Graduate Seminar in Painting and Related

APORETICS: Paintings without Painters and Painters without Paintings

This seminar will be organized around aporias. Starting with Plato's Meno, aporia is used to describe a state of numbed confusion, exposing a gap in knowledge that can be leveraged to temporarily undermine certainty. Optimally, aporia is not merely confusion or resignation in the face of contradiction, but a state of affairs that makes a demand on us. These double binds, paradoxes, impasses, and blind spots will be our guides through a history of painting and treated as a lens to explore the contemporary desire to unknow what painting was or to ask what types of experience it attends to. Making painting impossible again, at least for our seminar, might be the only way for painting to pose questions of its more recent triumphalist mode, which seems to celebrate all that it knows of itself while potentially overworking its painters.

Readings from philosophy, art history, artists' writings, and critical theory will be worked through over the course of the seminar along with presentations on individual artists. 

“…an aesthetic of aporias, the property of this painting being to deliver everything at once, as if by syllepsis, the one and its other, the rule and its exception, the law and that which breaks it, all the way to the dissolution of the institutional apparatus which frames and produces it.”  - Jean Clay, Martin Barre’s Dispositif: the Encrusted Eye.