Me at age 3, vacationing at Plymouth Rock
Randall Rhodes
Art Historian
B.A., M.A., Ph.D. University of Chicago
Since my earliest remembrances, I have been reading and traveling. Both endeavors have expanded my horizons beyond the singular and local to the plural and worldly, affecting an oceanic phase of ego. Reading provides a psychic and social connection while travel, a personal and physical connection. Yet reading newspapers and visiting Massachusetts were only the beginning. As I became aware of many more places in the world, I realized there existed many more texts to be read: books, journals, people, spaces, video, tv, and art. And, the study of Art History would offer an integration of such readings.
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (Taipei, ROC)
Art History is a discipline addressing the production and veneration of objects, from temples to textiles, photography to fashion, sculpture to ceramics, and paintings to performance. Objects conceived within the human mind, produced with mastered skills, and embodying the elements of design, constitute the realm of Art. The study of Art not only champions human capabilities and accomplishments, but also provides insight into the psychological, social, and economic frames of their production. Art History operates as a portal to the past and as a reflection of our present.
The principal critical issue within the discipline of Art History is that the readings of these visual texts are subject to constant revision. Who knows what was an artist's original intention, especially if he died almost four centuries ago? Whereas the "artist" no longer has a voice, the art object communicates, and oftentimes enthralls successive generations of spectators. Each generation brings its own expectations, biases, and projections to the transaction, resulting in a myriad of readings, only to be multiplied with the passage of time.
Paterre, Chateaux de Versailles (Versailles, France)
Art History is truly a voyage, not only to lands near and far, but across all dimensions of time and space. But most importantly, rather than being a voyage to view the "other", it provides an awareness of the Self. The study of the transaction of art and spectatorship indexically points to our aesthetic, social and psychic needs, and how we relate to the greater world around us.
Me as adult, on a compact vehicle with four legs,
while vacationing on the Sarala-Saz jailoo, Kyrgyzstan.
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Art History at Frostburg State University
Providing a most harmonious and balanced reading of visual texts, the Art History rotation at FSU surveys various fields of artistic production. Courses are taken in conjunction with the BFA degree, in satisfaction of an Art History Minor, in fulfillment of the GEP, or as electives.
Courses required for candidates for the BFA:
ART 301: Artistic Traditions: Asia (fall, even numbered years), or
ART 302: Artistic Traditions: Africa and the Americas (fall, odd years)
ART 360: Western Survey (every fall)
ART 408: 20th Century Art (every spring)
ART 415: Art Criticism (every spring)
Elective courses for those completing the minor in Art History:
ART 370: Women/Gender and the Visual Arts (spring, even years)
ART 380: 19th Century Art (fall, even years)
ART 430: Greek and Roman (spring, odd years)
ART 460: Renaissance/Baroque (fall, odd years)
Contact Information:
Dr. Randall Rhodes
Department of Visual Arts
Frostburg State University
101 Braddock Road
Frostburg, MD 21532
rrhodes@frostburg.edu
301-687-4047/4797
ART 100: Art Appreciation (every semester)
ART 360: Western Survey (every fall)
ART 408: 20th Century Art (every spring)
ART 415: Art Criticism (every spring)
ART 301: Artistic Traditions: Asia (fall, even numbered years)
ART 302: Artistic Traditions: Africa and the Americas (fall, odd years)
ART 370: Women/Gender and the Visual Arts (spring, even years)
ART 380: 19th Century Art (fall, even years)
ART 460: Renaissance/Baroque (fall, odd years)
ART 490: Special Topics (spring, odd years)
Special Topics may be either Ancient Greek and Roman, Medieval,
or Postmodernism
Dexter Fletcher (young Caravaggio) as "Boy with a Basket of Fruit".
A scene from Derek Jarman's film "Caravaggio".
Photo: Mike Laye.
The major critical issue within the discipline of Art History is that the readings of these visual texts are subject to constant revision. Who knows what an artist's intention originally was, especially if he died almost four centuries ago? Whereas the "artist" no longer has a voice, the art object communicates, and oftentimes enthralls successive generations of spectators. Each generation brings its own expectations, biases, and projections to the transaction, resulting in a myriad of readings, only to be multiplied with the passage of time.
Caravaggio's Fruit with Fruit is a paper I presented at the Association of Art Historians Conference in London in 1995. It addresses the critical tribulations of Caravaggio's early paintings, especially as they became "burdened" by cultural subjectivities and sexualities.
Photograph for Versace
Home Signature, Spring/Summer 1995.
Photo: Bruce Weber. Permission of Versace, S.p.A.
In our postmodern era, we are bombarded by images from video, film, and the print media. As we retreat further into this world of screens and surfaces, these visual texts, as surrogates for the three dimensional and worldly, become overinvested by our psychic selves and flows of desire.
Within the realm of fashion advertising, the couturier and photographer choreograph images to receive the narcissistic, fetishistic, and sexual projections of the target audience. The model, framed by luxurious fabrics and folds, struts a physique which attracts the spectator's gaze and functions as the transfer point between the commodity and utopian mindscapes. However, the model is only a "BwO", a body without organs, a highly stylized shell bereft of a human dimension. The paper Postmodern Identities and Versace's culto del corpo, addresses this fragmented condition of postmodernity and the polysemous nature of readings promoted by our contemporary visual culture.
Art History is truly a voyage, not only to lands near and far, but across all dimensions of time and space. But most importantly, rather than being a voyage to view the "other", it provides an awareness of the Self. The study of the transaction of art and spectatorship indexically points to our aesthetic, social and psychic needs, and how we relate to the greater world around us.
From Baglione to Wittkower, Caravaggio has been described as the anti-academic who sacrificed beauty for truth. The Borghese Bacchus, Fruit Vendor and Uffizi Bacchus (c. 1594-7), depict bohemian youths costumed in fancy dress suggestive of the physical delight and temptation offered by voluptas and luxuria. Provocatively inviting viewers to partake in a hedonistic minuet, their gaze is part of a programmatic display of sexual attraction, at once irresistible and unattainable.
In 1971, Posner's article "Caravaggio's Homo-Erotic Early Works" transferred that author's homophobic discomfort with the "languorous gaze" and "effeminate nature" of the "depraved, pampered mignons" onto the private life of the artist. By accusing Caravaggio of pederastic propensities and "unnatural pleasures," Posner closeted the artist. Later critics parroted their colleague's thesis and oftentimes hissed at the gay prurience, including Freedberg, who believed Caravaggio's art to have served as a self-chastisement for his ungovernable, deviant lifestyle. So, were these paintings, as Hibbard asked, "evidence of homoerotically autobiographical content" or "campy homosexual charades?" Translating these negatives into positives, Jarman, in the medium of film, would seize upon the opportunity to champion Caravaggio's brooding persona and the alluring promise of homoerotic seduction latent within his oeuvre.
A review of the literature on Caravaggio, from the 17th through 20th centuries, evidences the ever changing construct of the critical audience and the psycho-sexual baggage each critic brought to the transaction. After Posner queered the gaze, Jarman responded by neutralizing the homophobia and opening the closet. As Foucault wrote: "What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all 'discursive fact', the way in which sex is put into discourse...a discourse of refusal, blockage, invalidation, but also incitement and intensification".
Postmodern Identities and Versace's culto del corpo
In recent Gianni Versace menswear collections' catalogs, the couturier and his appointed fashion photographers mapped a utopian landscape at one with a free flow of desires. As a public situs for the exploration and extrusion of the ambivalences produced by the social self, the resultant fantastic photographical discourse blurs the boundary between actual experiences and the identity wish/identity experience.
Marketing is married to neoromanticism as Versace's disciplined masculine negligence, prefiguration of sartorial strategies, and orchestration of flows, function as ornamental indicators and lures for the assumption of relations of desire and queer spectating positions.
In a neo-Greek culto del corpo, thiasos is bestowed upon the model's "BwO", which is artistically inscribed with a charismatic gravitational pull. Framed by the swaggering luxe of the baroque fold, the performative nexus reinterprets characters, myths and the garment's transitivity and locality without restrictions. Yet, in the process, the serious collapses into the frivolous as artifice and stylization supplant content.
Versace's sartorial vectors are a postmodern construct, where everything flows and nothing abides, where the self is uniformed, and frames de/restructure identification. Captivated by homodesire, enthralled by an oceanic phase of ego, and swayed by the commodification of desire, the psyche of the unanchored subject overinvests in the passion play of haute couture with the objective of challenging cultural faultlines and annulling the fragmented condition of modernity.