Sexuality of Postmodernism

Catalog description

This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists of the postwar generation were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism in American art was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these artists raise the problem of authoriality and its discontents. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of the disclaiming of authoriality in post war American art, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing salience of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. What, in short, is the relationship between the rise of an anti-biographical, anti-authorial theoretical framework, and the lived histories of so many queer authors? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis. (Undergraduates interested in the course should contact Professor Katz.)