Editors’ Introduction

Kirkham, Pat; Weber, Susan

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Editors’ Introduction

Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)

History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400–2000

~This book began with the idea of producing a series of introductory texts for students entering the Bard Graduate Center. We were expanding and reshaping our year-long “Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design and Material Culture: The Ancient World to the Present” (required of all entering MA students) in order to reflect the greater plurality of...

Author

Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)

PublisherBard Graduate Center

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20617

Editors’ Introduction

This book began with the idea of producing a series of introductory texts for students entering the Bard Graduate Center. We were expanding and reshaping our year-long “Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design and Material Culture: The Ancient World to the Present” (required of all entering MA students) in order to reflect the greater plurality of approaches that inform the BGC’s work and reinforce its ambition to be the leading study center for the cultural history of the material world.

This project represents both a new direction for the BGC and a reaffirmation of the ideals that brought the institution into being. It was founded to address a gap in university curriculums in the United States which placed the decorative arts (sometimes referred to as the applied arts), if they considered them at all, within the contexts of art history and architectural history, while seeing them as secondary to the fine arts. The many rich and compelling histories offered by studies in decorative arts, design, and material culture stand at the heart of the BGC curriculum, and we hope that this publication will play its part in raising the profile of such studies.

The lack of a broadly based “textbook” or “survey book” on the model of those in other educational fields has often been commented upon, especially by students. Our intention is for this book to provide a platform on which to construct broad geo-cultural introductions to the study of decorative arts, design, and material culture at graduate and undergraduate levels, and to help familiarize students with a wide range of objects, contexts, materials, and techniques, as well as approaches and issues. We are not seeking to establish canons, but rather to give frameworks, encourage discussion, and point to fertile areas for further study and research. The book’s title invokes “History,” but there are many histories, and we envision the ones told herein taking their place alongside existing and future ones.

The diverse voices that shine through the chapters that follow indicate something of the variety of approaches between and within particular academic disciplines. Various approaches to the study of objects are evident. Some, for example, are associated with the academic disciplines of Art History and Architectural History, others with Anthropology, but all are informed by the various shifts within the discipline of History to include wider ranges of people, events, movements, and ideas than had previously been considered worthy of serious examination. Sometimes referred to as “history from below,” this perspective challenged traditional hierarchies. In some circles, even the term “decorative arts” came under attack, in part because some curators and scholars focused so greatly upon elite objects that everything else seemed marginalized. As they emerged in the 1970s, two new disciplines—Design History and Material Culture Studies—both of which addressed the intersections between objects and culture and embraced sociological, ethnographic, and anthropological approaches to objects, neatly sidestepped accusations of elitism and marginalization while broadening the questions asked of objects, their appearance, production, and consumption. They also accommodated a wider range of objects—such as clothing, graphics, interiors, gardens, and theater and film design—not traditionally considered within the purview of the decorative arts. In the years since we began the project, the fields of study have further expanded, with a renewed interest in inter- and cross-disciplinarity. Post-disciplinary approaches to scholarship have also grown significantly. Art History and Architectural History have become more welcoming of Design History, Material Culture Studies, and “object studies” approaches. Many historians, philosophers, sociologists, literary scholars, and others now take greater notice of materiality, and this book, by its scope at least, contributes to current concerns for international, transnational, and global histories.

One of our challenges was to identify expert and adventurous scholars willing to write across broad swathes of time and place, including some relatively new areas of study. In some of the latter, such as the Americas, we felt that the material was best served by scholars working in teams. From the outset, we encouraged authors to address continuities as well as changes, in part to transcend Modernist narratives of innovation but also to stress the deep immersion of objects and ideas in broader cultural, ideological, socio-economic, and political contexts. Our contributors have been attentive to the ways design and the decorative arts enriched daily life, as well as to special ceremonies and rituals. Readers are encouraged to think about how prevailing ideas, tastes, technologies, materials, and traditions shaped the ways things looked and how they were fabricated, thought about, and used. The chapters that follow raise questions about hierarchies of value, relationships between “high” and “low” culture, the intersection of objects with notions of race, class, status, and gender, as well as personal, regional, and national identities. When read together, the chapters presented here encourage attention to wide-ranging issues of manufacture, patronage, consumption, reception, cross-cultural appropriation, and cross fertilization.

Collaboration has been central to this project; indeed, all scholarship, especially surveys, builds upon what has gone before. We and all of our contributors remain deeply grateful to the teachers, peers, and students, both past and present, on whose research and ideas we have drawn and to whom we owe so much. We thank all the generations of scholars whose pioneering efforts in little-trodden, nontraditional, and sometimes unorthodox fields have made a project such as this not just thinkable but doable. It is only because of those who came before that we can offer this contribution to a burgeoning field of historical inquiry. If this project has taught us one thing, it is that we are all students with a great deal more to learn. We hope this book takes you, and us, some distance toward where we want to go.

Pat Kirkham, BGC Professor, Project Director, and Editor

Susan Weber, BGC Founder and Director, Professor, and Editor

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