When people are faced with overwhelming catastrophe, they often find themselves also facing a religious or spiritual crisis. When a catastrophe is so widespread that large segments of the population find themselves in that position, then civic and religious institutions that plan to survive must be seen to recognize the enormity of the situation, to offer consolation and healing, and - ideally - to create a direction or hope for the future. Within this context, the Church as an organization would seem to face a particularly intransigent challenge. Having promulgated a just, loving, merciful and all-powerful God, how can it heal and consolidate the faith of an agonized population that feels itself betrayed by that God?
In this course, we will examine the ways the Church has visibly responded to this kind of crisis in the past and present. We will consider projects from anywhere in the world, and compare them with related projects from the civic sector and from non-Christian societies and times. And we will attempt, as a group, to define typical or successful visual response strategies, to identify specifically "Church" elements from more generally civic ones, and to discover what the artists, and the religious and academic authorities have had to say about them. And if these attempts should prove fruitless - which is possible - we will investigate what this tells us about our own society and its agendas.
This innovative course should be looked on as a collaborative research project. The course calendar has mapped out certain areas for investigation, and a suggested order for addressing them. We will each take responsibility for "scouting out" agreed components, reporting our findings to the class, and consulting about the emerging implications. These may stimulate us to reconsider the syllabus, and so several classes will end with a short "redirect" session.
The primary skills developed in this course, therefore, are the ones needed to pioneer a new field. These include sketching what is "out there" by generating a workable research bibliography from scratch, briefly charting the development of an intellectual field, exposing blind spots, making valid use of ephemeral and unskilled material, and integrating these skills with your interest and observation of the art itself. In fact, these are the skills that underlie those listed as "performance objectives" for every Liberal Arts course at MIAD, and they infuse those objectives with exciting purpose and direction.
There is no set text for this course, but there are a number of readings taken from classic and informal sources, all of which are available on the web. You will find them bookmarked at the course website. But the web is ephemeral, so the more essential readings (or sections) have been printed out and stored in a folder in the library, and you may make personal xerox copies for your own convenience.
Assignments should be completed and the written ones brought to the following class. Bibliographies will be eyeballed to help you keep on track; research journals will function as reminders of your findings for discussion, and as "note pads" to receive corroborative or alternative data during class. Submit annotated journals at the end of each class.