Living Artist Case Study

The second writing assignment will require you to apply what you have learned in this course to a living artist that we did not cover in the course material.  The artist you select for your case study must be currently alive and have a museum exhibition history.  You can select any living artist who has exhibited at a major international museum.  The focus of this next writing assignment is largely of your own choosing, but you will need to connect it to the material of this course.  You must select at least two artists/works from the textbook that we covered and at least one philosopher from the Wartnberg readings that you think helps inform us of the ideas that the artist is engaged in.

I want to keep the assignment open-ended so that you can pursue that which interests you.  Ultimately, you have 3-5 pages to engage with a contemporary artist utilizing the new tools of aesthetic analysis and visual vocabulary.

Here is how I might handle the assignment.  I am married to Rachel Lachowicz so I want to write about her. Lachowicz is in the collections of many museums (MOCA, Whitney, etc.) and has had her work shown in places like MoMA, LACMA, etc.  She meets the criteria.  Much of her work references Dadaism and minimalism so I might pick Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal and Donald Judd’s Untitled to relate her work to.  Her art invokes deconstructivist thinking in relation to gender bias in the arts so Korsemeyer and Derrida will be the philosophers I might use to frame her work.

Please follow the English department’s guidelines for essay writing and citations using the MLA format.  You are expected to list both the Wartenberg text and the Gardner textbook as works cited in order to demonstrate your knowledge of proper citation practices.