Postgraduate Course: Utopia Zones: Modernism and Abstraction (HIAR11064)

Course Outline
School	Edinburgh College of Art	College	College of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	20	ECTS Credits	10
Summary	This course is designed to trace the vicissitudes and resurgence of utopian energies in art throughout the twentieth century. The twin desires to remake society anew, and to transform art, cancelling and rejecting its previous histories and beginning again, lay behind much twentieth-century artistic experiment, while the idea that art could stand for higher values and our own highest capacities helped to structure many of the most radical aesthetic developments. At the same time, dystopias have exerted a powerful fascination on the modern imagination, and utopianism has not always meant a focus on the 'highest' and most rarefied qualities. Artistic work is understood as its own utopia, in the practice of some artists, while the overlooked and neglected, or alternatively, the everyday have been sources of utopian energy for others. Much utopianism has involved an engagement with the city and with urban noise, dirt, detritus and distraction; whilst other utopias have been developed at the margins of the land, on the coast, or at the edges of cities. Throughout the modern era, non-Western artists have also developed their own engagements with these traditions, and have developed alternative modes of visuality and artistic making which may be seen to represent a challenge to Euro-centric histories of art.
Course description	Each class is structured around key formal and material paradigms which originated in the early decades of the twentieth century, and were further developed in the post-war period. These include: grids and windows; the palimpsest; the monochrome; collage; urban visuality; colour and colour-lessness; chromophilia and chromophobia; the city; work; the studio; social utopianism and the ideal of a collective; war; maternity; childhood; repetition and film spectatorship. Artists whose work we will examine include Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Hans Arp, Henry Moore, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Hélio Oiticica, Tacita Dean and Chris Ofili.

Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites		Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	None

Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to: acquire knowledge and develop understanding of key twentieth-century artists and artistic movements, including Constructivism, Dada, Minimalism and Post-Mimimalism perceive and analyse the ways in which forms and ideas, including the monochrome, the grid and collage developed within earlier twentieth-century art continue to underpin later twentieth-century and contemporary art develop the ability to perceive and argue for connections across a range of artistic practices gain confidence in handling a range of theoretically sophisticated methodologies including post-structuralism and psychoanalysis develop their existing abilities to look closely at works of art, read difficult texts skilfully and with understanding, analyze ideas and arguments successfully, present their own ideas clearly and well in writing and in debate, Prepare and organize their work effectively to deadlines