This interdisciplinary studio symposium course introduces students to key principles and practices of surrealism with particular focus on theories of photography and strategies of photographic image-making. Treating surrealism not only as an art-historical moment but a living body of attitudes, theories, and possibilities for thinking, art-making, and action, students will develop their own ideas and a body of work in formulating a surrealist praxis. Students will read texts by and about surrealists/surrealism, querying into the poetics, politics, and possibilities of photographic surrealism. The class will treat ideas including: erotic desire, pleasure, gender, chance, dreams/unconscious, walking, play/games, politics, race, anticolonial thought, freedom.
Students will study work by surrealist thinkers including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Aime Cesaire, Georges Bataille, Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun; modern surrealist potes including Juliana Huxtable and Billy-Ray Belcourt; and contemporary theorists such as Rosalind Kruass, Susan Laxton, Angela Carter, and Tina Campt. Artists of special focus will include: Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Pierre Molinier, Maya Deren, John Akomfrah, and Aruther Jafa. Students will also engage contemporary Afrosurrealism based in photography and film, e.g. Beyonce's ?Lemonade,' Donald Glover's ?Atlanta,' Boots Riley's 'Sorry to Bother You,' and Jordan Peele's ?Get Out.?
Students write two short analytic essays and a cumlinating research essay synthesizing ideas from across the semester. Students will also engage in generative photographic exercises designed to break habitual attitudes toward seeing and staging, as they build a focused body of personal work. Research, writing, and studio practice unfold in conjunction with one another, providing students with a working model for synthesizing art history and theory, political engagement, and making.
