080021 UE Course: Contemporary Figurations (nst.K.) (2019W)

What is “figuration” in contemporary art? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 lament regarding a nostalgic “return” to figuration in European painting of the interwar period, “figuration” has been linked in contemporary art history with questionable, if not suspect, aesthetic and political aspirations. It is associated with illusion, monumentality, and tradition, with the artist as virtuoso master, with authoritarian perspectival schemas and submissive viewers, with obsolete and exclusive iconographies, and with defunct formal, material, and stylistic conventions. It was this view of “figuration” that the historical avantgardes sought to counter or transcend by developing disparate strategies of abstraction.

Throughout the late 20th century, abstraction in one guise or another has continued to present itself as the antidote to the conservatism of “figuration.” At the same time, and especially in the art of the 21st century, artists began to explore modes of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrospective or nostalgic. Rethinking and resisting inherited rubrics of representation, perspective, orientation, and viewership, they arguably contest – in equally radical fashion – the dominant conventions of figuration and its historiographic reception. Taking the art of the early 1980s as a point of departure, this course critically examines contemporary figuration, considering the historical, artistic, and political grounds for and consequence of its resurgence. Artists under discussion include Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Takashi Murakami, and Jenny Saville, amongst others. Readings in feminist and queer theory, postcolonial theory, and disability studies will undergird our discussions.

This is a reading- and writing-intensive course designed for advanced B.A. students and M.A. students in art history with a strong interest in modern and contemporary art. The course will be held in English. Active participation in class discussion is expected. Erasmus and exchange students are asked to contact the instructor before enrolling.