Of Sea and Meteorology

Ah the memories of Art History, when the young green me was immersed in the study of beauty: magnificent paintings and objects, the lives of the artists of the past, the beautiful macros that show the painting techniques and the chisel of master sculptors. I loved the descriptions of how colors were gathered, shipped around the world in long journeys on caravels or caravans, then mixed with alchemical competence and applied layer by layer with techniques learned in a lifetime of dedication to the craft.

Then, to counterbalance the beauty of these studies, the insubstantial analyses on style: sometimes they were fascinating (moreover if well written), other times contorted and labyrinthine, but in general they left me with the unpleasant feeling that I had not learned much.

Jennifer T. Roberts paper[1] offered me both feelings. In the first half the transoceanic travel of the painting helps in showing a vision of a very large world now disappeared: the vast distances, the painting’s movement from hand to hand to its destination, the long delay between the making of the art piece and its exhibition. The analysis of how Copley carefully planned the theme of the painting is also interesting. Then the bitter taste of the pains of the undergraduate studies: the drapery and the perspective linking Copley to Empiricism, despite five hundred years of drapery painting and perspective studies that predated Copley.

Walter Benjamin’s paper[2] excels in showing the limits of my understanding. I could say that it is the language barrier, but I am perfectly aware that my mind is the problem. Between some very satisfactory (for my ego) errors and sparse concepts that I understood and appreciated, a dense fog obscured my general understanding of the meaning of the paper. Not language barrier, it was a meteorological issue.

Then the dense mist lifted; there was light again when Michael Yonan[3] and Charles F. Montgomery[4] blew off the haze. Yonan’s call for an Art History focused more on the materiality of the analyzed objects let me cheer in a very un-academic way. Montgomery’s practical guide to the evaluation of an object had the taste of a behind-the-scenes trip in the mind of one who has reached excellence: with clarity and nonchalance he leads through the multiple steps with the ease of a seasoned guide of a hidden wing of a magnificent museum.

The readings of this week confirmed what I miss and what I don’t of Art History: there is a limit to what we can deduct from an object, and the evidence that we have draws this border. Any analysis that is based on weak or no evidence is, in my personal view, just an opinion. The papers helped me in better defining the line; a lesson that I hope to use well in dealing with my beautiful object. That old magazine deserves some respect.

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[1] Jennifer L. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” in Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2014).

[2] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

[3] Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86 th  18 (2011): 232-48.

[4] Charles F. Montgomery, "The Connoisseurship of Artifacts," in Thomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture Studies in America (London: Altamira Press, 1999).

On the verge between material and fluffiness.

I am a pretty limited person. Well everyone is, but I studied art history, graduated, and yet I hate Duchamp.

This pisses me off.

My problem is actually worse because whenever I read art historians indulging themselves in self-referencing analyses of pieces of art without any concrete evidence I invariably felt sorry for them. They were probably quite happy in their successful careers so the problem is obviously mine.  It is clearly the same with Duchamp: in a nutshell I have probably an undiagnosed allergy to convolute thinking. Not to theory, I love theory, but the philosophical analysis of the world sometimes instead of helping the real world, creates a parallel universe of fluffiness.

Material Culture however needs a theory to create a scaffold for investigations on things and to extract useful information from them, yet there exists the same danger of falling into the trap of a “language of grotesque impenetrability”[1]. Tim Ingold[2] attempted the difficult task of focusing on the material of an object instead of on the materiality, while also offering good perspectives such as the nature of the raw material that we use (rarely raw, often a product of animals or plants) and how our experience of an object changes in different situations. 

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the second part of her paper[3] did an excellent job in showing how the concrete analysis of an object with good evidence can bring a new layer of information to the inquiry; the first part her interesting analysis that linked gender to furniture, shows a promising path but sometimes it rested on weak evidence.

The value of utilizing the things to bring up an underground vein of information unreachable by textual evidence shows up in all of these papers, but every technique needs some kind of organization, a collection of good behaviors to rely on. E. McClung Fleming[4] and Jules David Prown[5] provide two approaches. Prown’s example is particularly powerful, because he followed a methodological description with a practical example on a piece of furniture. Fleming on the other hand remained only on the theory, yet his organization is much more grounded on the practical aspects of an analysis of an object and yet very flexible and adaptable to the universe of different kinds of things.

On the metaphysical side of the spectrum are Carolyn Kitch[6] and Sam Anderson[7]; they can be excused for this capital sin because Kitch studies journalism and Anderson is a journalist himself. Jokes aside, their contribution is very useful in showing how the objects maintain traces of past lives and a certain character in themselves. Kitch skillfully implies that this character lies in the viewer, while Edmund de Waal, the famous potter interviewed by Anderson, leans towards the intrinsic metaphysical property of the object.

We can clearly excuse De Waal, because he is an artist, like Duchamp. You should excuse Duchamp too, if you consider him an artist; I still don’t like him.

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[1] Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 2.

[2] Ibidem, 1-16.

[3] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the Decorative Arts,” American Furniture.

[4] E. McClung Fleming, “Artifact Study: A Proposed Model,” Winterthur Portfolio 16 (1981): 154-173.

[5] Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (1982): 1-19.

[6] Carolyn Kitch, “Making Things Matter: The Material Value of Old Media,” American Journalism 32:3 (2015): 355-62.

[7] Sam Anderson, “Edmund de Waal and the Strange Alchemy of Porcelain,” The New York Times Magazine (November 25, 2015). http://tinyurl.com/oyj69y9.

From Here on, Material Culture!

Second Semester, another blog. Sorry dudes.

History infected me at young age, but on the path that led to my Graduate Studies other viruses paraded in and created a strange spectrum of intellectual interests. Mainly I perceive this weakness of my immune system as a virtue, but sometimes I wonder if a more focused interest would lead to an easier life. Academically I studied Art History as an undergraduate in Italy, then History as Masters with a thesis on a roman insurrection in 1867. Outside of academia I pursued a passion for electronics, programming, art, and poetry; I worked as a 3D and 2D graphic artist trying to combine the technological side of my soul with the intellectual one.

Modeling objects in 3D exercises both observation and analysis, because as a good forger the attempt to recreating reality in the virtual world requires a good attention to and understanding of details. This kind of craftsmanship, united to the education as art historian, led to an interest in the history of technology, which intersected the interest for military history. Technology always accompanied soldiers onto the battlefield, but in the second half of the nineteenth century a revolution changed the world: technology permeated the lives of people all around the globe in a whirlwind that excited the masses. Then the First World War arrived and these new technologies contributed to the massacre; the world acknowledged the danger hidden in the new things: the iron that created bridges and skyscrapers casted guns, while the chemistry that fueled the abundance of food and material created powerful explosives and poisons.

Times of change are always interesting: the second industrial revolution changed the vision and ideas of people, yet it evolved on a stream of objects which innovated the technical possibilities small step by small step. For this reason my expectations from the class are high; one must understand the language of things to decipher not only the messages coded between the words of the documents, but also those that follow the curves of an old telephone, or are ingrained in the patterns left on a metal surface by a precision lathe. If ideas shaped the world, objects made it in such a way that is as obvious as it is overlooked by historians, moreover those interested in warfare. With a powerful toolset that enables me to talk about weapons and technology with proficiency I will perhaps be able to nudge the discussion of military history from maps and maneuvers towards a social and technological history of the battlefield.

As an object to analyze during the semester I chose the issue of “La Domenica del Corriere” of 5-12 March 1916, the most popular Sunday edition of a newspaper in Italy at the time, with two beautiful colored illustrations on the cover and the back.