Letter of Seminar
When contemporary artists use the sausage as a visual, a comical effect is to be expected. For Morgan Labar, who wrote his PhD on silliness and stupidity, this foodstuff, popularized through industrialization, deserves to be recontextualized within its long history. In earlier art and literature ribald and scatological references abounded but it is in ...
Philippe Cordez takes an interest in book-shaped objects, whose functions may vary. A few examples: mechanical clock, drinking vessel, commode, firearm, gas cigarette lighter, and piggy bank. Cordez thus adds a chapter to the history of books since the Middle Ages. He does so in line with the work of Kurt Köster, who, as a pioneer on ...
Jean Rouch discovered the rituals of possession among the Songhai populations of Niger when he was a colonial public-works engineer before quitting that job to devote his life to research. He began filming in order to document ceremonies during which things are “activators of affects” for purposes of healing. Clara Pacquet notes the correspondences ...
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has helped to bring Giuseppe Arcimboldo out of the comfort zone wherein critics had treated him as an ahistorical painter. Kaufmann has contributed toward a critical revision of Arcimboldo’s oeuvre as a whole by placing it back within the context in which Arcimboldo lived and painted, including his connection with the ...
Paula Diehl takes an interest in political symbols and their usage in political ceremonies as well as in everyday life. Proceeding from an empirical study she conducted in the United States in 2014, she notes that the usage of political symbols plays several roles. The individuals she surveyed own several everyday objects bearing political ...
Camille Richert is preparing a dissertation around the notion of labor in Contemporary Art. Starting from the principle that our age has been altered by some major technological changes, she takes an interest in artists who are sensitive to the tools, materials, and products of the new forms of work—to things but also to ...
In drawing up an inventory of images and things in the nineteenth century, Manuel Charpy shows us how bourgeois domestic interiors ended up resembling still lifes, with curios, assembled in a certain order, accumulating there as within a picture. A painted or photographic portrait of a collector was, in this regard, edifying: his acquisitions ...
Paula Barreiro López connects guerilla tactics—which had become a common way of attacking established power, especially in regions that were called at the time the “Third World”—with the actions of artists who wanted in their own way to upset settled systems on both sides of the Atlantic. How did they set about doing this, ...
At the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi fabricated three large candelabra along with some vases, tripods, and stands out of some mud-covered debris left over from sculptures that had been rediscovered in Hadrian’s villa during the Pantanello excavations of 1769. In retracing the history of these candelabra that no longer evince any ...
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, the objects are as important as the characters. In each of his shots, he pays as intransigent attention to them as he does to everything else. One may recognize therein an echo of old still lifes, but that does not suffice to account for the main function they perform in ...
