Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Immaterial Culture? Things, Artefacts and Meanings
Convenors:
Deborah Sugg Ryan, Loughborough University D.S.Ryan@lboro.ac.uk
Timo de Rijk, Delft University of Technology T.R.A.deRijk@IO.TUDelft.nl
In 1977 the Design History Society was formed as a separate entity to the Association of Art Historians. Its thirtieth anniversary offers a timely opportunity to review the boundary between design history and art history in both methodology and subject matter. In particular, what do current preoccupations of what might be called the ‘new design history’ have to offer art historians?
Much early design history was concerned with the ‘designed’ and mass produced object. However, since the translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) and Daniel Miller’s Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1986), design historians have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which material culture mediates and forms personal identities. The impetus for this paradigm shift came from feminist, political and post-modern scholars who challenged both the modernist canon of design artefacts and the methodologies of modernist design history to explore the non-designed and the amateur. Design historians have borrowed from social anthropology and ethnography to investigate the aesthetics of everyday life, especially mass consumption practices. Judy Attfield more recently raised the possibility of ‘things with attitude’ in Wild Things (2000). Furthermore, new possibilities are opened up by the historian of science Bruno Latour who has suggested in Reassembling the Social (2005) that ‘objects too have agency’. Yet despite its prominence in design history, the material remains largely immaterial for art historians.
This session investigates the meanings of things represented in artefacts. It considers artefacts produced by artists and designers as material things rather than simply conveyors of visual images. It asks how does the materiality of artefacts contribute to their meanings? What effect does the life of artefacts – as things – have on their meaning? And how are artefacts used to construct individual and group identities? It includes contributions from practitioners who are dealing with these issues in their work.
The session is dedicated to the memory of Judy Attfield (d. 2006) who was a key player in the establishment of the ‘new design history’.
Speakers:
Katie Brandon (University of Manchester, UK)
Spinning Yarns: Women and Artists’ Books in the Home
Catherine Harper (University College for the Creative Arts, Epsom, UK)
Double Dresses: a narrative of a dress in a Civil Partnership
Janice Helland (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada)
Anatomy of a Dress: Embroidery, Display and Meaning, 1886–1907
Jan Konings (freelance designer, Netherlands)
‘YOU: You are designers and I am your co-creator’
Ed Krcma (University College London, UK)
Liquidity: Beuys, Drawing and ‘Material Imagination’
Grace McQuilten (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Living in a material world: Adam Kalkin’s Suburban House Kit, Deitch Projects, New York, 2004
Donna Roberts (University of Essex, UK)
František Skála: materiality and memory in post-revolutionary Czech art
Damian Sutton (Glasgow School of Art, UK)
Form Follows Fiction – Designing Fred and Ginger
Damon Taylor (Buckingham Chilterns University)
The Amazing Reappearing Art Object [performance]
Gareth Williams (Victoria & Albert Museum, UK)
Paradigms and archetypes: contemporary Dutch designers