A long look through the lens of Surrealism (1900 to now)

This course looks at the ways in which contemporary artists have responded to surrealism and metaphysics from 1900 to the present day. It considers: what is the relationship to surrealist language and its aesthetics, how has art produced by creative practitioners of color diverged from Western traditions? How can we conceive of surrealist narratives that are still untold and reflect on notions of lineage that were enacted across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What is the antidote to regulatory brutality and how does modern art factor into the expanse of nonviolence? A primary focus of this course will be to unpack how we think about different temporalities, such as the temporality of history, or subjectivity, or the temporality of lived experience. Artists of color are using their work to look forward and backward, to visualize imagined landscapes and utilize historic methods to trigger future possibilities. Surfacing is positioned at the intersection of various African American traditions including music, performance, poetry, and filmmaking.

Surfacing invokes the literature of Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, Samiya Bashir and Christina Sharpe. In structure, the course vacillate between sound and cinema as we investigate the function of experimental approaches to storytelling. Derived from an expanded meditation on Afro-Futurism, conceptual art, and various aesthetic methods, the class will survey the radical and imaginative innovations of indigenous artists. The ideas explored by these auteurs depend on looking beyond traditional interpretations of time and space, fact and fiction, history and myth. Our listening will follow the moods of Alice Coltrane, Erykah Badu and Sun Ra. Our screenings will analyze the intentions of Bill Gunn, George Clinton, and Rickey Laurentiis. We will discuss a variety of questions, debate our own theories, and engage with visiting artists and critics.

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know

- Samuel R. Delany

Explorations in music take the form of bi-weekly sound studies where the poetics and themes that embody the experimental aesthetic strain of the black radical tradition: histories of movement and music, philosophies of rhythm, indexes of sacred cosmology will take center stage. Each week our discussions will focus on a series of case studies from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Topics covered may include but will not be limited to surrealism, refugeeship, modernism, the black Atlantic, Afro-Futurism, dub poetry, romanticism, and the personal narrative. These concepts are asymptotic; a narrowing distance pulls the themes of the course together, connecting genres and hemispheres, phonetics and possibilities.

Course leader: Professor Logan Dandridge

Prominent ideas featured in my recent work reimagine forests and bodies of water as sites of ancestral communion. Other such natural sites, Toni Morrison believed “have a perfect memory.” In this way water, as well as all natural life, flows through, around and despite us all. 

Course Meeting Day(s)/Times(s): Tuesday 7pm