COML787 - Tpcs in Contemporary Art: Pictorial Photography

Topics vary each semester. Fall 2018: Since it was not translated into English until the mid 1960s, Walter Benjamin s Work of Art essay was slow to arrive in the English-speaking world, and when it did, it seemed part of the same zeitgeist as Guy Debord s The Society of the Spectacle, Roland Barthes The Rhetoric of the Image, and Louis Althusser s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. This zeitgeist was deeply suspicious of popular images, and this suspicion was soon fortified from a feminist direction by Laura Mulvey s Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and a postcolonial one by Frantz Fanon s Black Skin, White Masks. Benjamin s essay extended it to the kinds of images we generally find in museums, i.e., to what I will be calling pictures. This made the museum the primary target of institutional critique, and gave rise to what Hal Foster called the anti-aesthetic. It was against this backdrop that the so-called Pictures Generation emerged. This category was helpful at first, since it allowed us to look at things that would otherwise have been forbidden. It was based, however, on a misapprehension: the misapprehension that a picture means the same thing for Jeff Wall as it does for Cindy Sherman.