The Materiality of Things: In Front of t

This graduate level seminar focuses on specific medieval and early modern objects from the lands of Islam while turning our attention to the making of these artifacts. It will cover issues concerning the mining and producing substances and their taming with the help of specific tools, like for example the making and shaping of precious stones and precious materials into objects of art, the working with particular materials such as glass and rock crystals, the carving of ivory and wood, the casting of metals and ceramics, and even the making of copies and forgeries. Yet, this seminar explores also our interactions with art objects in the museum. It does so by studying the object as the subject of our inquiring gaze, while paying attention to its material, production techniques, shape and formation as related to time/science/technology/and style. An emphasis is put on the agency of substances as a no-less important tool than ‘the image’ for producing meanings. Beside the first three meetings, in which theoretical aspects concerning the ‘Material Turn’ in art history are discussed, each of the meetings takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the new gallery for the arts of Islam as well as in the Medieval/European show rooms. Each meeting will be devoted to one single object. Discussion about the museum exhibition context as the interactive-educational space, in which art objects are deliberately reinvented to speak (or rather answer) particular cultural demands and narrate stories and histories, will be critically discussed too. Histories of extraction of substance, real or contrived, as well as traces of the ‘hand’ of the maker while taming materials into a masterpieces and marvels will be addressed while observing objects.