ANTHRO 54N: For Makers and Thinkers: How to Use Art in Research and Vice Versa
General Education Requirements
Not currently certified for a requirement. Courses are typically considered for Ways certification a quarter in advance.
Course Description
This course is specifically designed for social science and humanities students who want to learn how to use art to expand their research questions and/or develop an art practice, and for arts students who want to find ways to deeply engage social science and humanities research in their practice. The course will:
- Introduce students to the work of artists who used their practice to deeply engage social issues (Ian Rowland, Cornelia Parker, Fred Wilson and many others). These artists will be contextualized with readings including: critical commentaries on their work; theoretical literature; and primary literature on the issues they address (in these examples, slavery, material culture, museum studies). Critical questions will include: Why did the artist select particular media for their work? How does the art provide a different perspective on, engagement with, or relationship to the issues they address? How does the meaning of the art change with or without contextualization? How does this artist draw on and expand art history and other artists' work? Are there critical issues the work raises but is underpowered to address?
- Provide support for students to work on their own quarter-length independent projects and research based in drawing, photography, creative writing, or other art practice which may shift according to research findings in the duration of the course. Part of the syllabus will be contingent on student projects. Regular group crit/support sessions will be held in class based on clear deadlines.
- Introduce students to various methods of working with primary and source materials for arts-based projects, such as improvisation, juxtaposition, performance, role-play, "moment work" and scenography. "Makers" workshops will be held to introduce students to arts methods and may include: wax casting, life drawing, graphic art, etc.
Students will complete the course with a solid introduction to at least 20 contemporary artists and an understanding of how to discuss and contextualize artwork in the context of several disciplines: art, social science theory, and art criticism. They will also have experience in building and completing their own project and learn how to justify their work, understand how different art media impact their exploration and ultimate product, and work through various challenges in the process. They will also gain experience in crit sessions, which will be directed by the professor with a question-based format, in both giving and receiving feedback. They will document their work and learn how to produce a portfolio of the project.
Meet the Instructor: Lochlann Jain
As a professor at Stanford for the last 22 years, Lochlann Jain has been engaged in a creative anthropology that aims to understand illness, injury and death as limit cases of life that provide unique vantage points from which to unpack crucial but often subterranean cultural currents. Jain has been fascinated by the ways that different disciplines, particularly medicine and law but also including fiction, art, history, and science, organize systems of legibility, rendering forms of violence visible and invisible in different ways at different moments. Jain has studied this question through culturally shifting understandings disease and injury from cancer, HIV and blood-borne illnesses to cigarettes and car design. Jain’s artwork also examines these questions, aiming to find ways to elicit an affective engagement that is so easy to miss or over-ride in the prose and argument style of social sciences. The work strives to strike a balance: just short of humor but close enough to the bone to provoke a jolt of recognition and a new way of thinking. Jain has published three books, including a book of drawings, and multiple articles. Jain’s work has won multiple awards and opened the discipline of anthropology to new ways of thinking and writing.
Jain has presented his artwork in Berlin, Denver, North Carolina, New York, London, and on Stanford’s campus and taught art workshops in London, University Chicago, and University of Hawaii. Jain has taken numerous courses in drawing, color, poetry, taxidermy, photography, and improvisation in Vancouver, New York, London, and The Bay Area.
