HAD-642 Performance Art:The Artist as Provocateur

3 Credits

Activist avant-garde artists have historically ignored national boundaries as well as aesthetic ones, taking regular people to be their audience and any subject or material under the sun to be appropriate to their means. Contemporary activist visual art performance practitioners view this avant-garde legacy as their own, incorporating musical, theatrical, literary, dance, film and technological elements in their work in order to address the pressing issues of our time. This course will focus on critical examples of performance art from the last century to today to analyze how artists have positioned themselves in relation to current standards of artistic production and developed techniques of provocation to activate the audience. Course work includes readings of primary and critical texts, class discussion, presentations, and a 15-page research paper, and will culminate in collaborative visual art performances to be presented collectively in small groups to the entire class.