*first, do not miss Karl's post below, "SMITHS NERD," on the round-table in NYC yesterday on Carolyn Dinshaw's new book, How Soon is Now: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time
Dear, dear Material Collective: by the time you read this, most of the
ideas in these little papers will have moved on, become part of other
texts, or not. As works of medieval studies or art history, these essays
are incomplete, awkward, and provisional. Some of them may read, to
you, to us, like embarrassing teenage poetry. This collection is that
dusty box in the basement: it is full of raw, unedited, transparent
expressions of affect, of the sort we have learned to hide.
Dear Material Collective, this is a nostalgic love letter to our
present and future selves, a little bit of poetry from the past.
And
so concludes the Introduction ["Dear Material Collective"], written by
Maggie Williams and Karen Overbey, to the small volume, Transparent Things: A Cabinet, just published today by punctum books, comprising 4 essays by
Karen Overbey, Jennifer Borland, Angela Bennett Segler, and Nancy
Thompson, and originating in a panel organized (by Maggie Williams and
Rachel Dressler) for the 1st biennial meeting of BABEL in Austin, Texas in 2010, where the Material Collective,
a collaborative of art historians and visual cultural scholars looking
for alternative ways to think about objects, first began collectivizing.
The panel, and ensuing essays collected in this book, were first
inspired by a passage in Nabokov's novel Transparent Things:
When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
As Maggie and Karen write in their Introduction about that initial conference panel,
For us, as students of medieval material, these tensions between surface and depth, present and past, concentration and skimming are all too familiar. Nabokov vividly evokes the ways in which visual objects entice us with the promise of experiences -- emotional, visceral, mnemonic, intellectual, spiritual. The inherent contradictions of medieval objects, their irreducibility to either the purely intellectual or the merely physical, are at once the dangers and delights of our work. And so this panel offered a dialogue on the question of how our encounters with physical things spark a process and how objects might allow unique collisions between the past and present, the human and inanimate, the practice of history, and lived experience.
And
because this panel also presented a nascent moment for the Material
Collective, which is invested in lyric, spontaneous, and experimental
styles of scholarly writing, as well as a more transparent avowal of the
scholar's subject position in her research and writing, the essays in
this volume show each writer, "rather than repressing subjectivity and
desire," laying it "bare." Thus, in her essay, "Reflections on the
Surface, or, Notes for a Tantric Art History," Karen Overbey examines
the play between visibility and invisibility in a 13th-century True
Cross pendant reliquary, while also asking, "how might we transform our
desire for the object? . . . Loosing my grip on expectation. On
teleology. Experiencing the fullness of the present." And further, she
ruminates:
Desire. I'm thinking of our collective, disciplinary desire to historicize, to pin our material to moments and locales; to make objects into anchors and paperweights, keeping history from blowing around, from blowing away. To define, to defend, to bound. To put under glass. To make disappear the gap between sight and knowledge. To know, by sight. . . . Can we un-desire this?
In
her essay, "Encountering the Inauthenthic," Jennifer Borland
investigates how we negotiate our material objects of study and their
phenomenological effects when they aren't there at all, when they are
technically absent -- in an inaccessible place [such as the British
Library], distant from the classroom, or present only in "medievalistic"
reproductions and re-creations, such as the building of the Ozark
Medieval Fortress in Lead Hill, Arkansas [projected completion date:
2030], or by participating in a workshop on making manuscripts using
medieval materials and techniques. As Borland argues, first-hand
experience of these re-creations can be used, as Christopher Tilley has
also argued, "to gain access to the experience of other persons,"
including those who lived in the past who are seemingly forever cut off
from us. For Borland then, better understanding the past is partly a
lived, phenomenological, and shared experience that resides in the body
in "touch" with certain objects and processes of making objects. This
experience, of course, is also partly indescribable and words are not
always adequate to its "occasions," and Borland wonders if there might
be new scholarly-phenomenological modes, especially in the digital age,
that might allow us to "move beyond language," in order to better render
how the object serves as the "meeting place" various types of
encounters across time. In "Touched
for the Very First Time: Losing My Manuscript Virginity," Angela
Bennett-Segler describes, in the style of an exhibitionist, her first
"physical" encounter with medieval
manuscripts in the Bodleian Library,
where the touch of a codex "occupies the cohabitation of languages -- or
signifying economies -- in a side-by-side existence that is a condition
of the experience of jouissance," and where scholarly
objectivity is dissolved "into the anonymity of the particpatory
community" enclosed in medieval manuscripts. In "Close Encounters with
Luminous Objects: Reflections on Studying Stained Glass" [from which
essay we culled the image for the cover of the book], Nancy Thompson
asks how we can "translate" the often exhilarating first encounters with
medieval objects (such as stained-glass windows in medieval cathedrals)
into our more dryly-conceptalized scholarly apparatus, which often
seems to lead away from the objects that draw us to the study of art
history to begin with? How might we reckon with the metaphysical aspects
of studying art history: is this a spiritual exercise as much as a
scholarly-historical one?
It
was the feeling of the editors of this small volume that these 4 essays
-- provisional, personal, incomplete -- could likely not be published
elsewhere, for they are [supposedly] not really "scholarly" in a
conventional-enough way; and yet, it is their very questioning of
"proper" scholarly modes, and their confessional modes of address, as
well as their thoughtful investigation of alternative ways to approach
certain "objects" of study, that this volume is, indeed, philosophical
in the best scholarly sense. "Scholarly," because the authors are all
trained scholars of medieval culture, and the reflections contained here
form an important part of these objects' intellectual history, because
to "think" the object -- rigorously, historically,
culturally-materially, contextually, etc. -- also means to think its
place and agency [if we are concerned with honesty] in relation, not
only to its origins [wherever those may be], but also to the lived
habits of our thought and practice in the process of encountering the
object [again and again]. And this volume does a more than admirable job
of that very labor. This also means, as Karen Overbey argues in her
essay, that we might consider better what it means "to write the
histories of art objects [emphasis on the plural], rather than an art
history."
Go HERE to download the open-access volume and/or to purchase a print copy.
Go HERE to download the open-access volume and/or to purchase a print copy.
