博雅学院2011级研究生必修，2010级本科生必修
    时间：周三，10:45－12:25（9月14日开始）
    教室：I-306
    语言：英语
授课人：Jennifer Dorothy Lee （高研院驻院学人，PH.D. New York University; MA, University of London; BA, Columbia University)


This course, titled “Exploring the ‘Experiment’ of Contemporary Art,” is intended to familiarize students with the core concepts of modern art that arises from the fluctuations of historical unpredictability and political confusion while leaving, nonetheless, lasting impressions on the realm of society and culture.  Several points of interest in late 20th-century China, including experimental art forms and art movements, will provide a platform on which to ponder specific questions concerning the notion of ‘art as such’, the relationship of art to experience, and the transformations of art as medium of expression, as marketplace commodity, and as subject of intense speculation by curious and consuming publics.  I hope to garner the interest of students in these abstract aesthetic questions as well as to draw out their ideas on and discussion of the relationship these questions bear to more present and concrete concerns driving culture.


1. The question of art and ‘art as such’
Hu Shi, “Shenme shi wenxue,” (1931).
John Dewey, “The Live Creature,” and “Art and Civilization,” in Art as Experience (1934), pp.1-19; 339-363.

2. Language and semiotics
Charles Saunders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in
Philosophical Writings of Peirce (1955), pp. 98-119.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1913), selections.

3. Sign and image
John Berger, selections from Ways of Seeing (1972).
Ma Yuan, “Cuowu,” in Shouhuo (1, 1987), pp. 127-136.

4. The question of aesthetic autonomy
Immanuel Kant, selections from The Critique of Judgment (“First Section,
Analytic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment”), Cambridge ed. (1790, 2000),
pp. 89-98.
Peter Bürger, “On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois
 Society,” in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1969), pp. 35-54.

5. The question of technology
Walter Benjamin, “A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (1969), pp. 217-251.
Marshall McLuhan, excerpts from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1994), pp. 3-61.

6. Production, consumption, and difficulty
Theodor Adorno, “Why is the New Art So Hard to Understand?” (1931) in
Essays on Music, pp. 127-134.
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in Social Text (Winter 1979), pp.130-148.

7. Difficult poetic art
Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de des— (1897).
Bei Dao and Xi Chuan, selected poems.

8. The avant-garde or something like it
Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1989), pp. 151-170.
Gao Minglu, “Dangdai dalu xinchao meishu,” in Ershiyi shiji (4, 1991), pp. 79-91.

9. Film screening
La Belle Noiseuse (dir. Jacques Rivette, 1991);
Dong (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2006).

10. Art and music
Theodor Adorno, “Introduction” of Philosophy of New Music (1949), pp.
7-25.
Zhang Xudong, “Lishi de diting: ‘xin yinyue’ yu Xin yinyue de zhexue,”
in Dushu (5, 1989).
Arnold Schoenberg, selected recordings (in class).

11. What is kitsch?
Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-garde and Kitsch,” in Partisan Review
(1939), pp. 34-49.
Li Xianting, “Xiaofei xingxiang yu ‘zhengzhi popu’” in Ershiyi shiji (4, 1993), pp. 79-86.
Andy Warhol, Wang Guangyi, and other selected images (in class).

12. The “Neo-avant-garde”
Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in Social Text (9/10, 1984), pp. 178-209.
Peter Bürger, “The Avant-Gardiste Work of Art,” in Theory of the
Avant-Garde (1984), pp. 55-82.

13. Anti-aesthetics
Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, tr. Alberto Toscano (1998).

14. Cynicism and postmodernism
Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (ed. Hal Foster, 2002), pp.
3-15.
Yu Ying-shih, “The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century,” in Daedalus (Spring 1993), pp. 125-150.

15. The return of the real
Hal Foster, “Introduction” and “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?” in The Return of the Real (1996), pp. ix-34.
Lei Yi, “Beijing yu cuowei—ye tan Zhongguo de ‘houzhimin’ yu
‘houxiandai’,” in Dushu (4, 1995), pp. 16-20.

16. The art of performance
Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Performance Art in China,” in Art Journal (Summer, 1999), pp. 60-81.
Peter Osborne, “Installation, Performance, or What?” in Oxford Art Journal (24.2, 2001), pp. 147-154.

17. Vision and visuality
Hal Foster, Norman Bryson, selections from Vision and Visuality (ed. Hal
Foster, 1988).

18. Final exam