MA in Contemporary Art Theory

What you'll study Overview The programme comprises a non-assessed introductory module, the Core Module (comprising 4 blocks that thematically vary from year to year and of which students choose 2), and four assessed components: two Special Subjects, the MA Symposium and the MA Dissertation. Students also attend the Visual Cultures Public Programme of lectures and other events. You have the option of auditing another special subject should you wish to do so, subject to availability and in agreement with the course tutor. The taught part of the programme runs from the end of September to the end of March, with additional guest lectures or workshops in May and June. It offers a framework to help you focus and develop your own understanding of contemporary art practice and its wider cultural significance. It is designed to develop your understanding of a range of critical and theoretical approaches that inform the heterogeneous field of visual art production whilst, at the same time, enabling you to identify and prepare the area of independent research you will carry out in your dissertation project. Thematic pathways through the MA will be offered on a yearly basis. These will connect the annually changing themes of the core courses with the annual roster of special subjects. In any specific year three themes will be operative. They may include Global Arts; Sound; Politics and Aesthetics; Performance and Live Art; Critical Thought. Full-time students attend on Thursday and one other day each week (determined by the choice of special subject); part-time students attend on one day each week in the first year and on Thursday in the second year. Core module Module title Credits. The Common Core Module: DEL: Readings/Processes The Common Core Module: DEL: Readings/Processes 0 credits The c ore module strands introduce you to the problematic that resides at the heart of the MA programme: how to explore the relations between critical theory and contemporary visual arts practices. You choose either A and C or B and D. They present differently articulated contemporary perspectives on ‘art’ and ‘theory’ drawn from a variety of traditions (e.g. The Frankfurt School, Post-structuralism, Performance Studies, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis and Post-Colonial Studies). The core module strands are supported by student-led Reading Groups. 0 credits. Special subjects Special subjects are in-depth taught modules based on the current research interests of staff. They enable you to focus on an aspect of contemporary art, cultural theory or contemporary thought that particularly interests you. Special subjects currently include: Module title Credits. Curating and Ethics Curating and Ethics 45 credits What is a suitable ethical position today? What cause should a curator support? What can philosophy do to address and/or support these ethical decisions? This course explores the act of taking on an ethical position in curatorial projects today. The material explored ranges from specific curatorial practices that have developed means of addressing ethical issues to philosophical engagements in ethics. Authors studied are taken from both Western and non-Western traditions and range from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Valentin Mudimbe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, and Timothy Morton. The visual work explored on this course mainly consists of key exhibitions that have defined the way art engages itself ethically. These include: Dada ist Politisch, When Attitudes Become Form, Inside the Visible, Making Things Public, Altermodern, etc. Teaching involves lectures, student presentations, and discussions of key art historical and philosophical texts. 45 credits. Reading the Performative Reading the Performative 45 credits This module considers the impact of performativity on contemporary art practice since 1960, starting with performance art engaging with the everyday, moving through appropriation practices of the 1980s and ending with projects that use re-enactment and fiction to re-imagine histories and possible futures in contemporary artworks. In doing so, the module will discuss differences between ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’, drawing on theoretical perspectives from post-structural theory, queer and feminist studies, art theory, and philosophy. Throughout the module, performativity will be explored as a way of expressing the psychic and political potential of performance in art: a way of thinking about what art does. The focus will be on artwork drawing on feminist and queer politics. Theorists discussed include Erving Goffman, J L Austin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière. 45 credits. Sex, Gender, Species Sex, Gender, Species 45 credits This module asks how animal and sexual differences matter in and through a range of contemporary art, films and literature. Recent years have shown a surge of interest in what Jacques Derrida names ‘the animal question,’ ie the philosophical tendency to divide ‘man’ from ‘animal’ and for this difference to support a ‘non-criminal putting to death’ of the latter. This module investigates the ‘logics’ that create this critical division while also addressing what is a frequent gap in critical animal studies: the interface with gender and sexuality. Thus this module will also interweave study of works by feminist thinkers (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway, Kelly Oliver) to bring the problematic ways that ‘the feminine’ is figured in relation to both ‘the animal’ and to a supposedly neutral and human ‘subject’ into view. It will also consider how the sexual locates a key intersection with species and may open paths to new ones. Thus the module points towards what some now call the ‘posthumanities’. 45 credits. Geopoetics Geopoetics 45 credits How can the altered relations between the world, the earth and the planet be made audible, visible and sensible? How do the volatile spaces and non-local times of anthropogenic violence change the methods and modes of contemporary cultural production? The Geopoetics module engages with historical and contemporary narrations that respond to the multiple scales and inhuman matters that confront the critical humanities. What kinds of fictions and what kind of fabulations can be productively reread as prefigurations of tomorrow’s climates today? How do artistic practices narrate the collisions between the strange weather of the present, the deep time of the earth and the abstract future of extinction? The Geopoetics module explores a range of theoretical-fictions and fictional theories that narrate the entanglements between the surface world, the extractivist earth, the geological planet and the energetic Sun. Geopoetics introduces you to critical, creative and artistic practices produced by artists, novelists and theorists that complicate the borders between the humanities and the sciences, philosophy and horror and science fiction and critical theory. It focuses on the weird sciences, technometabolisms and geomythologies that articulate planetary matters of concern. Geopoetics thus aims to equip you with a theoretical and speculative vocabulary that is capable of analyzing, envisioning, and participating in ongoing critical and cultural debates on the forces and the futures of the planet. 45 credits. Judgement and Creation Judgement and Creation 45 credits This module examines the relationship between judging and creating, in general, and as it relates to art and aesthetics. Strongly philosophical, it starts with a conceptual analysis of this relationship based on readings of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. It then considers how various 20th century thinkers (ie Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Arendt, Adorno, Gasché, Henrich and Deleuze) have interpreted this important text and/or engaged with the issues it raises. 45 credits. Transforming Critical Practices Transforming Critical Practices 45 credits 45 credits. Dissonant Images: Questions of Evidence Dissonant Images: Questions of Evidence 45 credits How can or must we think of evidence today? How can evidence be given of relations of force and political violence, from the micro-political to local conflicts, war and injustice, while at the same time notions of authenticity, veracity and truth are contested? Why and how to give evidence when its relation to and effect on the sphere of the political is in doubt? To explore a small aspect of this fundamental challenge this module chooses as its core arena documentary mode audio-visual material that we encounter in art, cinema and activist contexts. Can creative documentary practice productively address situations of crises and emergency? How to think of documentary forms as propositional? How can we work out the relations between experimentations with documentary forms and new constitutions of the evidential, the political or the judicial? To develop a solid ground for addressing those questions we will begin working with key writings in documentary film theory and selected historical moments, which brought about significant political cinemas, such as e.g. the Latin American Militant Cinema, revolutionary cinema from African and South Asian contexts or cinematic instances of socio-political change within Europe and North America post WWII. Looking at how documentary language and form came about at moments of radical change we want to think through the specific constellations at the time of their making and interrogate the implications this has for the thinking and practising with documentary mode material now, thus think trough genealogies, legacies and ruptures between historical and contemporary contexts. 2015/16 collaboration with Werkleitz PMMC lab: Arguably the global contemporary is, or should be, undergoing radical transformations and the visual dimensions and technologies through which one seeks to understand and intervene into current scenarios need to constantly be understood anew. During 2015/16 the Dissonant Images class will think through the challenges towards and the possible futures of moving image practices in collaboration with the Werkleitz PMMC (Professional Media Master Class) lab, a practice based Master programme based in Halle (Germany) which takes a very innovative and expansive approach to film, documentary and moving image based media arts. There will be face-to-face meetings and workshops as well as online exchanges of ideas and thought processes with the idea to develop collaborative projects. 45 credits. Postcapitalist Desire Postcapitalist Desire 45 credits This module will consider recent debates on post-capitalism from the perspective of political aesthetics. It will explain and analyse some of the most influential theories of post-capitalism and ask whether post-capitalism is the best concept for theorising a shift out of capitalism. What advantages does it have over older terms such as communism and socialism? The module will identify the antecedents of theories of post-capitalism in socialist-feminism, anti-authoritarian leftism, cyberfeminism and accelerationism. At the heart of the module is the question of what role culture and aesthetics can play in imagining, pre-figuring and facilitating a move beyond capitalism. What are the major obstructions to the development of post-capitalist desire? How has capitalism’s use of culture enabled it to engineer and commandeer desire, and how can this be overcome? 45 credits. Spatial Biopolitics Spatial Biopolitics 45 Credits This module engages with an expanded notion of the geographic, specifically the shift from classical post-colonial geography to issues of cartography. Drawing on key theoretical texts and the works of spatial practitioners (contemporary artists, architects, curators, activists and others in the fields of the humanities), it explores such issues as urbanity, globalisation, mobility, conflict, migration and human rights. In addition, it asks how, within the heterogeneous geographic discourses and practices in circulation today, not only knowledge and cultural production but also identities and new forms of subjectivity, are ‘spatialised’. Explore our online archive of student work from Geographies 45 Credits. Independent research From the end of March, you will start independent research on a subject of your own choosing. At the end of the spring term, you will submit your dissertation proposal and be assigned a dissertation tutor who will support your independent dissertation research and writing activities in an advisory capacity. Module title Credits. MA in Contemporary Art Theory Dissertation MA in Contemporary Art Theory Dissertation 60 credits Having already produced an assessed oral presentation on your topic (see above) you work on your dissertation over the summer and submit your completed project for assessment early in September. Assessment: one 12-15,000-word dissertation. 60 credits. Two-day MA Symposium (oral presentation on dissertation topic) (30 credits). The MA Symposium provides you with the opportunity, fairly early on in the research/writing process, to present a worked up and focused investigation of your dissertation topic or some aspect of it. Your presentation will be formally assessed. Presenting on your dissertation research at this stage is invaluable for enabling you to define your project and, through verbal feedback and discussion, to progress your thinking. Assessment: one oral presentation in early June (20 minutes, plus 10 minute discussion). Assessment Visual Cultures assessment are 100% coursework. Normally this consists of essays, sometimes accompanied by creative projects, group projects, multi-media projects, presentations, symposia, reviews, and studio work. Download the programme specification for the 2018-19 intake. If you would like an earlier version of the programme specification, please contact the Quality Office. Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.