Art of Dying

Catalog description

FNRT-784 is a graduate-level counterpart to FNRT 484. Under the 784 number, graduate students will explore various disciplinary critiques of mourning practices and attitudes toward death. This interdisplinary discourse will contextualize concepts of pathorgraphy and autopathorgraphy. Students will also meet with the professor outside of class for an additional weekly discussion; and produce a final project that connects with their thesis work. This course explores the experience of dying—a profoundly human and universal experience—as it is represented by artists who are themselves facing immanent death. The unique and deeply personal process of each dying artist is crucially informed by social, cultural, and historical as well as artistic contexts. The course will focus primarily on visual artists and writers living with and dying of disease—such as AIDS, cancer, and cystic fibrosis—as well as mortality and age. Topics such as aesthetics, artistic media, representation, grief, bereavement, illness, care-giving, aging, and the dying process will be considered within the context of issues of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and community values. Some of the artists covered will be Jo Spence, Hannah Wilke, Elias Canetti, Bob Flanagan, Herve Guibert, Tom Joslin, Laurie Lynd, Audre Lorde, Charlotte Salomon, Keith Haring, Frida Kahlo, Bas Jan Ader, Ted Rosenthal, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Keith Haring, Eric Steel, Derek Jarman, Eric Michaels, and David Wojnarowicz. We will also explore some of the critical theory of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Ross Chambers.