This programme is concerned with outlining and critically evaluating the concept of the ‘avant-garde’ both theoretically and in terms of its applicability to representative areas of 20th century art. Closely focused on the visual and historical specificities of the subject, the programme is particularly concerned with examining the politically oppositional and ‘transgressive’ impulses of the avant-garde.
For the purposes of the programme ‘transgression’ is interpreted in the widest sense and in relation to a range of diverse historical contexts: eg the anti-art concerns of Dada; the political tensions arising from conflicts between nationalist and internationalist currents in Central European art early in the 20th century; the Nietzschian/Bataillean testing of the boundaries of conventional moral positions, particularly regarding sexual identity and the body.
Content
Two compulsory core courses:
* Research training
* Theories of the avant-garde
Plus a dissertation.
Some examples of optional courses:
* Readings in Duchamp: anti-art, blasphemy, sexuality
* The avant-garde and modernism in Central Europe, c1918-39
* Dada in Switzerland and Germany
* Other Europes 1900-1968: design and architecture in Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland
* Art, embodiment, transgression (body art from the 1960s onwards)
One of your four courses may be chosen from the following options:
* Multimedia analysis and design or 2D digitisation, offered by the Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute
* a course offered by the Department of English Literature from the Masters programme in Modernities, Modernity and Post-Modernity
* an option from elsewhere in the faculty, which must be approved by the programme convener.