The Bard Graduate Center has announced the schedule for its 2012-2013 Seminar and Lecture Series. The series feature museum professionals and academics from a range of disciplines including english, history, art and gender studies. Each session offers insight into the methods and approaches to studying the cultural history of the material world.
The first event is the Beyond Representation: an Interdisciplinary Approach to the Nature of Things symposium on Thursday, September 27, 2012.
The past two decades have been marked by a renewed concern with the agency, presence, and ontological status of crafted things, witnessed in a shift of interest across several fields from questions of iconography and meaning to questions of affect and efficacy. These developments call into question some of the binary oppositions that are foundational to the epistemologies and ontologies of Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment) thought: animate-inanimate, subject-object, material-meaning, and so forth. They raise significant questions about the nature and operation of things in the world, their materiality, their ability to act or inspire action, and their relation to speech, texts, and words. Acknowledging the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the profound questions raised by these developments, the conference aims to examine the historical antecedents for these ‘new’ ways of thinking about the material world, to consider their implications, and to imagine the ways in which they might help us develop novel approaches to images, things, and words.
October lecturers include: Joan-Pau Rubiés, Ethnographic Images in the Late Renaissance, East and West, on October 10; Christine Göttler, Constructing a Global Interior: The Imagery of Collections and Collecting in Seventeenth- Century Flemish Art, on October 17; Yves Porter, Potters of Kâshân (Late 12th–Early 14th c.), on October 23; Zhao Feng, Silks from West and East: The Textiles From Tomb TAM170, Astana, Turfan, Xinjiang, on October 24; and Daniel Harkett, The Studio and the Salon: Artists, Masculinity, and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century, on October 30.