Course Description and Outcomes
This seminar is an introduction to the art history methodology of material culture. Simply put, the study of material culture is the study of “things”—human-made or human-modified products. These “things” can include clothing, your grandmother’s heirloom jewelry, a formally landscaped garden, a painting, or the contents of a trash can. Scholars of material culture investigate these cultural products as a way to uncover the beliefs, values, attitudes, needs, hopes and fears of a particular society at a particular moment. In this class we will look at art (early American portraiture; southern plantation architecture; hand-built wooden furniture), luxury goods (Marie Antoinette’s clothing; silver teapots), consumer goods (Tupperware; table forks), and popular imagery (photographs of President Kennedy; the interior decor of Graceland) through the material culture lens.
However, the study of objects alone is not enough. Material culture scholars must study contexts as well as objects, for it is only by considering the historical, social, spatial, and cultural contexts that we can come to a fuller understanding of the meaning expressed by the human-made/modified product itself.
In addition, the field of material culture studies is filled with challenges and debates. Scholars sometimes argue that objects “speak” to us about the past. What does this mean? How can we know for sure what the artifact(s) is “saying” to us? What are the limitations of using objects as evidence? Is it possible to overstate an object’s value as evidence? Is it possible to overstrain an interpretation? Such questions are endemic to the field and are important to our investigations this semester.
This course introduces students to the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of material culture studies through readings, discussion, and research in an array of fields including art history, anthropology, folklore, and history. It is important to recognize that our readings will NOT deal primarily with contemporary art. Rather, this seminar is designed to help you develop critical skills of object analysis and will encourage you to consider the relationships between human –made/modified products and cultural meaning.
Responses for Friday, September 26
This week, please respond to any aspect of your reading in Adrian Forty,
Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992).
Consider especially the way the design of an object affects its production and/or use. If you choose to talk about a chapter in the book that not everyone else has read, make sure you explain any examples that you may cite so that everyone can follow along.
7 comments:
I'm going to go ahead and take the easy route to this weeks response since I want to save my chapter until this friday. From what I've read so far from my browsing of the book I think I'll enjoy reading the articles. The introduction alone pulls me into the understanding of design and commerce. Adrian Forty as a way of approaching the idea that you can't have a division between design and commerce. In fact Forty sort of hits it on the head with his comment about British design.
"Particularly in Britain, the study of design and its history has suffered from a form of cultural lobotomy which has left design connected only to the eye, and severed its connections to the brain and to the pocket." That is a powerful thing to say considering in the present design more than ever is integrated into our way of living. We don't really pay attention to it since we don't take the time to analyze everything but we have a sense of it on some level.
Forty makes another interesting argument and that is about how manufactured goods isn't really art. Forty states in the introduction that when an item is made by that artist themselves then that can be considered art. Not the manufactured goods that sit in museums because the item is just the idea of the artist. Overall it seems like we will be having some great discussions come Friday about the objects in the book.
The First Industrial Designers talks about how pottery has changed into different forms and taken on different designs as time has progressed. How potters use to sell their goods by sending whole sets of completed work to markets or to merchants. Wedgwood adopted a novel technique of selling by advance order.
Although he was not the first pottery master to make a distinction between the tasks of designing pots and making them, he attached more value to the work of the designers than other manufactures had done before. this is evident in the fact that by the 1750's he had a totally different stage in production just for designers or his so called "modellers" The bigger idea in this article,besides one form of pottery changing into another or how the development of forms that both suited the methods of manufacture and satisfied the tastes of the market was the work of design, is that the idea of industrial design isn't new. although professional designers did emerge in America in the 1920's fusing ideas with manufacturing techniques, was identical to that of Wedgwood's modellers in the potteries.
I found it extremely interesting that Forty found a relationship between economic development and the advent of design-oriented professions. Drawing from the writing of Karl Marx, Forty asserts that design as an occupation developed in most areas beginning in the eighteenth century, when craftspeople became progressively more and more separated from the production and sale of the objects they crafted. This, the author claims, fostered the cooperation of laborers to work as a unified whole to create the same objects originally executed by an individual. Continuing in this trend, the design itself became distanced from the craftsmen, as conglomerates such as Wedgwood, hired designers to craft only the imagery used in their products.
Another interesting point of discussion logically follows this trend: the introduction of copyright laws may well have been necessitated by the practice of design as a profession. What I find particularly interesting in this avenue of discourse is that copyright laws interfere with free-market economic competition. In the historical context of "Design and Mechanisation," designers were contracted at will by manufacturers; theoretically, anyone could become a designer. However, after a successful design was completed, copyright laws made it possible for manufacturers to prevent others from using it. This seems to be in direct contrast to the author's statement that the origins of design and capitalism are inextricably related.
Eric Easterday
What caught my eye was in the introduction where Forty says that design has "much more enduring effects than the ephemeral products of the media because it can cast ideas about who we are and how we should behave into permanent and tangible forms." This was something I had never really given much thought to until I read that, but it's pretty true. He also goes on to say how design turns myths into tangible forms so design becomes reality, such as the myth of the office being a fun place to work is turned into reality through the design of office products. Or at least they try to make you think it's fun through the design of products.
The fist chapter with Wedgewood was really intriguing that the production of the pottery seemed more highly thought of than the items construction. Mass production of a quality product is not to say that the design was not important. Although it seemed that the work of the workman went unwanted once machines took over the workers role. Though the workers role went down it opened windows for others in the design dept.
On a side note I thought it was interesting to see greenware as an item they made. My greatgrandmother had a greenware plate in the living room for a candy dish. She had another the same design but a slight variation in color which really showed that the text was right about the inconsistancies in the firing process of that particular product.
The introduction is really nice because unlike the other chapters, he talks very generally about design. It allowed me while i was reading to think about designs that appeal to me and think about how i have been processing them with my personal interpretation. When you talk about the manufacturing of designed good i cant help but think about this idea of objects, art, and that third thing. We have art that serves no other purpose then ascetic stimulation, and then we have objects that serve purpose. When does a functional object that we use every day make its way into the realm of art. When do found objects or functional objects re-appropriated as art lose there function and become nothing more then ascetic stimulation. If you think about a really nice piece of furniture that you pay way to much for. That is art that is design, but part of the design can be the comfort or the function. When the design reaches that point where it is art do we then quit using it and just display it like that room in your grad parents house where you couldn't sit on any of the furniture.
When you listen to Adrian Forty talk about consumer design it makes you think of all the people who posses objects that were very well designed, but the owners have no appreciation for them as art. It seems like the thought and design we put in to these functioning objects, even though its over looked by the average consumer, attracts use from specific people. Even if some one doesn’t know why they enjoy using a certain kind of object, the appeal that draws them to the item is embedded in the design.
Design in the Office
With reconstruction, and the industrial revolution there was a boom in the economy. With this boom of economy came more and more paper work. Or clerical work. States developed, cities grew, trade increased, education developed and as well as growing technologies. All of this entailed clerical work, and plenty of it.
Time is money, so efficiency was the main drive behind designing within the office. It began with almost nothing. Practically slave driven, and pay no better than factory workers. It was made very clear that clerical workers were "machines" to be had the highest efficiency from. Long silent break-less days at desks, i imagine, were possibly more strenuous than a factory job where one was at least doing something.
Chairs, desks, pens, and files went from bare essentials to whatever the desire of the worker. In the 1930s the Human Relations school of management came into being. MAinly from here on out efficiency was only restricted by worker comfort, which if maintained yielded higher efficiency anyway.
More focused on the individual, offices now became small domiciles meant to be personalized to the worker for a more comfortable environment. Styles of office furniture and models of equipment created a competitive market in the production of these items. Art showed up.
Designers, be it office maintainers or the desk designers, tried to blur the distinction between home and work. One can take "It looks like a home" as a compliment. But rarely is it with good intentions to say that "it looks like an office"
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