Architecture and Art: From Minimalism to Neuro-phenomenology

Since the first pronouncements of the \’death\’ of painting in the post-Abstract Expressionist era, art consistently sought to radicalize its practice by overturning the traditional metaphysics of expression and meaning through a vigorous engagement with the context of its presentation. This approach came increasingly to center attention on the temporal aspects of experience, and on the adjacent physical environment as an annex of the work itself. In the contemporary context both art and design have increasingly begun to examine and address the physiological aspects of perception as the principal shapers of space. This course will begin with the principle ideas that shaped the new thinking about painting after the second world war, how these ideas found form in the sculpture of the 1960s and \’70s and how the legacy of these ideas have continued to mark aesthetic theory from relational aesthetics to neuro-aesthetics.