Letter of Seminar
Anaïs Linares is studying digital practices influenced by the methods of operation that are foreseen by the suppliers of devices, but that, in part, escape their control. An entire body of ethnographic research has taken an interest in gestures pertaining to technical objects that come under the headings “Personal Tactics” and “Digital Plumbing”: users ...
Chang Ming Peng undertakes a comparative approach between Western Art and Far Eastern Art. In this way, she proposes that we reflect on the status of “the still life” and “things” in one world as well as in the other. Across a few striking examples, she builds bridges while showing the limits to any ...
Annette Becker is known for her fine knowledge of wars and genocides. She is now studying the conditions under which they are being exhibited in museums that have preserved traces thereof. Such museums have become sites of both commemoration and mourning. Especially since the 1990s, a bit everywhere in the world and there, too, ...
Prudence Bidet studies the albums of Yoko Ono, who mixes everything together: music, politics, and autobiography. Less studied than the rest of her creative work, these singular objects, especially her first solo albums, contain strong symbolic charges while displaying her desire for liberation. In her fourth album, in particular, Feeling the Space (1973), she ...
Charlotte Foucher Zarmanian is known for having extended the perimeter of research devoted to women. Here, she studies the issue of the conservation of things in the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions (Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, MNATP), which was created in 1937. In taking a close look at the ...
Using documentary photography that prioritized home over street, Isabelle Bonnet invites us to enter British interiors of the 1970s. These photographs offer us signs of a new lifestyle henceforth centered on domestic space. There, the status of things speaks volumes, as does their number, their profusion within the working-class world, which contrasts with the ...
Charles Sterling is among those museum curators whose originality is to be rediscovered. Having had to flee Vichy France and the Nazi Occupation during World War II, he never was able to create exactly the kind of exhibition he wanted to organize until the Spring of 1952, when he presented his European retrospective The ...
Charlotte Guichard highlights everything that goes against the Kantian ideal. She is working on an anthropology of the picture by showing that art is also material and has what she calls its own preaesthetic regime. She lays stress on what vision by itself conceals: a whole world of gestures and practices, an entire material ...
Guillaume Faroult carefully observes the “talkative objects” that appeared at the fringes of eighteenth-century still lifes. At the moment when this quite old genre was receiving its designation in French as nature morte, and despite the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture’s directives, which favored a “good” model for still lifes consisting of ...
In studying the status of things over the long term, Amaru Lozano-Ocampo lay stress on the transition from the mysticism of the classical age to the secular world of modernity. According to him, the still lifes of the seventeenth century would be the ultimate testimony to a religious sensibility inherited from the Middle Ages. ...