Letter of Seminar
2015-
Philippe Cordez takes an interest in book-shaped objects, whose functions may vary. A few examples: mechanical clock, drinking vessel, commode, firearm, gas cigarette lighter, and piggy bank. Cordez thus adds a chapter to the history of books since the Middle Ages. He does so in line with the work of Kurt Köster, who, as a pioneer on ...
The readymade is one of art history’s most used, discussed, studied object. It is almost never written in the same manner, and its definition is made all the more unstable by Duchamp’s own refusal to make it into a “school”. In his wake, generations of artists have subverted it for their own profit, sometimes ...
The dragster is a machine-thing whose principal asset resides in its extreme speed: it brutally accelerates over a very short route, attaining the record of more than 500 kph. Connected to the danger incurred by its driver, its mythology looms large in certain milieus Paul Ardenne studies as an anthropologist of art in our ...
Anaïs Linares is studying digital practices influenced by the methods of operation that are foreseen by the suppliers of devices, but that, in part, escape their control. An entire body of ethnographic research has taken an interest in gestures pertaining to technical objects that come under the headings “Personal Tactics” and “Digital Plumbing”: users ...
Chang Ming Peng undertakes a comparative approach between Western Art and Far Eastern Art. In this way, she proposes that we reflect on the status of “the still life” and “things” in one world as well as in the other. Across a few striking examples, she builds bridges while showing the limits to any ...
A question is being raised more and more often these days: How far must one go to know a thing? Is one to open it up to the point of imagining that one can touch its “essence” or else, on the contrary, is it better to remain on the surface while investigating its most ...
Waste products, a part of our everyday lives, have become an object of study for scientists who examine here their physical and technological but also anthropological, sociological, economic, philosophical, political, and ecological dimensions. While this object has for a very long time been granted privileged status in the scrutiny of past societies, it also ...
At a time when people are asking themselves about the status of living and nonliving beings, of the human and the nonhuman, things are of concern to us as active agents of the world that act upon us as much as we act upon them. Marielle Macé restores to poets the freshness of their endeavor, ...
Jean Rouch discovered the rituals of possession among the Songhai populations of Niger when he was a colonial public-works engineer before quitting that job to devote his life to research. He began filming in order to document ceremonies during which things are “activators of affects” for purposes of healing. Clara Pacquet notes the correspondences ...
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has helped to bring Giuseppe Arcimboldo out of the comfort zone wherein critics had treated him as an ahistorical painter. Kaufmann has contributed toward a critical revision of Arcimboldo’s oeuvre as a whole by placing it back within the context in which Arcimboldo lived and painted, including his connection with the ...