A unifying theme for these for articles this week is an examination through approaches to material culture studies of the idea of what it means to own a thing. “The Connoisseurship of Artifacts” is unabashedly about setting the price for a thing, selling it, buying it, and owning it.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” brings the age-old enemy of capitalistic systems — Karl Marx — and the idea of reproduciblity as a devaluation strategy into the conversation as a way to lift the dead hand of consumerism from objects of value. Unfortunately, we end up with dead hand of Marxism incompletely covering the first dead hand of capitalistic hegemony, and it’s not fun to contemplate.
“Copley’s Cargo,” reads a painting and reveals the great existential angst of the 17th Century Atlantic world: the promises of commerce and conquest (new things to steal, buy, and own as a way to gain and prove your power) as opposed to the realities of moving these things from place to place on slow, leaking wooden ships, through the hands of thieves. The article uses an art historical consideration of an object (an oil painting) and breaks through to an Ulrich style revelation about an epoch.
“Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” returns to the quest of Mechanical Reproduction to this time lift the dead hand of consumerism from Art History by using the more agile and skilled hand of Material Culture. But the article falls back on the (to some) timeless or (to some) age old comparison of Plato and Aristotle, and the author falls just short of finding the revelation of Ingold, that things are in life and life in not in things.
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Charles Montgomery, “The Connoisseurship of Artifacts“,in Material Culture Studies in America, edited by Thomas J. Schlereth (The American Association for State and Local History, Tennessee, 1982)
This is a straightforward read that provides a basic, “Antiques Roadshow” recipe for assessing the value of an object. For Material Culture study, this method is antiquated in that it represents the privileged male gaze of the so-called connoisseur, the collector, the buyer, the owner, and so on. This gaze reveals more about the looker than it does the object being looked at.
To arrive at a valuation, Montgomery’s approach isolates the object from its environment and its materials, and thus removes deeper cultural meaning that could threaten the marketability of the object. Previous ownership, beyond provenance, is not admitted. In other words, any discussion of people who owned or loved the object, or may have lived or died to make or possess the thing — a discussion of cultural history — is not permitted.
Tellingly, the final section of this article, “Appraisal or Evaluation,” focuses on how much money the object is worth, as revealed by Montgomery’s final sentences, “Is it worth of purchase? And, if so, at what price?” (Montgomery, p. 152)
Nonetheless, a student can still use this method to get at the basic characteristics of an object. So, Montgomery could represent the prosaic starting point for a the study of an object.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969)
Okay, Marx, capitalistic production, proletariats, “In principle a work or art has always been reproducable.” (Benjamin, p, 218) It feels like we are in for a Marxist Art manifesto of some sort or another. Or, was the writer just really inspired after seeing his first Warhol in person?
As an artist, I say this chapter reads like the ‘art critic’ telling the ‘artist’ all about what they are doing. It further brings to mind my assertion that manifestos are generally reductive, false, and thus boring. The one time I produced a manifesto, I wrote it as an Eno-esque inspired numbered list of lyrics, then I blacked out every third or forth word to make the document unintelligible. It’s stuffed in an old Freshman year sketchbook, somewhere.
I understand that Benjamin is defining the authenticity of an object, and stressing how this has an authority that when questioned, can jeopardize historical testimony that arises from the object. (Benjamin, p. 221)
In the case of Benjamin’s manifesto, a lengthy consideration of mechanical reproduction of ‘art’ is basically false. Simply put, if an artist makes an object and someone else comes along and copies it, either roughly by hand or finely with a laser printer, its a “mechanical reproduction,” and this has been happening — not at Benjamin asserts, in some “age of mechanical reproduction,” characterized as films, or photographs, or lithographs — but for as long as people have been picking up rocks and bashing them into spear heads. All art is essentially a form of communication technology. And all worthwhile technology is reproduced.
Jennifer L. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” in Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2014)
Roberts ‘reads’ Copley’s painting and reveals the 18th century, empirical mind of the artist, as well as the empiricist ‘zeitgeist’ of his cultural world that straddled the Atlantic from Boston to London. Roberts moves beyond Barbara Novak’s standard picture of Copley as an American artist who’s “approach [has a] nativist bent, connecting it to an essentially American desire to get at the unvarnished truth of things … [to] … emphasize instead the status of empiricism as a quintessentially transatlantic project.” (Roberts, p. 35) When Robert’s considers the way Copley painted a table top, she reveals, “Copley’s brand of empiricism … [that] mirrors the language of transatlantic commodity exchange and consumption in the colonial Atlantic world.” (Roberts 38)
Roberts further asserts that the 18th century emphasis on empiricism sought to solve the problem of the great time and distance imposed by shipping cargoes and communicating across the Atlantic ocean on the Atlantic world. Roberts’s discussion begins here, with the idea that modern art historians ignore the great distances (space and time) of the Atlantic World, and instead create “spatiotemporal compressions … [that are] … external to all art-historical concerns,” and by implication, do not exist in this painting by Copley. (Roberts, p. 36) This is false according to Roberts, because Copley’s Boy with a Squirrel is an 18th century meditation on the the problem of traversing time and space in the Atlantic World.
Roberts’s immersion in this world of 18th century empiricism impressed me because she is also able to filter out our modern, probabilistic worldview and convincingly step back into the mechanistic mentality of these 18th century empiricists. Robert’s approach represents a thorough revelation of the mind of an age, through the intellectual probing of one oil painting that one man painted, a series of men carried from Boston to London to a group of men who appreciated its aesthetic value.
Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86th 18 (2011): 232-48
Michael Yonan revisits the ideas of Prown to create a closer alignment of the separate disciplines of art history and material culture. Yonan — an art historian — feels “that art-historical practices and perspectives should play an essential role in future examinations of objects’s social lives.” (Yonan, p. 233) Yonan focuses on Prown’s emphasis on the object’s formal analysis “or investigations of what an object represents.” (Yonan, p. 242) He note’s Prown’s admittance of “sensory qualities” or “crediting the sensual,” meaning the permission to ask how an object makes you feel, which Yonan recognizes to be a “quality [of] material cultural analysis that is often downplayed.” (Yonan, p. 242)
Yonan suspects that Prown’s approach to material culture was not embraced by art historians at large because it threatened to democratize art objects, making a Titian equal to a teacup, and thus rob the Titian and other two dimensional paintings (in oil, largely) of their intellectual cache, or cultural hegemony.
On page 243, Yonan slips past an essential part of his argument too quickly, the “idea that art has a physical, sensual dimension, and not just a visual one.” Instead of pausing here, Yonan clambered his way through formalism, then semiotics, to find himself tumbling down into Plato’s cave. Yet he happily emerges into the light of an Aristotelian interpretation of art as “not exclusively a representation of something else [the shadows of Plato’s cave, but as] a structured entity composed of matter and form.” (Yonan, p. 246)
Had Yonan paused at ‘art as a physical and sensual dimension,’ he may have found Ingold’s reference to ‘things in life and not life in things.’ (Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” p. 12) Which is to say, the presence of a work of art and its influence — not on the ‘viewer’ but on the ‘experiencer’ of that work — is real and intentional on the part of the artist.
Reading a two dimensional painting in terms of semiotics can yield information like that found in Robert’s article, “Copley’s Cargo,” and clearly, this is of great value. Prown hints at the presence of a work of art when he talks about admitting a consideration of the sensory qualities of an object. Yonan’s emphasis on Aristotle prevents him from realizing Ingold’s ‘things in life’ synthesis. Yonan falls just short of acknowledging the presence of an object as something seamlessly arising from both its environment and from the experiencer who shares the space with the object. Thus, his article “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies” hints at but doesn’t fully achieve this fusion.