Nariman Skakov (Slavic Languages & Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 63T | 4 Credits (Fall 2024) | CANVAS SITE
THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
Avant-garde art sometimes seems to make a complete break from the art that precedes it. The very name, ‘avant-garde’ (from French, literally ‘advance guard’) carries military connotations that suggest a total, violent break with the past. Our seminar will look at another side of this radical change, asking whether the avant-garde might also be playful, rather than violent, making possible an interplay between invention and convention? And what is the afterlife of the avant-garde? How did its legacy inform aesthetic innovation in a later period? We will try to answer these questions by studying a small set of textual and visual artifacts from the long twentieth century, cutting across different continents and political formations. We will begin with conceptual experiments of the Dada and Suprematist groups and Italian and Russian Futurism and their convoluted relationship with Fascist and Communist ideologies. We contrast these historical examples with later work, like that of Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and Joseph Beuys. We will consider cinematic experiments of Dziga Vertov and Jean-Luc Godard, ending with David Lynch’s radical displacement of the reigning ideology of Hollywood in his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive. This nearly century-long framework will allow us to investigate a range of artistic, social, and political mobilizations of the term ‘avant-garde’. We will be doing short readings and working through them together in class, helping students learn how to read theoretical texts as well as read novellas and watch films in the light of theory.
Note: There will be two required trips to the Bauhaus-related collection at the Harvard Art Museums and to the ICA, Boston.