Course Description

This course is meant to be a space for you to examine and deepen your relationship to the field and your own practice through readings, discussions, and presentations.  The readings are meant to expand your perspective on the field of jewelry and metalsmithing, to define its particularities and concerns in relation to the discourses of the contemporary art world.

Together we will explore a series of seminal theoretical texts, seeking ways to relate them to our own practice.  Through these texts we will encounter a series of themes and historical perspectives that are crucial to the field of jewelry, while also delving into fields and areas of inquiry, that have not commonly been related to our field, but perhaps should or could be.  Our aim is to get a historical and interdisciplinary perspective on where we are as artists/makers today, how we got here and where we could go from here. The course aims to bring up critical questions on why we make, whom we make for and the meaning of our practice beyond the studio and the jewelry and metals world.

This is a chance to practice your skills in connecting theory, reading and writing to your work and to build a vocabulary and ground of reference around your ideas, interests and intentions. It’s a chance to take part in an intense discourse around your field, which you might be asked to do many times in the future of your career.

The Wednesday meetings will adopt the form of a reading/talking circle. Your role in the group is important and the success of our conversations will be based on your participation and engagement. We will all take turns in presenting and leading the discussion and also examine what “research through practice” might mean for us, by exploring some ways of connecting theory and making. 

Oct 12, 2009

Theodor Adorno




A German critic and sociologist and philosopher. He was a member of the Frankfurt School (in Germany), a school for critical theory, sociology and philosophy, where Marxism was questioned and they overcame the assumptions of past theories. Walter Benjamin was also a member of the Frankfurt School, and he wrote an essay in 1936 called, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that addressed originality and the presence of a work's aura in the wave of new arts like film and photography. He gives us a an idea of the social and political dissidence with art's traditions, by quoting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Manifesto, the founder of the Futurist Movement(1910-1944), he says, "For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic. . .Accordingly we state: War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns."

What do you call beautiful? Are ideas and concepts just as beautiful as a visually stimulating object? Are ugly ideas uglier than physically unappealing things? Do formalism and beauty always go hand-in-hand? Does beauty always mean purity?
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