of events will be provided to students.)
Course Objectives
- To ask how various artists and artworks shift our understanding of both feminism and art.
- To think deeply about and look closely at connections between aesthetic form and ideology.
- To reflect upon the cultural construction of gender and sexuality in a way that deepens our awareness of world politics.
- To use basic methods of anthropological and art historical research.
- To practice an interdisciplinary approach through course assignments, which guide students to analyze visual form together with the social, political, and economic dimensions of art objects.
- To develop competencies in how to use digital media for research and knowledge sharing.
Course Texts
EReserves: All readings assigned by the instructor are available through the UW Libraries Electronic Reserves, which you should be able to access through your MyUW resource page for the course.
Books: Available at The University Bookstore and on 4-hour reserve at Odegaard Library.
- Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory
- Guerrilla Girls, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art
Additional books of interest: Selections from some of the following are in the course EReserves, and you might be interested in further exploring them, as well as other catalogues and films related to the course. The Course Reserves page indicates whether these items are held at the Art Reserve Desk, Odegaard, or Media Center.
- Cornelia Butler and Lisa Mark, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
- Centre Pompidou, Elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne
- Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society
- Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
- Lynn Hershman Leeson (director), WAR: Women, Art, Revolution [DVD]
- Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, eds., Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art
- Shirin Neshat (director), Women without Men [DVD]