A survey on the evolution of the idea of avant-garde art and its implications for imagining artists and artworks as agents of historical change. Students will learn how art worked as a space of both support and resistance to the period’s dramatic historical changes. We will discuss the impacts that developments in the fields of science, linguistics, and literature had in art production in Europe between 1850 and 1930. This class adopts a social perspective to the study of art as it introduces students to other theories such as feminist and decolonial art history.
Can art change the world? Questions about the impact of art in the social fabric are constitutive of the idea of avant-garde art. This course will introduce students to these debates as they took shape in the American continent since 1960. With an emphasis on forms of art practice that outspokenly seek to provoke positive social change, this class provides a parallel narrative of contemporary art, in which art exits the museum space to ingrain itself in broader social processes.