Seminars 1-4: essay titles - suggested fields

1. What artists can be nominated as categorically dealing with abject subjects? Provide examples and descriptions of specific works.
2. Can a trajectory be drawn from early modernism through the avant-garde to 'abject art'? Name works and their contexts.
3. By most accounts, collage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in the 20th Century. Discuss.
4. What relationship does the avant-garde have to the subjects of taboo, danger, and the impure?
Compare the work of avant-garde film makers with video artists of the contemporary period. What conclusions can be drawn about intentions: of methods, representations, and subjects.
5. Is there an argument for video as a preference to other media taken by artists dealing with abject material and the body? Give examples of practices.
6. Can there be considered a difference in regard to the visualisation of Spectacle, as theorised by Guy Debord, and one operating as 'haptic' theatre in the performances of Abject art? How does 'ritual' play a part in both categories.
7. Jean Baudrillard has written of simulation as 'the ecstacy of comminication': the sacrifical logic of consumption, gift and expenditure, potlatch, and the accursed portion. Once belonging to the realm of the 'sacred' what 'qualities' of the organic have changed in the process of desacrilisation? What is the simulacrum? What disappears?
8. What relation does abject art have to feminist discourse and practice? Name artists and define differences in their approach.
9. Alain Badiou writes in 'The Century' of the 'passion of the real? What does this mean, in relation to the historical work of avant-garde artists? How do the contingencies of the present affect practice?
10. Is there any conclusion to be drawn from the failures of the avant-garde and the rise of the art industry? How do contemporary artists work in the scene of the globalised market, and the field of electronic communication?
11. How does a museum programme events such as performance art? Give examples and describe the reasons for adaption to new conditions in presentations.
12. What did the Pompidou Centre [1977] change by its architectural monument, in terms of how a museum might function as part of a social fabric?