Art History 530:Originality and Reproduction in Contemporary Arts

Wednesdays 2-5

Professor Peter Hales

This class has the course- number of a seminar in contemporary photography. But photography as such has nearly disappeared as a boundaried and identifiable medium. And so the seminar explores one of the central questions in contemporary visual arts: originality and reproduction.

The terms are loaded. Originality within the context of artistic production celebrates particular types of the artist- as creator, as eccentric, as avant-garde soldier. Within the context of the gallery, museum or auction house, originality promises value and insures against deflation: it's a marketplace term. In the discourse of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the question of the original leads back to a chain of origins: the source of the materials (think: Smithson); traditions and precedents from which the work derived (think: Piss Christ); the interplay of invention, adaptation and replication (think: Andy Warhol's Disaster series).

Reproduction, too, is charged with implication. From Walter Benjamin to Matthew Barney, the artifacts of multiplicity- lots of prints, Ansel Adams on the wall of the dorm or cubicle, postcards, movies, television shows, forgeries- have been viewed with fervor, delight, and alarm. But the very question of the reproduced object has become central to the discourse of contemporary art: video; installation-with-documentation; mixed media materials, including photographs that can't be reproduced and paintings that use photographs and other reproduced materials; complex multiple incarnations of a single (?) element, as is the case, for example with Matthew Barney, whose works are simultaneously present in artifacts, limited-edition objects (light-box photographic slides, for example), and multiply-shown movies.

How can you do work now without confronting these issues? How can you think about the contemporary without introducing these concepts?

Requirements: readings, discussion, short papers/responses, final "project" in one's primary medium. Work in other media than primary with permission of the instructor.