With And Against The Given: Found Objects x Black Study

Catalog description

In this course we work with found objects, considering whether and how different arrangements of familiar materials yield new or unexpected (ap)proximities and throughlines, relations or resonances. The aim here is to practice a type of creative forensics that is as familiar to historians as visual artists—finding traces (archives and scraps, ruins, relics and artifacts), and deciding, quite literally, what to make of them. We are guided in our endeavours by the work of scholars and artists such as Saidiya Hartman, Theaster Gates, Dwayne Betts, Christina Sharpe, Arthur Jafa, Alex Bell, M. Nourbese Philip, the quilters of Gee's Bend, Thelonious Monk, and producers of early hip hop, who model how to work with and against "the given." We will ask, what strategies do they use to remix, rehabilitate, resist or reimagine the materials they encounter? And,how can black study, with its inter- and transdisciplinary orientations, and black cultural practices, born of a longstanding imperative to think and create against the world as-is, shape our engagements with found objects (and their transformation)? Our collective answers to these questions are designed to spur students' thinking about their own found-object projects, clarify theoretical interests and methodological commitments and structure future study.