SART 4303 The Book as Object and Artifact

This studio operates under the heading of the book, but that material object is of less concern than our understanding of how the attention books solicit from their readers relates to the zone of artistic processes characterized by attentiveness, care, and participation. The studio concern here is in finding ways of utilizing ordinarily 'non-art' objects or else fashioning things that resemble such objects without preserving their use. The work of the studio will explore expansive exercises of containment, accumulation, psychological vocabularies, archiving, objects to be read, words to be seen, site-specificity, models, modeling, pages, paging, seriality, and other ways of applying spatial resonance to objects, whether found old or new, or made for nominative (as distinct from narrative) reading. Readings and discussion will examine contemporary transgressions of subject and object within contemporary studio art practice. The course will engage students in both assigned and self-directed work that will enable them to experiment with a broad visual vocabulary.