During the Junior Seminar, you will develop and write a (20- to 25-page) Junior Paper. Most weeks, we will begin with a large group lecture before breaking out into smaller seminars—each focused on a single author or filmmaker.
Our seminar will turn to Lizzie Borden and the “downtown” New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. We will situate Borden’s work within a larger ecosystem of artist-run alternative exhibition spaces, punk and no wave music, radical feminisms, experimental group formations, and activism, as artists like Patti Smith, Adrian Piper, Gordon Matta-Clark, Laurie Anderson, Samuel Delany, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cookie Mueller, and many more worked across mediums and venues to articulate an oppositional culture to Reagan-era economics, policing, and state power. Borden is known for her films that take up themes of collective struggle, revolutionary politics, sex work as labor, state violence and surveillance, media and communication, and the possibilities and limits of utopian experimentation. We will closely watch and analyze her early films, situating them within the context of the period and bringing in companion theory, artworks, films, and scholarship to ask how Borden’s formal and aesthetic strategies challenge dominant cinematic narratives and propose alternative modes of social organization.
The JP:
Our seminar will turn to Lizzie Borden and the “downtown” New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. We will situate Borden’s work within a larger ecosystem of artist-run alternative exhibition spaces, punk and no wave music, radical feminisms, experimental group formations, and activism, as artists like Patti Smith, Adrian Piper, Gordon Matta-Clark, Laurie Anderson, Samuel Delany, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cookie Mueller, and many more worked across mediums and venues to articulate an oppositional culture to Reagan-era economics, policing, and state power. Borden is known for her films that take up themes of collective struggle, revolutionary politics, sex work as labor, state violence and surveillance, media and communication, and the possibilities and limits of utopian experimentation. We will closely watch and analyze her early films, situating them within the context of the period and bringing in companion theory, artworks, films, and scholarship to ask how Borden’s formal and aesthetic strategies challenge dominant cinematic narratives and propose alternative modes of social organization.
The JP:
We will work together throughout the semester to scaffold your writing of the Junior Paper. Ideally, the topic of the paper will be related to our seminar work. Our class discussions and shared readings and films will be particularly meaningful for papers on 1970s and 1980s New York. Throughout the seminar, we will think together about topics and approaches to the paper. We can discuss alternative topics that will be in dialogue with themes of the course.
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