Letter of Seminar
“American things: true, metaphorical and anachronistic stories of trauma, colonialism, slavery, racism and social terror, through the ages and the worlds of the hemisphere”: this lengthy title given by Edward Sullivan to his paper relocates our research subject in the current historical context. The author outlines here what he calls his “imaginary exhibition” by ...
Since the early days of the 1990’s, Peter Fischli and David Weiss have replicated ordinary household items using an expanding polyurethane foam, robbing this material world of its very materiality. What remains, then, of these useless objects? What meaning can we find in this flattening of reality, and why did these artists choose objects ...
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 ...
The readymade is one of art history’s most used, discussed, studied object. It is almost never written in the same manner, and its definition is made all the more unstable by Duchamp’s own refusal to make it into a “school”. In his wake, generations of artists have subverted it for their own profit, sometimes ...
The dragster is a machine-thing whose principal asset resides in its extreme speed: it brutally accelerates over a very short route, attaining the record of more than 500 kph. Connected to the danger incurred by its driver, its mythology looms large in certain milieus Paul Ardenne studies as an anthropologist of art in our ...
A question is being raised more and more often these days: How far must one go to know a thing? Is one to open it up to the point of imagining that one can touch its “essence” or else, on the contrary, is it better to remain on the surface while investigating its most ...
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 ...