The Unstable Artwork: Composites, Copies, and Change across Time and Place
Fall, 2021
The Simple Description of the Course
This writing-intensive course shifted the focus away from works of art in their original contexts and forms, and instead examined how objects and images are changed in secondary temporal, geographic, or conceptual contexts. Taking a thematic approach, we explored the issue of the “instability” of artworks, how artworks are susceptible to change and re-making, and the various attitudes and approaches towards their reuse in an assortment of different global regions, time periods, and artistic media.
The More Elaborate Description of the Course
What exactly does “instability” mean when talking about works of art? Typically, a work of art is understood as being from a determined context – we have an idea of who made it, where it was made, and when. This is a very “stable” understanding of a work of art. However, there are many works of art that are not quite so easy to wrap our heads around; perhaps they were later moved into a new context, or were later remade into something else entirely, or were copied into a new setting, or were restored. These are all physical changes that have added to the history of a work of art and have made it “unstable,” so to speak: it no longer has a single maker, location, and time, but has several, and points to multiple contexts.
But what does this mean for us now as historians? How are we to adequately talk about this type of artwork? Is the secondary or tertiary setting more or less important than the first? What does it mean for later makers to use objects or materials that already have a history? What are the benefits (or drawbacks) of employing earlier objects or materials in new works? What does it mean to copy or replicate a work of art? These are precisely the kinds of questions that we tackled together as we explored some under-discussed works of art and some different mentalities about the histories and functions of objects and images.
We looked at a large scope of time and place – ranging from ancient Egypt to contemporary America – and focused on a variety of different cultures and their mindsets about these issues of copying, reuse, and general “instability.” In so doing we defined and nuanced some major art historical terms and activities such as spolia, reuse, maintenance, restoration, conservation, appropriation, copying, hybridity. There are different connotations associated with each of these terms, yet each implies a kind of instability, whether physical or conceptual, between one or more temporal/spatial situations or even – as in the case of hybridity – between different artistic vocabularies and traditions.
Ultimatley, the goal of this course was to become more aware of change in the long lives of works of art, to become more sensitive to the reasons for that change, to expand or challenge notions of authorship and originality, and to study complicated works of art that frequently slip through the “non-canonical cracks” of an art history education. The projects hosted here are student works that present a variety of different approaches to these issues.