Syllabus
In the winter semester, the student chooses the topic of the written work in agreement with the teacher and prepares its project, incl. bibliography.
Suggested topics to be discussed:
Dead body, dead face in art
Death masks or skulls?
Strategies for Displacing Death in Contemporary Advertising
The Sociology of Death - Contemporary Burial Culture
"Memento mori" paintings of popular music and new media
Tombstones, grave sculpture
Noble Empire, Classicist, Neo-Gothic tombs
Tombstone architecture (tombs of Jan Kotěra etc.)
Architecture of crematoria (Turnov, Pardubice, Nymburk etc.)
Cemetery and contemporary architecture (Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi etc.)
Contemporary cemeteries as urban units
A cemetery as a park or a zone of desolation
Sepulchral monuments in the current practice of monument care
Death in the Art of Symbolism (Arnold Böcklin, Gabriel Max, Munch etc.)
Death in contemporary art
Exposure to "death"
The seminar will include excursions - Olšanské hřbitovy, Vyšehradský Slavín, Prague crematoria, etc.
Annotation
The seminar is always devoted to one key topic, which can represent the transformation of a broad visual culture within the framework of modernity. The seminar will alternate hours of lectures with hours of practical study of works in the field, excursions, visits to selected places or gallery collections on the topic. The seminar begins with a general introduction, familiarization with key terms and specification of specific works or texts, on the basis of which the students will prepare a paper and a seminar paper.
The theme for 2023/2024 is Memento mori – a reflection of death in contemporary art and architecture
Memento mori is an established expression about the transience of man. Transience is an important subject of medieval and baroque art. But what is the perception of death in modern and contemporary art? Today's mainstream society, built on strategies of performance, productivity or advertising, displaces questions of death. However, artists, architects or even stars of popular culture do not avoid them. Cemeteries, tombs, funeral halls are part of urban units and modern cities. Tombstones take on peculiar forms of self-presentation and are related to the change in the perception of the sociology of death. In popular culture, the sight of a dead body has ceased to thrill the viewer's senses, as it still did in the 19th century. Questions of disappearance, departure, vanitas are part of contemporary artistic expression.
As part of the two-semester seminar, we will examine the theme of transience and death in modern and contemporary art and architecture from various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.
In the winter semester, we will focus on early modern perspectives and the period of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the summer semester, we will follow the period from the Second World War to the present