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.
[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.
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