In this class we consider another episode from the history of modern graphic design.

1. Module 9.2
material culture
A r t 1 0 0
U n d e r s t a n d i n g V i s u a l C u l t u r e

2. Olivetti ad
featuring Dante,
1912

14. what is material culture?
Understanding human history through things that humans
have made.
Discipline of history—tends to use texts to reconstruct what
happened.
Discipline of art history—tends to use visual imagery to
reconstruct what happened
Interdiscipline of material culture—tends to use objects to
reconstruct what happened. In this way, it is closest to the
formal discipline of archaeology, except, it is not only
excavating the distant past.

15. how broad is the definition?
rather broad!
material culture could include anything from:
high-fashion clothing to the simplest t-shirt or sock
one-of-kind objects made by craftspeople or designers to
mass-produced toothbrushes or dogbowls or toasters
technological and mechanical objects
parts of buildings and architectural elements

16. corbel: decorative bracket

17. Spiral Staircase, The Rookery Building, Burnham & Root, 1888

18. Why do we need
material culture?
Jules Prown, “Mind in
Matter,” (1982), p. 1
“ALTHOUGH ART
MUSEUMS, historical
societies, museums of
history and technology,
historic houses, open-air
museums, and museums of
ethnography, science, and
even natural history, have
long collected, studied, and
exhibited the material of
what has come to be called
material culture, no
comprehensive academic
philosophy or discipline for
the investigation of material
culture has as yet been
developed.”

19. Olivetti, Lettera 22, 1950

20. Krannert Art Museum Addition,
University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign, 1985

21. The First Floor
Education Director Anne Sautman
leading a gallery discussion

22. The Basement
Louis Sullivan, Elevator Gate from
The Chicago Stock Exchange
Building, 1894,
Cast-iron with bronze plating

24. How do we define
material culture?
Jules Prown, “Mind in
Matter,” (1982), p. 1
“Material culture is the
study through artifacts of
the beliefs —values,
ideas, attitudes, and
assumptions—of a
particular community or
society at a given time.
The term material culture
is also frequently used to
refer to artifacts
themselves, to the body
of material available for
such study. I shall restrict
the term to mean the
study and refer to the
evidence simply as
material or artifacts.”

25. What is an artifact?
Ordinary old pebble
Pebble tools, Olduvai Gorge,
Tanzania, 1.8 million years ago

26. artifact
a usually simple object (as a
tool or ornament) that shows
evidence of human
modification or
workmanship, as distinct
from a naturally occurring
thing

27. Piece of obsidian (volcanic
glass)

28. Obsidian tools
Properties of the material are
enhanced by human intervention

29. Are these naturally-occurring
things, or artifacts?

30. Why bother with objects?
Wouldn’t words and deeds be
more revealing of culture?
Jules Prown
“Mind in Matter”
(1982)
p. 3
Why should one bother to
investigate material objects
in the quest for culture, for
a society's systems of
belief? Surely people in all
societies express and have
expressed their beliefs
more explicitly and openly
in their words and deeds
than in the things they have
made. Are there aspects of
mind to be discovered in
objects that differ from,
complement, supplement,
or contradict what can be
learned from more
traditional literary and
behavioral sources?

31. What could be culturally
revealing about the study of
objects?
Objects survive and provide direct and tangible evidence
of the past. This allows us to “experience” the past
through empathetic engagement of our senses.

32. What doors might
the study of
objects open?
Jules Prown, “Mind in
Matter,” (1982), p. 5
"This affective mode of apprehension
through the senses that allows us to put
ourselves, figuratively speaking, inside
the skins of individuals who
commissioned, made, used, or enjoyed
these objects, to see with their eyes and
touch with their hands, to identify with
them empathetically, is clearly a
different way of engaging the past than
abstractly through the written word.
Instead of our minds making intellectual
contact with minds of the past, our
senses make affective contact with
senses of past.”
—Arnold Hauser, Sociology of Art

33. What could be culturally
revealing about the study of
objects?
Objects might be more representative of what people in a
society are doing, thinking and feeling than words are.

34. Jules Prown
“Mind in Matter”
(1982)
p. 3
Henry Glassie has observed that only
a small percentage of the world's
population is and has been literate,
and that the people who write
literature or keep diaries are atypical.
Objects are used by a much broader
cross section of the population and
are therefore potentially a more wide-
ranging, more representative source
of information than words.

35. What are the limitations of
studying objects?
“The theoretical democratic advantage of artifacts in general,
and vernacular material in particular, is partially offset by
the skewed nature of what in fact survives from an earlier
culture. A primary factor in this is the destructive, or the
preservative, effect of particular environments on
particular materials. Materials from the deeper recesses of
time are often buried, and recovered archaeologically. Of
the material heritage of such cultures, glass and ceramics
survive in relatively good condition, metal in poor to fair
condition, wood in the form of voids (postholes), and
clothing not at all (except for metallic threads, buttons, and
an odd clasp or hook).”

37. Have a great break! See you in 2 weeks!