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Image, Ornament, Matter: A Symposium on their Limits and Intersections in the History of Art
April 12, 2019 - April 13, 2019
April 12-13, 2019
Harn Museum of Art
Speakers:
Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University (Keynote)
Benjamin C. Tilghman, Washington College / The Material Collective
Megan McNamee, Warburg Institute
Meekyung MacMurdie, University of Chicago
Susanna McFadden, Bryn Mawr College
Irene Backus, Oklahoma State University
Ashley Jones, University of Florida
Recent attempts to re-situate the so-called “Minor Arts” at the center of the discipline of art history have both explored the historiography of the minor arts and re-framed the objects in question in terms of luxury, intimacy, portability, and phenomenology. But the terms of the minor arts’ restitution are the same as those of their exclusion—namely, material, scale, and function—the very qualities that focus attention on their non-mimetic aspects. More broadly, the discourse on ornament, freighted with philosophical and moral implications, has long occupied a troubled position in the history of western art. Derided as feminine and dismissed as superficial, ornament has been has been defined against the austerities of classical figuration and modern minimalism. Often associated with architecture, ornament serves to order both lived space and the planar surface of its support. Beyond the architectural, it shapes not only the fabric but also the very definition of the “minor” or “decorative” arts. Crossing boundaries of medium and culture, ornament exists in the spaces between. It resists decoding because it lies outside the view through the window of Renaissance pictorialism. But it is precisely by its liminality and abstraction that a consideration of ornament, in dialogue with both representation and materiality, can serve to broaden narratives of the history of art, not only geographically, but also philosophically. This symposium explores the fabrics and frameworks of art history by bringing together scholars exploring the limits and intersections of representation, abstraction, and materiality, in arts both minor and major, western and non-western.
For more information, please visit the HESCAH webpage.