Letter of Seminar
An ethnologist and anthropologist, Mélanie Roustan has investigated the hold objects have over people (her book was published in 2007). She offers us a thorough analysis of things that were sacred for reasons that differ greatly from what, once they have entered museums, defines them for us. The case of eighteenth-century tattooed and mummified ...
Sophie Basch is the autor of the powerful volume Rastaquarium, her recent book on the relationships between Art Nouveau and the Dreyfus Affair in Proust's work. In this summary of her talk given to the Arts & Sociétés seminar, she identifies for us the references to primitive Greece of this writer who, without being ...
Philippe Artières devotes his work in large part to the contemporary history of writing—to our graphic culture, from neon signs to tattooing. He is never far removed from fiction authors and artists, which also must contribute to making his work inventive. He goes back over for us the process by which archives have become social ...
Estelle Zhong asks what art can do in the face of the ecological crisis. Considering this crisis as a crisis of sensibility, Zhong, following the studies of Bruno Latour, sees art less as an object that should make us feel a bit more “guilty”—we already have enough of that—than as an object of ...
Arlette Farge has always made one want to go into archives to do research. There, she has been able to find the minuscule signs of lives complicated by poverty—indeed, her thesis was on food theft in eighteenth-century Paris. Here, she returns to the interest in the poor that emerged in the wake of ...
Christine Peltre tells us of the status of “things” in the Orient imagined by nineteenth-centuries contemporaries: objects acquired in bazaars and souks, robes, cloaks, babouche slippers, turbans, headgear, carpets, etc. “Operators of belief, border agents, or reminders of proximity?” Everything would be a way of recalling sites and atmospheres, dazzling sights, even vain ...
“Disappearance” is at the heart of the studies and novels of Hadrien Laroche, who reexamines for us “the thing” in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Meyer Shapiro. We are familiar with the discussion around Van Gogh’s shoes, a still life lively enough to give rise to some very keen, contradictory interpretations. ...
After his Paysages en mouvement. Transport et perception de l’espace, XVIIIe-XXe siècles (published by Gallimard in 2005), Marc Desportes has taken an interest in the singular presence of objects in twentieth-century art. He proposes to clarify the various ways in which these objects are used by artists, in accordance with varying circumstances, as well ...
As a historian of anthropological art, Bertrand Tillier studies objects of all sorts manufactured in the trenches by the combatants of all nations who were engaged in the bloody conflict of the Great War. Conscious of the reticence of art historians to include such unclassifiable and disturbing products, he directs his attention toward the ...
Armelle Fémelat, whose dissertation on Italian equestrian portraiture from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries is forthcoming, brings us into the world of representations of animals shown dead or alive, wherein things have lives of their own. She invites us to grasp, through the world of forms, the nature of animal otherness by crossing ...
