Art and the Civic Body: A Tale of Two Ci

From social media to TV, from advertisement to museums, interactions with images depicting human bodies mark our daily life. As many scholars and thinkers of the past few decades have shown, such interactions are not neutral but rooted in specific socio-political power dynamics. In this seminar, we will engage with visual and textual representations of the human body, placing dynamics from ancient Greece in dialogue with those of contemporary New York City. The goal is to understand the fragmentary sources of the past within their own cultural context, as well as to think about them from our own modern corporeal subjectivities, with our own cultural schemes, constructions, and biases. With a focus on Athens – the most economically and culturally prominent city of ancient Greece – this course places the bodies that surface from the historical and pictorial archives in conversation with the physical as well as socio-political space of the ancient polis. In this course, we will scrutinize artworks and texts as bearers and producers of bodily images as well as interlocutors of the body politics.