Conor Lauesen

This course explores the history of 20th century warfare through the lens of art and history, most especially photography. An upper-level undergraduate course, lectures and discussion likewise aim to introduce students to both the uncanny strangeness and implicit violence embedded in the photographic medium. In this way, the material of the class reaches beyond only explicit representations of war, and instead also considers how the medium of photography is today part and parcel with our modern, contemporary experience of witnessing violence. Chronologically structured, the course considers the ever-shifting ethos of representation and war with pictures beginning in 1898 and the American imperial projects across the Philippines. However, with the American Civil War looming in the immediate background of democratic identity and pictorial practice, the 1865 war photographs from Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan unofficially commence our investigations. We then speedily arrive at the wars in the Pacific (1898) and slowly traverse through the long 20th century: WWI, the inter war years, WWII (Hiroshima; the death camps and Lee Miller's Hitler), Korea to Vietnam, Iraq and the 'Desert Storm' wars, 9/11, and Abu Ghraib--these are some of the historical markers structuring the material of the course. As we often traverse beyond the edges of mere binary and literal representations of war, the course will as importantly incorporate art photography from some of the most consummate American masters of the last century: Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Eugene Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Diane Lawson, Dawoud Bey, An My Le and others comprise this short list. The ways in which pictures are often obliquely and subtlety inscribed with a pathos of war are always fundamentally at stake. Finally, the basement photography gallery at the Art Institute as well as rotating special exhibitions will offer the class firsthand opportunities to discuss photographic works of art in person. Moreover, their will be two film screenings across the term and students will be expected to attend the screenings and in turn contribute to related conversation. Students will be asked to complete one short (2-3 pages) and one long (6-8) end of the term paper. Topics may vary but all students will be asked to discuss their final project with the professor; most pressing at stake is the writing process, one's own art historical temperament, and perhaps most fundamentally: how can we (students and artists) learn to put words to images, going beyond blithe captions and ironically glib, disinterested tropes. Ideally there will also be a short final written exam (20% of the final grade): this will include two long essay questions; three short questions; and 15-20 works of photography to be identified.*I write this with hopes that a short exam, though challenging, will encourage students to truly engage with the material at hand--learning and memorizing and critically thinking that goes beyond rote knowledge.

This course investigates the international art movements of the 1920s and 1930s such as Constructivism, Purism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Neoplasticism, and other movements that favored a nonobjective mode. After its initial development before World War I, how did nonobjective art develop, justify itself, change, and find new roles in the troubled period of the Roaring Twenties and the Fascist Thirties? These questions are explored in lectures and discussion.

Beginning with the Armory Show in 1913, this course examines the arts in America from the time of the Stieglitz circle's modernist views through the various strains of Regionalism leading up to the emergence of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists in the early 1940s. The artistic developments are considered in the context of the complex social and political issues of the period.