Contemporary Art: 1960-Present

Catalog description

This course discusses new art practices since the 1960s. Although numerous artistic experiments took place during the first half of the twentieth century, it was with the declining importance of modernist painting and sculpture by the late 1950s that newer modes of artistic practice became established. The course will explore the rise of Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Land Art, Video and Performance, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism. These practices are situated in relation to intellectual and social movements since the 1960s, including counterculture, feminism, race, ecology, institutional critique, and globalization. This course focuses primarily on Western European and North American art, but also incorporates selected global developments.