American Carnage: Politics, violence and subjectivity in art, 1990-Now - HOA00127M

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Module summary

This module investigates interrelations between American politics, contemporary art, and theories of violence and subjectivity.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 1 2025-26

Module aims

This course explores the place of violence and conflict in American contemporary art from 1990 through to the present. Starting with the First Gulf War and concluding with the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, we will consider how artists have connected social to psychic conflicts and what this means for the relationships between contemporary art and theory. The last decade of the 20th century marked the emergence of a unipolar historical moment following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the so-called ‘end of history’ inaugurated by an American war in the Middle East, accelerated globalisation, and the emergence of the World Wide Web. In our present moment, resurgent authoritarian, right-wing populist, and illiberal movements are ascendant across and beyond the West while the mediation of social life through digital technologies continues apace and discourses on the Left continue to reframe questions of power, agency, sexuality, race and representation. In thinking about how we arrived at this juncture, this course reflects on historical events and social and technological change as well as fugitive and dispersed manifestations of violence. Working through a series of case studies, we will examine how artists working across a diverse range of media offer ways of using theories of violence and subjectivity as lenses for understanding how recent historical events and processes have shaped both our present political situation and the development of contemporary art.

The primary theoretical framework for this course is psychoanalysis however rather than a discourse of sexuality and the individual, our focus will be on literature that takes violence and the group as its object. Among the writers and theorists we will encounter in this course are Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Franco Fornari, Wilfred Bion, Didier Anzieu, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Chrsitopher Bollas, Juliet Mitchell, Guy Debord, Klaus Theweleit, Étienne Balibar, Wendy Brown, Federico Campagna, Rosalyn Deutsche, Mignon Nixon, Hal Foster, Jonathan Crary, and Christina Sharpe. Artists may include Mary Kelly, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Robert Gober, Coco Fusco, Silvia Kolbowski, Aria Dean, Omer Fast, Jill Magid, Trevor Paglen, Forensic Architecture, Cady Noland, and Rachel Harrison.

Module learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• A detailed, critical understanding of how recent political history has been mediated by contemporary American art.
• Knowledge of the ways in which theoretical discourses of violence and subjectivity have shaped the development of recent art practices.
• The ability to conceive and make use of psychoanalytic frameworks to enrich interpretations of works of art.

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Module feedback

You will receive feedback on assessed work within the timeframes set out by the University - please check the Guide to Assessment, Standards, Marking and Feedback for more information.

The purpose of feedback is to help you to improve your future work. If you do not understand your feedback or want to talk about your ideas further, you are warmly encouraged to meet your Supervisor during their Office Hours.

Indicative reading

• Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books, 2010; repr. 2017.
• Crary, Jonathan. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. London: Verso, 2022.
• Deutsche, Rosalyn. Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War.New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 65-144. London: Hogarth and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955.
• Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. “On Death-Work.” In Frontiers: Between the Dream and Psychic Pain, trans. by Catherine Cullen and Philip Cullen, 184-93. London: Hogarth, 1981.
• Sharpe, Christina. Ordinary Notes. London: Daunt Books, 2023.