Bodymorph: Fantasy Worlds of American Visual Culture, Animation, and Product Design

This lecture and discussion-based course engages students in media beyond the fine arts, which shaped in fundamental ways how ordinary Americans experienced life during decades of dynamic change and modernization over the first half of the 20th century. We consider cartooning and animation, film, advertising, product design, department stores and the visual strategies of consumer culture, jazz aesthetics, the skyscraper city, and more. We set these new forms within broad changes in the rhythms of everyday life driven by industrialization and new technologies, as well as how filmmakers, animators, and artists both expressed these new realities, as well as how they turned in response to the handmade, the "primitive," and the embodied. We look at the uneasy exchanges between high art and mass media; and at the open borders between surrealism, advertising, and art. Prerequisites: Any introductory or 300-level course in Art History or American Culture Studies, History, or literature
Course Attributes: AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H; FA AH

Bodymorph: Fantasy Worlds of American Visual Culture, Animation, and Product Design

ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY 5763

Section 01