ARH 386 Art and the Body
From performance art to Paleolithic palm prints, from the nineteenth-century nude to Renaissance robots (automata), the body has served as the foundation of art making. Representations of the body constitute an essential platform for constructions of and challenges to our most fundamental understandings of being and identity, calling attention to issues of gender, race, class, death, and the afterlife. This course examines images of the human form across various cultural geographies and historical moments as a means to investigate how the body, through an almost infinite variety of means, has been used to explore the nature of the human condition.