The Artist’s Joke

Catalog description

The Artist’s Joke is an experiential art history and studio course that engages students of all sensibilities and skills in hands-on postmodern thought, art appreciation, and contemporary art making practices. The Artist’s Joke is about the relationship between humor and art. The class will engage a wide range of humor and artistic jokes from the past several centuries to the present for us to laugh with. The course will evoke how art and humor have been used to betray and undermine hegemony and power relations, to rethink cultural and societal norms, to envision or reorder the visual and experiential worlds and most of all to give us hope. Some of the artists and thinkers engaged in the course are Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Peter Land, William Pope L., Werner Herzog, Sandra Berhard, amongst others. Students will process the content of the course by utilizing humor and jokes to produce rich and thoughtful works of art. Learning formats include lecture, discussion, art making and art critique.