Bard Graduate Center, Exhibitions Department – förlag

In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The Anthropology of Expeditions draws together contributions from anthropologists and historians of science to explore the role of these journeys in natural history and anthropology between approximately 1890 and 1930. By examining collected materials as well as museum and archive records, the contributors to this volume shed light on the complex social life and intimate work practices of the researchers involved in these expeditions. At the same time, the contributors also demonstrate the methodological challenges and rewards of studying these legacies and provide new insights for the history of collecting, history of anthropology, and histories of expeditions. Offering fascinating insights into the nature of expeditions and the human relationships that shaped them, The Anthropology of Expeditions sets a new standard for the field.

The past forty years have seen the rise of the personal computer, a device that has enabled ordinary individuals to access a tool that had been exclusive to laboratories and corporate technology centers. During this time, computers have become smaller, faster, more powerful, and more complex. So much has happened with so many products, in fact, that we often take for granted the uniqueness of our experiences with different machines over time. The Interface Experience, which is a companion to an exhibition in the Focus Gallery of the Bard Graduate Center, surveys some of the landmark devices in the history of personal computing - including the Commodore 64, Apple Macintosh Plus, Palm Pilot Professional, and Microsoft Kinect - and helps us to better understand the historical shifts that have occurred with the design and material experience of each machine. With its spiral - bound design, reminiscent of early computer user manuals, and thorough consideration of the cultural moment represented by each device, The Interface Experience is a one-of-a-kind tour of modern computing technology.

How do works of art endure over time in the face of aging materials and changing interpretations of their meaning? How do decay, technological obsolescence, and the blending of old and new media affect what an artwork is and can become? And how can changeable artworks encourage us to rethink our assumptions of art as fixed and static? Revisions is a unique exploration of all of these questions. In this catalog, which accompanies an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center, Hanna B. Holling examines Zen for Film, also known as Fluxfilm no. 1, one of the most evocative works by Korean-American artist Nam June Paik. Created during the early 1960s, this piece consists of a several-minutes-long screening of blank film; as the film ages and wears in the projector, the viewer is confronted with a constantly evolving work. Because of this mutability, the project, as HA lling shows, undermines any assumption that art can be subject to a single interpretation. By focusing on a single artwork and unfolding the inspirations, transitions, and residues that have occurred in the course of that work's existence, Revisions offers an in-depth look at how materiality enhances visual knowledge.A fresh perspective on a piece with a rich history of display, this catalog invites interdisciplinary dialogue and asks precisely what-and when-an artwork might be.

In the late nineteenth century, the growing discipline of anthropology was both a powerful tool of colonial control and an ideological justification for it. As European empires and their commercial reach expanded, different populations became intertwined in relationships of exchange and power. Frontier Shores accompanies the exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery and draws from the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. Focusing on Oceania—the vast region encompassing Australia, New Zealand, and the tropical Pacific Islands—it examines crosscultural contact and the contest for power between indigenous and non-indigenous people.Many of Oceania’s peoples were perceived in mainstream European scientific thought as belonging to humanity’s lowest tiers. Although these notions have long since been discredited, Shawn C. Rowlands traces their impact on the development of anthropology, colonial policy, and national identity. Ultimately, Frontier Shores reveals important processes of “othering” and the difficult issue of manufacturing identity and authenticity.

In early twentieth-century Berlin, the museumsdebate was set into motion with Wilhelm von Bode's sweeping proposal to reorganize a group of the city's museums. Between 1907 and 1910, two particularly striking series of articles appeared in the journal Museumskunde: Journal for the Administration and Technology of Public and Private Collections. The first was a six-part essay by Otto Lauffer on history museums and the second was a ten-part piece by Oswald Richter regarding ethnographic museums, and both initiated a century of important dialogue.Presented together here as Collecting, Displaying, and Interpreting Material Culture, these first full English translations of the two book-length articles remain unequalled presentations about the different implications of art, historical, and ethnographic museums. They show how sophisticated the discussion of museums and museum display was in the early twentieth century, and how much could be gained from revisiting these reflections today. Accompanied with short commentaries by a group of museum professionals, these translations and associated commentaries allow for an intervention and intensification of the current level of debate about museums, one that will further invigorated by the opening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin in 2019.

Bringing together the work of over twenty international scholars from various disciplines, Cultural Histories of the Material World provides a substantial collection of works that explore materiality and material culture from a historical perspective. These scholars represent some of the most innovative voices in their respective fields, using historiographical lens to chronicle how the field of material culture has operated between multiple disciplines and has grown to prominence in the last two decades, both inside and beyond the academy. Essential reading for the study of material culture and including writing by Bill Brown, Nancy Troy, Horst Bredekamp, Ja&sacute Elsner, and Pamela H. Smith, this book builds on the recent proliferation of works that address materiality and offers unified collection of key perspectives on the material turn across the humanities.

Ritual and Capital is an expansive volume that collects an interdisciplinary range of voices and genres that reflect on ritual as a form of resistance against capitalism. The poems, essays, and artworks included in this anthology explore habits and practices formed to subvert, subsist, and survive under the repression of capital. These works explore the refuge in ritual, how ritual practices might endow objects with qualities that resist market values, the use of ritual in embodied practices of healing and care, and how ritual strengthens communities.The publication of Ritual and Capital is the culmination of a series of public readings organized by Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn, as part of their Spring 2016 Reading Room residency at the Bard Graduate Center. Copublished by the Bard Graduate Center and Wendy’s Subway, Ritual and Capital is the first title in the BGCX series, a publication series designed to expand time-based programming after the events themselves have ended. Springing from the generative spontaneity of conversation, performance, and hands-on engagement as their starting points, these experimental publishing projects will provide space for continued reflection and research in a form that is inclusive of a variety of artists and makers.

In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles—both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners.Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women’s lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women’s studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives.

A volume considering questions of conservation that arise with new artistic mediums and practices.Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms—such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components—that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved.  This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.

Considers the future of conservation and its connection to the human sciences. This volume brings together the findings from a five-year research project that seeks to reimagine the relationship between conservation knowledge and the humanistic study of the material world. The project, “Cultures of Conservation,” was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and included events, seminars, and an artist-in-residence. The effort to conserve things amid change is part of the human struggle with the nature of matter. For as long as people have made things and kept things, they have also cared for and repaired them. Today, conservators use a variety of tools and categories developed over the last one hundred and fifty years to do this work, but in the coming decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. Looking ahead to this moment from the perspectives of history, philosophy, materials science, and anthropology, this volume explores new possibilities for both conservation and the humanities in the rethinking of active matter.

A first of its kind exploration of early modern European culinary history.Staging the Table in Europe represents the first book-length study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illustrated handbooks for cooking and dining that provided instruction for nearly every element of the dining experience, from expertly carving meats and fruits to folding napkins into animal forms, performing tableside magic tricks, and creating tablescapes for courtly banquets. Deborah L. Krohn opens a window into a world of culinary spectacle and sheds light on what became a pan-European culture of elaborate performance surrounding the preparation and presentation of food.Krohn shows that the rise of instructional manuals followed the decline of formalized, in-person modes of craft education, such as guilds and familial instruction. More broadly, she demonstrates how these manuals illuminate the material and social worlds of their readers. Beautifully illustrated, Staging the Table in Europe reveals the rich material culture that accompanied lavish banquets and state events as well as everyday dining, enabling readers to imagine the tastes, smells, and sights of Europe’s early modern culinary world.

Thought-provoking discussions on conservation from various points of view.What is Conservation? is an unconventional introduction to the topic of conservation in all its forms, facilitated through discussions with MacArthur Fellows. The discussions took place in New York in the Spring of 2022 alongside an exhibition at Bard Graduate Center called "Conserving Active Matter.” This volume seeks to acquaint readers who are new to the subject by presenting it in its broadest sense, while also focusing on its greatest significance as described by MacArthur Fellows. It touches on aspects of conservation through the lenses of art, science, literature, poetry, humanism, and more. It also features photographs from the accompanying exhibition.

This volume charts alternative courses through history via the physical conditions and artisanal ecologies in which cultural artifacts were created in Europe from roughly 1400 to 1700.Maker Space: Creative Environments in Early Modern Europe asks how spatial considerations initiated, supported, and thwarted creative activities and highlights points of intersection and overlap across practices that we otherwise tend to think of as separate. Scholars have long had an interest in, for instance, the workshop, laboratory, studiolo, or Kunstkammer as distinct places of production—named coordinates that situate social and technical actions in a defined context. The essays in this volume use the less fixed notion of space to break open such typologies, emphasizing the fluid, improvisational, and idiosyncratic aspects of creative work. They demonstrate how the ever-shifting array of tools, materials, environmental conditions, and bodies involved in artisanal production redirects our attention to the shared conditions that unite various enterprises of intellection, imagination, experimentation, and making.The book comprises a series of short case studies and extended meditations on particular sites where the work of the mind and hand coincided, from mines, arsenals, theaters, and imagined hermitages to tailors’ shops, artists’ workshops, the home, and even the space of a chemist’s notebook. This format of short and long essays animates the story of early modern making and thinking practices at various scales. The specifics of these case studies move us away from either totalizing or categorical views that would gloss over the fluid, messy, and insistently material conditions of daily work—that is, the raw material of history. These essays also suggest fundamental shared concerns—from environmental and moral control to the conditions necessary for the mental demands of making—that supersede distinct makers or creative practices.

Highlights ways of thinking and doing that connect philosophical generality to socio-material idiosyncrasy, encouraging care for all types of objects, from famous works of art to items like plastic bags. What Are Objects? opens with an object biography, composed in the form of an interview between the concept and author, in a playful attempt at “object whispering.” From there, Ann-Sophie Lehmann presents five object biographies that explore the life of flax—a material intertwined with human history, particularly storytelling. A third essay connects Richard Tuttle’s collection of everyday things, Hannah Arendt’s ecological philosophy, and an object taxonomy developed by the early modern inventor Christoph Weigel to explore the philosophical dimensions and potential effects of object biographical thinking.This BGCX title grew from visits to Bard Graduate Center, particularly in response to the exhibition Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object?, while Lehmann was a fellow and lecturer in 2021–22.

New modes of displaying and viewing African art and material culture.At the heart of SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa is a design-focused question of how to present historical and contemporary works alongside one another. Through the use of a long wall designed by the architectural firm AD–WO for the 2023 exhibition, Bard Graduate Center invited visitors and interlocutors to engage with African art in a variety of ways.As part of the exhibition, the department of public humanities and research at BGC worked with curator Drew Thompson to craft a vigorous and lively series of public programs, inviting guests to create their own sightlines. Participants mary adeogun, JJJJJerome Ellis, Jessica Lynne, Annissa Malvoisin, Maaza Mengiste, and Okwui Okpokwasili offered their vantage points, illuminating various aesthetic, functional, and symbolic uses of the metalworks on view, and highlighting the modes of historical analysis and storytelling behind the contemporary works.This book gathers those sightlines with photographs of the exhibition installation and other illustrations selected by the authors. An introductory essay by curator Thompson grapples with current debates on the display of historical and contemporary art of Africa and the Black diaspora. Exhibition designers and curatorial advisers Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood present a visual essay on the inspiration for and the ideas behind their long-wall display. The book also features an interview between Admassu, Thompson, and Wood.SIGHTLINES marks a different approach to scholarship around exhibitions in two immediate ways. First, it showcases how visitors engaged with the exhibition through its design and display of objects. Second, it provides an opportunity to highlight the kinds of research and cultural insights that a collaborative and design-focused curatorial approach provides. The publication is the first Bard Graduate Center book to explore the visual and material culture of Africa and the Black diaspora, delving into the history of the metalworks as well as larger debates on collecting practices, museum display, gallery education, and provenance.

A reconstruction of the first exhibition of world art history in Germany, organized by the historian Karl Lamprecht in 1914.By the standards of its day, the exhibition of world art history was an extraordinarily cosmopolitan and comparative project, yet it also had a political agenda. Karl Lamprecht studied and presented works of visual art as records of the psychological development of entire cultures—a development which, he believed, followed the same pattern as the mental growth of a child. Juxtaposing mature works of art with children’s drawings from around the globe, his exhibition deployed new ways of thinking about historical times to infantilize colonial subjects as perpetual pupils and dependents.This book examines for the first time how Lamprecht’s public exhibition and academic research on art jointly contributed not only to colonial representations but also to concrete designs for domination. Situating this watershed 1914 exhibition within the wider context of German historical scholarship, scientific racism, and international politics on the eve of the First World War, the book revises the genealogy of “global art history” while intervening in contemporary debates around Eurocentrism, the universal museum, and Germany’s colonial past.

This exploration of Jewish identity in Ancient Asia Minor sheds light on a unique community and offers a valuable contribution to the canon of Jewish studies. This book explores the benefits and pitfalls of writing about an archaeologically rich but literarily poor topic. The results of this inquiry are strongly revisionist: the Jews in ancient Asia Minor, or Anatolia, are shown to have been far from the perfect balance of integration in their host cities and self-preservation that scholars have long ascribed to them. Rather, the Jews experienced conflict and poverty, struggling to carve out a place for themselves in the Greek cities of Asia. Jewish communal institutions played little role before late antiquity, but Jews sometimes achieved a diffuse sense of community through trade guild membership and participation in theatrical events. Surprisingly, many of them actually expressed pride in their Roman identities, but rarely––or never––their local civic identities. Even during the Jews’ brief period of prosperity and heightened civic engagement, circa 400 CE, their lives were characterized by strong localism, featuring many elements that distinguish them sharply from Jews elsewhere in the Roman Empire. Tackling a history shrouded in myth and fiction, The Jews of Asia Minor reconciles literary and archaeological evidence to create a detailed analysis of the evolving history of Jews in Asia Minor under Roman law.

Highlights the long-understudied history of free Black communities in the United States.This volume makes a unique contribution to a growing body of scholarship bringing forgotten free Black communities back into public memory and expanding views of Black history. Each of the book’s nine chapters presents a different historical-archaeological study of a community on the East Coast to the Midwest in environments ranging from rural to urban. The authors share what their investigations into material traces and documents have uncovered about the experiences, accomplishments, and struggles of people who were self-emancipated, manumitted, or born into freedom. Among the topics covered are inter- and intra-community relations, land ownership, place-making, landscapes, cemeteries and burials, private life and interiors, work, health, imagination, and material and spiritual strategies used to cultivate individuals, families, and communities. The authors’ innovative approaches, combined with the affective power of sites and artifacts, illuminate creative and resourceful efforts to establish thriving Black communities, whose members often had different biographies, views, and economic statuses. At the same time, each chapter pays close attention to the external barriers, including prejudice and violence, that aimed to limit the freedom of Black Americans and that made their experiences of freedom different from those of white Americans.

Bringing together innovative contributions from archaeology, anthropology, and material culture studies, this volume reframes objects as active participants in shaping the future. From ancient technologies to ritual assemblages and global networks, each chapter shows how things orient human action toward possibilities not yet realized. Drawing on case studies that range from ancient Rome to pastoral Eurasia, the contributors foreground the material and relational foundations of creative action, bringing close contextual analysis into dialogue with recent work in new materialism, distributed creativity, and possibility studies. Finding the Future in the Past shows that archaeology can recover not just what was, but also what might become—and, in turn, reopen our sense of what might still be possible.

Derived from Latin ex voto suscepto "in pursuance of a vow," an ex voto embodies the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of the person who deposits it. Almost anything, regardless of size, weight, form, or original function, can become a votive object. Ultimately, the category refers to a subset of the material world in which a thing is not necessarily made to be a votive, but instead becomes charged with votive meaning once dedicated to a deity or deities. This volume, one of the first collections devoted exclusively to the subject, builds on the assumption that a shared conceptual framework underpins votive objects, and that by merit of their consecration they have become a category representing a special stage in the life of a material. The contributors to this comparative study examine ex votos across a range of locations and time periods, including the classical Mediterranean world, medieval Europe, the period of the Catholic Reform, and on to Mexico, Shinto and Buddhist Japan, and Muslim Iran. Voluminous and diverse, Ex Voto will appeal in a wide range of fields, including history, religion, and anthropology.

History is usually thought of as a tale of time, a string of events flowing in a particular chronological order. But as Karl SchlOgel shows in this groundbreaking book, the where of history is just as important as the when. SchlOgel relishes space the way a writer relishes a good story: on a quest for a type of history that takes full account of place, he explores everything from landscapes to cities, maps to railway timetables. Do you know the origin of the name "Everest"? What can the layout of towns tell us about the American Dream? In Space We Read Time reveals this and much, much more. Here is both a model for thinking about history within physical space and a stimulating history of thought about space, as SchlOgel reads historical periods and events within the context of their geographical location. Discussions range from the history of geography in France to what a town directory from 1930s Berlin can say about professional trades that have since disappeared. He takes a special interest in maps, which can serve many purposes one poignant example being the German Jewish community's 1938 atlas of emigration, which showed the few remaining possibilities for escape.Other topics include Thomas Jefferson's map of the United States; the British survey of India; and the multiple cartographers with Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, where the aim was to redraw Europe's boundaries on the basis of ethnicity. Moving deftly from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to 9/11 and from Vermeer's paintings to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this intriguing book presents history from a completely new perspective.

Today, China's classical antiquity is often studied through recovered artifacts, but before this practice became widespread, scholars instead reconstructed the distant past through classical texts and transmitted illustrations. Among the most important illustrated commentaries was the Sanli tu, or Illustrations to the Ritual Classics, whose origins are said to date back to the great commentator Zheng Xuan. Design by the Book, which accompanies an exhibition at Bard Graduate Center Gallery, discusses the history and cultural significance of the Sanli tu in medieval China. The Sanli tu survives in a version produced around 960 by Nie Chongyi, a professor at the court of the Later Zhou (951 960) and Northern Song (960 1127) dynasties. It is now mostly remembered if at all for its controversial entries and as a quaint predecessor of the more empirical antiquarian scholarship produced since the mid-eleventh century. But such criticism hides the fact that the book remained a standard resource for more than 150 years, playing a crucial role in the Song dynasty's perception of ancient ritual and construction of a Confucian state cult.Richly illustrated, Design by the Book brings renewed focus to one of China's most fascinating medieval works.

Although craftspeople and artists often work with natural materials, the notion that making art can constitute a means of knowing nature is a novel one. This book, with contributions from historians of science, medicine, art, and material culture, shows that the histories of science and art are not simply histories of concepts or styles, but histories of the making and using of objects to understand the world. An examination of material practices makes it clear that the methods of the artisan represent a process of knowledge making that involves extensive experimentation and observation that parallel similar processes in the sciences. Ways of Making and Knowing offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of the ways in which human beings have sought out, discovered, and preserved their own knowledge of the world around them; it has only been through material and human interaction with (and manipulation of) nature that we have come to understand it.

The transition from roll to codex as the standard format of the book is one of the most culturally significant innovations of Late Antiquity. The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity examines surviving evidence in order to better understand how this transition took place. Placing the codex into the general cultural, religious, and technological context of Late Antiquity, the book examines the major types of codices the wooden tablet codex, the single-quire codex and the multi-quire codex in all their structural, technical, and decorative features. Georgios Boudalis argues that the codex was not an ingenious invention but rather an innovation that evolved using techniques already widely employed by artisans and craftspeople in the creation of everyday items such as socks, shoes, and baskets, revealing that the codex was a fascinating, yet practical, development.

Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were pioneers in using visual anthropological techniques to study the aesthetics of bodily motion in Bali. What is less well known is that they also collected textiles, paintings, puppets, and carvings, most of which are collected at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This book, and its accompanying exhibit, explores the Mead-Bateson textiles as forms of power. Some textiles in the exhibit are valued for their magical powers derived from techniques of fabrication and contexts of use; other cloths are important for the stories that surround them as records of a period in Balinese history. An added layer of meaning is introduced as these fabrics are curated and exhibited in Western countries. This book explores how the "power" of Balinese textiles depends upon the efficacies attributed to these objects as they journey from fabrication and ritual use in their native context to curation and display in the West.