ARAH 9535

Materiality and Early Modern Art

Assoc. Prof. Douglas Fordham

fordham@virginia.edu

Wednesday 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Fayerweather Hall 206

Overview:

This seminar will engage with “materiality debates” in Art History, particularly as they relate to Western art between roughly 1500 and 1800. Challenging the opticality of Modernism, the ephemerality of the screen, and the textuality of theory, the new emphasis on materiality asks what kinds of insights a renewed focus on embodied experience and the raw materials of artistic process might yield. Course themes include the intersection of art history with material history, anthropology, thing theory, vitalism, iconoclasm, currency, exchange, wills, and inventories. It seeks to marry compelling theories of materiality, objects, and object agency with elegant art-historical analyses in which we can view these approaches in practice. The seminar will also encourage students to formulate research topics that will draw upon the seminar’s themes while contributing to the development of a PhD thesis topic.

This class begins with four basic propositions that we may decide to alter, drop, or add to:

Proposition 1: This class explores a method and associated approaches for our own thinking and writing about art.

Proposition 2: A material approach to art can enable us to engage in a revisionist history of art in which iconology, opticality, and formalism can be revisited and reconceived.

Proposition 3: A material history of art is not new to the field. It has always been one component of art-historical thinking and writing. One challenges is to view materiality historically – to understand what materials and their artistic or figurative use meant at historically specific moments.

Proposition 4: A higher cognizance of art’s materiality compels us to slow down our own visual analysis. The slowness of the studio is a check on the speed of a Google search.

Revised and Added Propositions:

Proposition 5: One way of summarizing these readings would be to consider them a post-Marxist model of artistic production that privileges the irreducible determining limits of the human body.

Other Propositions?

Readings:

All reading assignments are posted on the Activities Grid. If the assignment is not linked to a PDF, then the reading can be found in the Fine Arts Library on the reserve shelf for this course.

Suggested books for purchase:

Two books which are on reserve, but which you may prefer to purchase online are:

David Esterly, The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (Viking, 2012).                     

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010).

Assignments and Evaluation:

30%     Participation grade including occasional brief writing assignments

10%     Leading one class discussion and synthesizing the readings

15%     Final presentation grade

45%     Final paper (approx. 15 pages) on approved research topic

This seminar will engage with “materiality debates” in Art History, particularly as they relate to Western art between roughly 1500 and 1800. Challenging the opticality of Modernism, the ephemerality of the screen, and the textuality of theory, the new emphasis on materiality asks what kinds of insights a renewed focus on embodied experience and the raw materials of artistic process might yield. Course themes include the intersection of art history with material history, anthropology, thing theory, vitalism, iconoclasm, currency, exchange, wills, and inventories. It seeks to marry compelling theories of materiality, objects, and object agency with elegant art-historical analyses in which we can view these approaches in practice. The seminar will also encourage students to formulate research topics that will draw upon the seminar’s themes while contributing to the development of a PhD thesis topic.