Art Practicing the Body
Art Practicing the Body is an interdisciplinary course combining seminar and studio formats and methodologies. It takes 'the millennial body'—in its myriad senses, significations, and interpretations—as the basis for critical and aesthetic inquiry. While intersections of art history, science and technology, cultural theory, and pop culture are interrogated through readings, screenings, web research, guest speakers, and presentations, students respond to the sensory and intellectual information through a series of artworks. Of special note is that assignments are not medium-specific, and consequently, students work as freely in video as they do in text-based art as they do in performance.
Art Practicing the Body
http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/classes/dms/cgkoebel/body/index.html
(site designed by Soyeon Jung)
Banned & Censored Cinema
Banned and Censored Cinema analyzes a far-ranging selection of films that are marked as having been banned, censored, or otherwise extremely controversial in their countries of origin or in the international arena. Directors have had to face such punishments as imprisonment, exile, marginality, and career loss. Weekly screenings are placed in context by extensive materials regarding: 1) the individual film’s conditions of production; 2) the film’s governmental, critical and popular reception; 3) the sociopolitical climate of the “home country;” and 4) the film’s director. Close attention is paid to various state-sponsored forms of restriction of expression, including “morality codes” and censor boards. Freedom of speech and the right to receive information and ideas—Constitutional rights in the U.S.—are conceptual touchstones of the course. Although much of the course content derives from the 1960s and 1970s, included are key examples of both silent and contemporary cinema. The course’s main body of international feature films is complemented by several sessions devoted to short films (avant-garde, experimental) and documentaries. Directors include: Kenneth Anger, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Jean Genet, Lawrence Brose, Frederick Wiseman, Todd Haynes, Michael Powell, Catherine Breillat, Jafar Panahi, Oscar Micheaux, Tahmineh Milani, José Mojica Marins, Pier Paolo Pasolini, D.W. Griffith, Vera Chytilova, Jaromil Jires, Wang Xiaooshuai, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nagisa Oshima, Sergei Paradjanov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean-Luc Godard.
Banned and Censored Cinema
http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/classes/dms/cgkoebel/bc/index.html
(site designed by Caroline Koebel and Adam Lemke)
Installation
2006, 19:50, shot on miniDV
Site-Specific Installation leaps out of the space of the classroom by employing the city as a laboratory. The semester is dedicated to conceiving and realizing artworks for a particular location, resulting in widely publicized and critically acclaimed public exhibitions. In collaboration with the city of Buffalo, the course has been staged at the historic Asbury-Methodist Church (corner of Delaware and Tupper), before it was purchased and renovated by Righteous Babe Records, multiple times at the top of City Hall itself, and most recently, in the defunded Mead Library in the Lovejoy area of Buffalo. Students are educated in the art of politics by working with various representatives of the city as well as with constituencies outside of both academia and contemporary art. While students compose projects that range between lo-tech and technology-intensive, the ephemeral nature of site-specific installations is combined with the capacities of the Web to mark and preserve the passing moment; and consequently, several websites continue to enable entry to the exhibitions.
Now In Circulation: Site-Specific Art at Mead
http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu/nowincirculation/
(site designed by Gautam Malik; poster: Aimee Buyea)
The Elevator Stops Here: Installation Art at the Top of City Hall
http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/classes/dms/cgkoebel/cityhall/index.html
(site designed by Soyeon Jung)
Gape
GAPE is a collaborative web platform built by Bernadette Wegenstein and Caroline Koebel as a critical complement to their extant teaching resources.
GAPE is a hole in order to take in something that is larger than life. GAPING refers to the instinctual bodily response to information, wondering about the world around us. It's a way of beginning to understand, and for meaning to start working. But what does GAPE mean? In French/Italian, régarder bouche bée or guardare a bocca aperta, means to leave one's mouth open while staring at something/someone. The German gaffen has the same connotation implicitly referring to the orifice of the mouth. In English a GAPE can also be linked to other (body) openings. Any opening leaves at the same time a gap, an empty or void space to be filled with a surplus image. While GAPING at the emptiness of the gap, meaning puts on its garment for the day or moment. GAPING at the void we become aware of the incompleteness of matter, information, and of the eternal and constant necessity to provide meaning. The one-minute film The Big Swallow aka Eaten Alive by James Williamson (1901) foregrounds how the body is eating the technology that records it. What remains after this culinary feast is a gap, an empty space, a black screen. The Victorian gentleman, as Williamson describes his protagonist, has engulfed the photographer, as well as the apparatus of the cinema. After chewing and swallowing, the protagonist seems satisfied. GAPE is a space/non-space on the world wide web where we can stare at information swallowing up the technology that records us, and share the Englishman's satisfaction.