Undergraduate Seminar

Falling from the Grip of Grace: Critical Texts in Recent Art

Visiting Professor, Visual & Performing Arts
Bennington College, Bennington, VT
2010–14

This seminar studied key texts on art and visual culture by critics, theorists and artists from late modernism to the present moment. It included close readings and analyses of essays from about 1960 to 2013 to consider the changing conditions under which art is conceived, produced, distributed, and experienced. The departure point was Michael Friedʼs seminal essay “Art and Objecthood” published in Artforum in summer of 1967, and the subsequent response by Robert Smithson published in the same journal that fall. The course examined the changing roles of the spectator from an indifferent position of viewer to an integrated role of participant in contemporary artistic practices.