Performing the Object considers the relationships between objects and performers – tracing what runs between both embodied practice and active matter. We explore objects as contingent – active forms subject to change and predisposed towards interface with performers, audiences, individuals and communities. We examine the role of art objects to initiate movement and for bodies to be informed by materials. Situated in the social and political – participation, engagement, agency and mobility will be examined in consideration of positionality and structural formations. Our work will bridge political and historical concerns of labor, audience, gaze, power, vulnerability, attention and passivity as we consider and enact performativity in body, language and forms. We will examine the role of site and venue as well as public and private contexts. Likewise we will consider the role of documentation in performance and the life of a performing document. This class provides an inclusive and dynamic approach to media that may include performance, sculpture, installation, video, dance, theater, sound, painting, drawing and photography and social practices. Students will present work individually and collaboratively and engage in a series of intentional critiques. Our work will be informed by texts, documentation, live performance and exhibitions, lectures and class visits.
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Fine Arts Seminars are intended to broaden and clarify students' perspective on contemporary art practice. Each semester these seminars shift in focus and subject matter. Seminars may concentrate on art from the perspectives of art history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth, or may take the form of a discipline-based critique focusing on the history, theory, and practice of painting, sculpture, and photography, among others.

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