Instructions for Art: Text Scores in Art, Music and Performance

Catalog description

What is at stake when an artist creates a work through a set of linguistic instructions or textual cues? This class will look at early written scores and instructions from artists, performers, and composers, such as Sol Lewitt, George Lewis, Adrian Piper, Felix Gonzales Torres, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Alison Knowles, Anthony Braxton, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. We will also explore early artists’ code-based projects and recent work done with artificial intelligence. In this course we will look at the myriad of reasons artists have used a language-based system to realize an artwork.