| ART HIS 150 | JAPAN POP CULTURE | SPIKER, C. | Godzilla to Hello Kitty: Japanese Popular Culture
Explore Japan through the mass production, distribution, and consumption of Japanese popular culture. Students will learn how to analyze a diverse array of visual material: architecture, advertising, animation (anime), art, comics (manga), digital idols, film, graphic design, mascot culture, music, and video games. In discovering the popular construction of "Japaneseness," the course will proceed thematically to address issues of nationalism, race, gender, domesticity, consumer culture, subculture, and Japan's relationship with its minorities from 1950 to 2013. Using methodologies from media studies, film studies, art history, and anthropology, the goal will be to rethink Japan as a site of local and global pop culture flows from Godzilla to Hello Kitty. |
| ART HIS 185 | THE ART OF THE BOOK | KRYCZKA, A. | The Art of the Book: Artist's Books and Printed Matter
With the rapid growth of digital media, many have predicted the demise of the book. However, there was a time not long ago when the “old-fashioned” book was just as revolutionary as YouTube. This course will ask: why did artists produce books and for whom? While considering a book as a work of art may not seem like a radical act today, the artist’s book delivered a slap to the face of high art traditions of oil on canvas. As a portable work of art in the form of an ordinary object that one can touch, the artist’s book did not need to depend on the gallery or museum for authority and instead circulated through everyday processes like the United States Postal Service. Artist Ed Ruscha said his books “were like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” artworks disguised as regular books. This course will consider the cunning and craft of the artist’s book from Surrealism to Conceptual Art and Fluxus, by artists such as Ruscha, Marcel Duchamp, Stéphane Mallarmé, Sol Lewitt, Hannah Higgins, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Yoko Ono. This class will look at artist’s publications across the 20th century, offering an overview of some of the major movements and artists, as well as a specific account of the significance of the artist’s book within this broad art historical period. The political, material, and aesthetic practices and implications of the using the book and the page as artistic media will be explored in depth. We will use the superb collection of rarely seen artist’s books at UCI’s very own Special Collections and engage with the insights and work of local contemporary artists working in printed matter through several in-class guest lectures and site visits. |