Course Description
European sculpture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focusing on issues of scale, materiality, idolatry, industry, collecting, and memory. Engaging material culture studies, the course offers an alternative art history to that traditionally based on figurative marble statuary as the Ideal and end of Sculpture.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be expected to produce an extensive research paper on specific works or issues related to the field and the methodologies appropriate to the topic under consideration in the course. This paper will be a detailed, in-depth consideration of the student's chosen theme requiring not only a demonstration of advanced research skills (including the ability to read and use material presented in foreign languages), but also an articulation of the student's ability to understand and manipulate the critical apparatus of art history.
Athena Title
Sculpture and Material Culture
Prerequisite
Two ARHI 3000-level courses
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will be challenged to reconsider the historical notions of sculpture (conceived as white marble statuary) extolled by German philosophers including Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Georg Friedrich Hegel as dematerialized, serious, chaste, and as providing models of virtue and perpetuating the memory of illustrious men.
- Students will understand the material turn in recent years that has questioned a staid vision of “Ideal” figure and form by tending to the various historical materials by which sculpture was fashioned and collapsing the physical and ontological distance of humans and objects.
- Students will consider issues of agency, exchange, and matter engaging a range of objects such as sugar shakers, ivory eye portraits, small Egyptian antiquities, cork architecture, porcelain figures, and miniaturized monuments, that have historically been cast as outside the limits of Sculpture and anachronistically deemed “decorative arts.”
- Students will analyze how scale and material affect viewer response; they will question how these objects evoke wonder, longing, and the uncanny; they will determine how sculpture can unsettle, disrupt, and disturb.
- Students will further reflect on the way miniatures and certain materials have been gendered feminine, or “othered” as idols, and they will assess the relationship between small, sculpted objects, environmental extraction, and global capitalism.
- Students will judge whether an alternative history of sculpture can confront “universalist” aesthetics bound to ancient, and antiquated, bodies.
- Students will be challenged to look, think, read, and write in a critical manner about material culture and its ideas.
Topical Outline
- Week 1: Introduction/The Material Turn in Art History
- Week 2: Naturalia/Artificialia
- Weeks 3-4: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts
- Week 5: Porcelain
- Weeks 6-7: Idols, Fetishes, Magots, and Pagodes
- Week 8: The Revolution Will be Miniaturized
- Weeks 9-10: Ivory and Memory
- Week 11: Animalia
- Week 12: Industry and the Multiple
- Week 13: Bibelots and Bricobracomania
- Week 14: Souvenirs
- Weeks 15-16: Student Presentations
