First Year/First Semester Registration, 10:00am EST

At 6:58am, my phone alarm went off reminding me of the two minutes I had to quickly log into my school's online student account site and register for classes. It was a little anticlimactic, but I did snag the last spot for a graduate critique course that I wanted to take which was exciting.

Here are a list of the three courses I registered for this morning and their descriptions. On September first, I am registering for an art history course through Tufts. I'll include that one too cause I am almost positive I will be taking it with the others. This should give you a pretty good idea of what my first semester is going to be like... on paper at least:

Grad Group Critique (Mondays, 6-9p)

This course is designed to build verbal and written articulation critique skills in a group setting among the first and second year graduate students. Led by a faculty member students examine the art work of their fellow classmates as the catalyst for critique. All first and second year Master of Fine Arts students are required to take this course each semester for the first two years of the program.

Grad CAP Seminar (Mondays, 9-12p)

Contemporary Art Practice. This mandatory MFA graduate seminar is open to first year Master of Fine Arts graduate students only. In the fall 2009 semester the course will be taught by faculty members of the graduate faculty. Topics will be announced.

Advanced Seminar: Material Photography (Tuesdays, 9-12p & 2-6p)

This course looks at the intersection of photography and sculpture, making material interrogations into the medium of photography. Looking at Man Ray's Rayographs and Henry Wessel's deadpan physical puns as important historic seeds of the gestures that have vastly expanded in the last 10 years of contemporary photography we address the materiality of the medium. As artists now collage, build, cut, perform, unfold, dance with photographs in the digital, ephemeral era we forge new relationships with a medium previously thought to be merely "2D," drawing out the sensual, tactile nature of the medium, exposing and playing with the physical mechanics of its exhibitions strategies. We will look at performative photographs with sculptural content that function somewhere between documentation and staged photography while also looking at sculptures created for the purpose of being photographed. Explorations between material and ephemeral photography (projections, digital screens) will be explored as students work in non-traditional ways with the medium, thinking in terms of sculpture and installation with photo materials and construction for photography.

Historiography and Methodology of Art History (Wednesdays, 1:30-4p)

Art History has undergone a period of intense self-examination in the last 25 years or so, i.e. the “crisis in/of the discipline”. We will survey some key theoretical vantage points ranging from connoisseurship to queer theory, social history to semiotics. Our goal will be to translate theory into practice and conversely, to understand the theoretical and methodological implications of what we do as art historians (students, teachers, critics, museum professionals, artists).

I can feel the workload already.