Teaching Assistant - College of Fine Arts Ragona

Teaching Assistant Position

The School of Art is seeking one teaching assistant to work 8 hours per week across two courses in Critical Theory and Art History, as well as engage in occasional research tasks for an Art History/Critical Theory professor in the School of Art.

Based upon skill set and knowledge of course content, a teaching assistant would be responsible for the following tasks:

• Manage & update weekly Canvas course sites (for 2 seminars)
• Attend two classes per week: take attendance, keep track of student participation, presentations, and grades keep clear records of all of the above
• Assist with grading papers across two courses
• Occasionally preparing digital slides for course sessions
• Small research tasks, i.e. library research, internet searches for seminar presentations
• Downloading and running PowerPoint presentations prepared by both students and instructor (sent to you before class)
• Preparing classroom before class, helping to clean-up after presentations i.e. if furniture needs to be moved or chairs organized, or whiteboard erased, etc. (physical classroom readiness)
• Co-organize (with instructor) and participate in final classroom CRITS, as well as helping organize final presentation receptions
• Attend special class events (TBA)

Course descriptions for both classes are as follows:

The Precarious Body in Contemporary Art

Professor Cash (Melissa) Ragona

Tuesdays 7-9:20 pm

Seminar description:
This seminar will examine images and projects in contemporary art that deal with debates concerning ideas that had already begun brewing in the 1980s and early 90s, that addressed issues of institutional violence circulating under the guise of "discourse," or that delved into ideas of difference and alterity through the notion of "abjection." More recently, the idea of precarity has taken central stage as a way of thinking through, and taking action against, the kinds of structural oppression that deems certain groups of people vulnerable to repeated forms of aggression, poverty, illness, and displacement without protection.

We will also explore a seemingly opposite corollary: the SUPERCLEAN—a trope that exploits the capacity of certain technologies to present hygienic forms of representational violence at the level of the digitally manipulated image. We will read the work of Tung-Hui Hu, Zuzana Kovar, Judith Butler, Claudia Rankine, Pamela Lee, Frantz Fanon, Sarah Ahmed and study the projects generated by artists, such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Superflex, Anicka Yi, Mika Rottenberg, Carolyn Lazard, Katherine Behar, Trisha Baga, Hito Steyerl, among others, as a way of interrogating these State mandated structures of material and psychic repression.

A major part of the course will examine how contemporary artists responded, acted, and produced—addressing the precarious body as the site for political and aesthetic resistance.

ART WRITER:
Writing as Object, Criticism, and Experiment

Professor Cash (Melissa) Ragona

Wednesdays 7-9:50 pm

Seminar description: ART WRITER will strive to bring together the intersecting discourses of artists' use of writing as an object, exploring experiments by artists, poets, novelists and critics who use language and theory as invention. The idea of experiment implied here emphasizes the urgency that art writing move beyond its own history, beyond the received understanding of its proper practices in order to propose new modes of critical reflection.

The form and material force of language will be explored through the conceptual and critical work of Ocean Vuong, Harryette Mullen, Fatimah Asghar, Jamaica Kincaid, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Frances Stark, Kathy Acker, Samuel Delaney, Glenn Ligon, Brian Kim Stefans, Pajtim Statovci, Trisha Low, Tan Lin, Adam Pendleton, just to name a few. International projects of Art and Language, Fluxus, the Dark Room Collective, Los Contemporáneos, as well as more recent iterations will be investigated/researched.

This is a writing intensive seminar with experimentation at its core. Members will workshop their writing: revise, rethink, perform, and publish.

The assignment is for 8 hours per week, assisting in both sections of either course.

Joining…