Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Contesting Forms, Testing Functions: Dynamic Encounters between Sculpture, Decoration and Design
Convenor:
Martina Droth, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds martina@henry-moore.ac.uk
The category of ‘decorative art’ defies precise definition. As a term, it is descriptive rather than definitive, and implies a condition of art, instead of a distinct category of its own. It is often used interchangeably with ‘applied art’, ‘industrial art’ and ‘design’, even though each of these terms evokes a specific period and comes with its own unique associations. Inherently interdisciplinary, these practices cross fluidly into other, more easily defined categories of art, such as painting, sculpture and architecture. Yet when they are studied, catalogued or displayed, objects classed as decoration or design often assume an autonomy that contradicts their interdisciplinary nature. This session seeks to explore these divisions and intersections with specific reference to sculpture: when does an object count as sculpture, decoration or design? In turn, how are these definitions absorbed and reflected into art history and histories of decorative art and design? The papers in this session address these and related questions from a number of perspectives, revealing their different implications that highlight shifts and continuities in the historic interdisciplinary partnership that exists between sculpture, decorative art and design.
Speakers:
Emily Richardson (University College London)
Miniature ‘Grands Hommes’, or, paradoxical porcelains
David Raizman, Antoinette Westphal (College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University, Pennsylvania)
Dinner with Dante: Fine and Applied Art in Nineteenth-Century Presentation Furniture
Morna O’Neill (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven)
Between Painting and Sculpture: Walter Crane’s ‘Europa’ and the Origins of Decoration
Viola Weigel (Museum Bellerive/ICS, Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich)
Hermann Obrist’s ‘Parasitic’ Sculptures as Challenge for the Museum’s Institution and Modern Art History
Visa Immonen (University of Turku, Finland)
‘Capricious contours’: The scholarly tradition and its ways of transforming silver artifacts into objects of art