Deviant Objects & Performance

This course is a studio-seminar course for
advanced undergraduate and graduate students that
focuses on intersections of performance art and
sculpture, centering relationships between deviant
materiality, bodies, and the performance of
objecthood. Students will work on creating,
reading about, discussing, and critiquing artwork
that explores the deviant, queer, and fugitive
capacities of materials, and expands ideas around
embodiment. We will examine the artwork of
primarily queer/trans/femme/disabled/BIPOC artists
from the 20th century to the present who countered
the harmful effects of the systemic
objectification and violence against their bodies
by reimagining and re-performing objecthood as a
way toward agency. Students will reconsider common
modes of figuration to question commonly held
beliefs of which bodies are natural or unnatural,
and experiment with tactics of abstraction for the
hidden, uncomfortable, unresolved matter that
refuses to cohere into representative bodies that
are subject to systemic control and surveillance.
In addition to studio-based projects, students
will work on critical-theoretical reading and
writing assignments, presentations, and actively
engage and collaborate with peers through in-class
discussions, peer critique, research, and other
assignments related to course themes. We will read
and discuss issues within critical race theory,
queer theory, concepts of abjection,
performativity, drag, virtual bodies, and other
ideas and artistic provocations that may inform a
reimagined conception of human bodies, nonhuman
objects, and things.