INTRODUCTION.
Modernity has often created a separation or dichotomy between the language of art and the lived everyday experience. For the longest time, art has been placed within an elitist and exclusivist position of way of living and the everyday as a quotidian, invisible and “othered” way of cultural life. In the contemporary times, the study of the everyday gained a strong attention and currency because of the capacity of the everyday to reveal and examine the operations and circulations of power, mode of production, representation and subjectivity of art. The re-location of art, on the other hand, within the everyday further exposes the historical and spatial matrix of class, ethnicity, race, sex, gender, sexuality, and the self. This course, therefore, explores different ways of integrating the two tropes and why it is necessary to expose their intersections, interlocutions, contingencies, redefinitions, nuances and debates.
GENERAL EDUCATION FOCUS.
The three-unit subject provides the students with critical perspectives in understanding and way of knowing art and the everyday. The course gives emphasis on art and the everyday through the study of Cultural Studies with a strong focus on ethnography and popular culture. The course provides multi-disciplinal attention on how art can be explored in the everyday and vice versa. In particular, students will employ their own ethnographic processes in grappling with notions of the everyday as this is expressed in art that have escaped institutional scrutiny and privileging of these same institutions, art that has not been deemed valuable or worthy of such scrutiny in the first place. The art-ness of art and the everyday-ness of everyday will be fleshed out through mixed media culture such as visual culture, geography, cinema, music/sound, popular prints and publications, radio and television, fashion, ads, cyberspace, experience economy etc. and look at how these cultural products intimate the contemporary social relations and life— specifically, the affect, senses and sensibilities of the everyday, body, performances, space and place, technology, globalisation and ecology.
- Teacher: Lara Katrina Mendoza