Disability, Art, and Performance
Eugene Lang College Lib Arts: The Arts
CRN: 15644
Credits: 4
This Seminar+ course asks after disability and dependency as aesthetic and social resources within art and performance since the 1970s. How do disability arts reframe time, value, labor, sensation, and social relations? What knowledges about life and death, presence and absence, do these artworks make possible? We will center artists and writers for whom access and dependency are essential to aesthetic form, including Beverly Buchanan, Finnegan Shannon, Judith Scott, Park McArthur, Josephine Sales, Carolyn Lazard, Constantina Zavitsanos, Christine Sun Kim, Sharlene Bamboat, Carmen Papalia, and collectives such as Crip Movement Lab, Sins Invalid, SPK (Socialist Patients’ Collective), and Gran Fury. Alongside disabled artists’ work, we will also explore how questions of disability and dependency have influenced art histories not often understood as “disabled” -- from minimalism’s unsettling of subject and object, to conceptualism’s challenge to the retinal, to performance art’s preoccupation with bodily limits and improvisatory entanglements, to the interdependence of social practice art. How do documentation and description, integral to any study of art and performance, necessarily implicate access? Throughout this Seminar+ course we will not only study access and dependency in the arts, but also practice them experimentally through collaborative description in and out of class. Our Seminar+ course will draw on the rich resources of disability arts for learning beyond the classroom, including field trips and studio visits.
College: Eugene Lang College Lib Arts (LC)
Department: The Arts (ART)
Campus: New York City (GV)
Course Format: Seminar (R)
Modality: In-Person
Max Enrollment: 18
Add/Drop Deadline: February 3, 2025 (Monday)
Online Withdrawal Deadline: April 15, 2025 (Tuesday)
Seats Available: Yes
* Seats available but reserved for a specific population.
Status: Open*
* Status information is updated every few minutes. The status of this course may have changed since the last update. Open seats may have restrictions that will prevent some students from registering. Updated: 7:16am EST 12/13/2024