UTILITY & SUBVERSION: THE OBJECT IN 20TH CENT. ART (AH3020)

From cubist assemblage to multimedia contemporary art installations, from Duchamp’s ready-made to the design departments in prominent art museums, the presence of objects –in the sense of things, everyday utensils–is pervasive in 20th century Art History. Mixing up high and low culture, aestheticizing the common and desacralizing the unique, the object in art has cast into question the traditional definition of art in Western Culture. This course will highlight the different implications of the object as the subject of art, as the material for art, as design product, as a trigger of spatial experience. We will explore how, in the context of a fast developing consumerism, the art revolving around the object, whether conciliating or critical, expresses and clarifies our relation to a complex and sometimes contradictory modern world. Major examples in art and design history from the end of the 19th to end of the 20th century will be discussed in class or during museum/workshop visits, in order to reach an understanding of our object-invested cultural and material environment.