Share: Twitter | Facebook

The past two decades have been marked by a renewed concern with the agency, presence, and ontological status of crafted things, witnessed in a shift of interest across several fields from questions of iconography and meaning to questions of affect and efficacy. These developments call into question some of the binary oppositions that are foundational to the epistemologies and ontologies of Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment) thought: animate-inanimate, subject-object, material-meaning, and so forth. They raise significant questions about the nature and operation of things in the world, their materiality, their ability to act or inspire action, and their relation to speech, texts, and words. Acknowledging the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the profound questions raised by these developments, the conference aims to examine the historical antecedents for these "new" ways of thinking about the material world, to consider their implications, and to imagine the ways in which they might help us develop novel approaches to images, things, and words.


1:30pm
Peter N. Miller (Bard Graduate Center)
Welcome

1:35pm
JaÅ› Elsner (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford); Finbarr B. Flood (Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences, New York University); and Ittai Weinryb (Bard Graduate Center)
Introduction

2:00pm
Hugh Raffles (The New School)
Writing Stones

2:45pm
David Frankfurter (Boston University)
Female Figurines in Late Antique Egypt – Problems and Revelations in Mimesis and Efficacy

4:00pm
Caroline van Eck (Leiden University)
Representation, Animation, and the Excessive Object

4:45pm
Richard Neer (University of Chicago)
Not Puzzling Enough: Gell, Art History and the Aesthetics of Disavowal

5:30pm
Zainab Bahrani (Columbia University)
Response

External Link »