Week 1 Manifestos
Recommended book: Mary Ann Caws’s Manifestos (anthology)
Exercise: With a critical sense of the manifesto as a
“genre” of (art) writing, compose an original manifesto addressing your work
and beliefs as an artist. To the extent that your work is
collaborative/group-oriented, consider how your manifesto may also represent
the interests of your collaborators/group?
Week 2 Typography
Recommended texts: An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (ed. Emmett Williams), Hollis
Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (film), Adam
Pendleton’s Becoming Imperceptible,
and N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix
Exercise: Using any medium/format, compose an original work
of art that uses typography in a significant way. How may your use of
typography draw attention to current conditions of print technologies (online
and off)? How might it also investigate how typography has been used
historically in advertising, printed matter, signage, fashion, and/or other
works of art? What do your choices of font and design values intend?
Week 3 Artists’ Books
Recommended books: Johanna Drucker’s A Century of Artists’ Books and Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop
Press 1971-2008
Exercise: Produce an original artists’ book. How may
your own book extend, critique, and/or revisit a previous discourse of artists’
books? In what ways may your book not be merely a vessel for other works of
art, but a work of art in itself? To
what extent can the book’s construction and choices of materials (physical or
digital) inflect certain aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political values? To
what extent may your book function performatively, gesturally, and/or
theatrically?
Week 4 Feminisms
Recommended books: M/E/A/N/I/N/G (ed. Susan Bee & Mira Schor); We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women
1965-1985 A Sourcebook.
Exercise: Consider the historical use of
language/text by various feminist-identified artists. Create an original work
of art that mediates your “feminism” through the use of language. To what
extent are particular uses of language gendered? What is the relationship between
language and embodiment (a principal concern of many feminist artists)? How,
too, may language express a content specific to women (whether cis-identified,
trans, or otherwise)?
Week 5 Performance Writing + Screenplay
Recommended texts: Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New
Psychodrama (Whitney Museum catalogue), PAJ Journal
(ed. Bonnie Marranca)
Recommended artists: Trisha Baga, Guy Ben Ner, Sadie
Benning, Gregg Bordowitz, Mark Bradford, Janet Cardiff, Omer Fast, Richard
Foreman, Coco Fusco, General Idea, Melanie Gilligan, Sharon Hayes, Adam
Pendleton, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Mike Kelley, Kalup Linzy, Shana
Moulton, Adam Pendleton, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl, Catherine
Sullivan, Ryan Trecartin, Kara Walker, Robert Wilson.
Exercise: Compose a script for film, video, the
stage, or public space. How does language function gesturally and/or via a set
of theatrical and/or cinematic conventions (cf. Catherine Sullivan)? To what
extent is your use of language a function of genre (cf. Sullivan and Melanie
Gilligan)? How can you produce comedy and pathos in your work (cf. Robert
Wilson, Kalup Linzy, Yvonne Rainer, Guy Ben Ner, Gilligan, Mark Bradford, and
General Idea)? Consider how you wish your writing to be performed/staged
(where? to whom? with the use of what props and/or actors?). Consider how you
may involve others (actors, bystanders, an audience)? Do you wish to make
interventions in a particular space or among a particular community (cf. Sharon
Hayes)? How may your performance be enhanced by video post-production
technologies and/or installation (cf. Shana Moulton and Ryan Trecartin)?
Week 6 Diaries and
Journalism
Recommended artists: Vito Acconci, Etel Adnan, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Dodie Bellamy, Cara Benedetto, Gregg Bordowitz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
Moyra Davey, Tracey Emin, Simone Forti, Juliana Huxtable, Chris Kraus, Eileen
Myles, Trisha Low, Lee Lozano, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Paul
Thek, Hannah Weiner, Matias Viegener, David Wojnarowicz.
Exercise: Using an existing set of journals/diaries
(your own or another’s) compose an original work of art. OR: start a
journal/diary that may become (part of) a work of art. Consider how journals
and diaries have been used by other artists. What qualities differentiate
diaristic and journalistic writing? How
do these types of writing inflect time differently? How might they create
different senses of immediacy and intimacy? How may they offer a means to tell
a story about yourself or others that might be impossible to tell through other
forms of writing?
Week 7 Materiality
Recommended books: Liz Kotz’s Words to be Looked At, Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible, Susan Howe’s The Birthmark, Jerome McGann’s The
Textual Condition, Fred Moten’s In
the Break, and Poetry Plastique
exhibition catalogue (ed. Charles Bernstein & Jay Sanders).
Recommended artists: Ian Hamilton Finley, Susan Howe,
Lev Rubinstein, Robert Smithson, Cecilia Vicuña,
Lawrence Weiner.
Week 8 Artists’
Magazines
Recommended book: Gwen Allen’s Artists’ Magazines (anthology) [see appendix for a comprehensive
listing of artists’ magazines].
Recommended magazines: LTTR (Ginger Brooks Takahashi et al), Dot Dot Dot (Dexter Sinister), Shifter
(ed., Sreshta Rit Premnath), The Lay
of the Land Newsletter (Center for Land Use Interpretation), 0 to 9 (ed. Bernadette Mayer & Vito
Acconci)
Week 9
Instruction/Prompt/Questionnaire
Recommended book series: Collective Task (ed. Rob Fitterman et al)
Recommended artists: John Cage, CA Conrad, Robert
Gluck, Bhanu Kapil, Ben Kinmont, Alison Knowles, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Georges
Maciunus, Jackson Mac Low, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Georges Perec.
Exercise: Compose a set of instructions or prompts
for a work to be performed by yourself and/or others. In composing your
instructions/prompt, consider what you would like to achieve through your own
or another’s actions? Do these actions reflect critically on a state of affairs
or set of relations (Ben Kinmont)? Do they intend to depersonalize the one
instructed (cf. Jackson Mac Low, John Cage)? Do they allow the instructed to
access desirable modes of attention (cf. Cage, Georges Perec)? Are they meant
to be works of art in themselves? Do they ask one to do the impossible and as
such become purely speculative and/or prefigural? To what extent may they
enable alternative modes of production (cf. Collective
Task)? Consider the elegance and economy of your words in composing your
instructions/prompts.
Week 10
Orality/Duration/Transcription/Scoring
Recommended artists: David Antin, Amiri Baraka, Steve
Benson, Kamau Braithwaite, David Buuck, John Cage, M. NourbeSe Philip, Cecil
Taylor, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Andy Warhol.
Exercise: Compose an original work using any of the
following methods: 1. By recording and transcribing a conversation or set of
conversations (cf. Warhol); 2. By improvising and recording a talk and editing
your talk for the page (cf. David Antin and Steve Benson); 3. By transcribing
and scoring two minutes of audio; 4. By transcribing your own or someone else’s language phonetically (cf. Kamau
Braithwaite).
Week 11 Detournment/Reappropriation/Tactical
Art
Recommended artists: Alexandra Bell, Critical Art
Ensemble, General Idea, Glenn Ligon, Not an Alternative, Pictures Generation
(Jenny Holtzer, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine), Keith and Mendi Obadike, Situationist
International, The Yes Men.
Exercise: In what ways are detournment,
reappropriation, and tactical art still effective as means of intervening in a
“society of the spectacle” (cf. Situationist International)? How can the media
be “jammed” and “hacked” to create novel situations that redress social wrongs
and/or create conditions of possibility for ‘another world’ (The Yes Men,
Critical Art Ensemble, Not an Alternative)? How may the reappropriation of
words, pictures, sounds, and media enable you to explore your identity or
perform another (Glenn Ligon, Pictures Generation)? To what extent does
language function through re/contextualization? Create an original work of art
that addresses any or all of these concerns.
Week 12 Between
Drawing, Painting, and Writing
Recommended artists: Etel Adnan, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Joseph Beuys, Renee Gladman, Philip Guston, Keith Haring, Douglas
Kearney, Robert Kocik, Henri Michaux, Matt Mullican, Carolee Schneemann, Cy
Trombly.
Exercise: Compose an original work of art that exists
between ‘drawing’/’painting’ and ‘writing’ (cf. Etel Adnan)? How do words and
letters attain graphic values and vice versa? How may you use words
calligraphically, ideogrammatically, hiero- or petro-glyphically? To what
extent are the visual and aural senses of written language inextricable?
Week 13 Fictions
Recommended artists/groups: Etel Adnan, Arakwa Gins, Bernadette
Corporation, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Alexander Provan,
Tan Lin, Jalal Toufic.
Exercise: Consider the adoption of fiction by artists
historically. How have artists used the genre to create stories and narratives
about their cultural and/or society? To what extent is fiction adopted to
challenge narrative conventions and official notions of ‘truth’? How might
fictions be employed as a response to personal and widespread cultural trauma
(cf. The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic)? In what ways does fiction
challenge dominant epistemes and technological paradigms (Alexander Provan)?
How might fiction allow the artist a means to play with notions of self and/or
cultural identity (cf. Tan Lin, Jalal Toufic)?
Week 14 Poetry and
Art
Recommended artists/groups: Cara Benedetto, Bernadette
Corporation, Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Dada, Jimmie Durham, Juliana Huxtable,
Steffani Jemison, Arnold J. Kemp, Ralph Lemon, Claire Pentecost, Isaac Pool,
William Pope.L, Dmitry Prigov, Bunny Rodgers, Yvonne Rainer
Exercise: Historically, artists and visual artists
have been in conversation and collaboration with one another. Oftentimes
artists have trespassed into poetry and vice versa. Sometimes artists start out
as poets; less frequently, poets start as visual artists. How might you use
poetry as a mode or medium for your art? To what extent are you in dialogue
with poets—do you read them and take something vital from their ways of
working? Do you consider yourself to have a ‘practice’ as a poet, and if so do
you differentiate this from your practice as an artist? Inasmuch as
contemporary poets and visual artists exist in very different economies, if not
communities, how does ‘value’ affect the choices you make to be an artist, a
poet, or both? Compose a poem or series of poems that inflect any or all of the
problems I have outlined here.
