Death + Modern Art

Course Description

Summary

How does something that cannot be directly experienced or given a fixed form become materialized in art? This advanced seminar examines the representation, imagination, and materialization of death in modern and contemporary art. We will examine death as more than a recurring subject in art and consider it also as a problem that artists continually attempt to make visible, tangible, symbolic, or perceptible. Through representations, absences, objects, images, performances, environments, and emerging technologies, artists give form to something that remains fundamentally unknowable to the living.

We will begin by examining recognizable representations of death, including religious imagery, memento mori, vanitas, and artistic responses to war, famine, disease, and other threats to life. We will then consider more indirect and subjective approaches in which death emerges through absence, loss, disappearance, immateriality, irresolution, and the traces left by what is no longer present. These approaches will allow us to examine how experiences of pain, suffering, mourning, curiosity, denial, fear, and control become aesthetic forms through practices associated with the macabre, ornamentation, documentation, Romanticism, phantasmagoria, the sublime, and other attempts to confront mortality. The course will also consider how representations of death are shaped by historical and cultural circumstances. Ideas about mortality are never universal or fixed; they are mediated by religion, politics, geography, social structures, technological change, and individual experience. We will therefore ask how different artists and cultures construct, resist, aestheticize, document, or otherwise negotiate death, and what these choices reveal about the living societies that produce them. Finally, we will turn to contemporary practices that use photography, film, digital media, artificial intelligence, virtual environments, and other emerging technologies to complicate distinctions between presence and absence, life and death, the real and the simulated. Here, death becomes both a subject represented by art and a way of thinking about memory, disappearance, technological preservation, simulation, and the persistence of images and information.

As a 4000-level seminar, Death + Modern Art emphasizes critical inquiry and independent research. Students will engage closely with artworks and theoretical texts, develop their own interpretations through discussion and writing, and consider how formal and material decisions shape the ways death becomes perceptible. Through written responses, presentations, group discussions, and research, students will develop increasingly complex arguments about the relationship between artistic practice, mortality, and the cultural conditions that shape how death is imagined and understood.