This document provides an excerpt from a paper assignment asking students to analyze an object from the beginnings of civilization to 1800 CE. It provides 4 potential excerpts for students to respond to in their analysis. Students are asked to choose an object currently on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario or Royal Ontario Museum, include a clear thesis statement and reproduction of the object. The excerpts discuss the relationship between pictures, writing and marks in Greek; how vision is culturally constructed through social codes and discourse; the Eurocentric construction of art history; and how the desire for order shapes perceptions of the world.

1. Analysis of an object from the beginnings of civilization to the year 1800
CE
Analysis of an object from the beginnings of civilization to the year 1800 CESome important
details:1)The objective of this paper is to consider different approaches to the study of art
and design from the beginnings of civilization to the year 1800 CE. It asks you to critically
analyze an object and consider it within its broader social, political and cultural context.
Your paper will respond to one of the excerpts below using an object of your choice as the
focus.2)The object should be chosen from AGO or ROM museum that is currently on
display(2 museums in Toronto)3)The essay should include a clear and assertive thesis
statement at the begining of the essay, and include a reproduction or rendering for your
object along with complete information.4)The excerpts are:1. ?In a sense the indissoluble
unity of graphic and linguistic marks is already there in the Greek word gramma, meaning
picture, written letter, or piece of writing. In Greek graphein means to write, draw, or
scratch, and so the word enlarges the association of picture with writing by bringing in
engraving and opening the field to marks of all sorts: hard chisel marks, glyptic impressions
in wax, the impressions of tokens on clay containers. And if we go deeper into the history of
language, then gramma and graphein come in turn from the Indo-European root *gerebh?,
which is the Western world?s most general lexeme for writing, drawing, scratching, and
marking of all sorts. The Greek words and their putative Indo?European origin reflect a
Near Eastern practice [defined by] a confluence of pictures, writing, notation, and sculpture
that served economic purposes. (It is implicit in Denise Schmandt-Besserat?s explorations
of ancient MiIDle Eastern clay tokens that the origins of numbers, pictures, and writing
cannot be disentangled.) Those connections are the bare outlines of a broader notion of the
image that was once the normal state of affairs, and now has been largely forgotten.? James
Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998),p. 188.2. ?When I look, what I see is not simply light but intelligible form: the rays of
light are caught in?a network of meanings?For human beings collectively to orchestrate
their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience
to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world?Between the subject and the
world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural
construct, and makes visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual
experience?when I learn to see socially, that is, when I begin to articulate my retinal
experience with codes of recognition that come to me from my social milieu(s), I am

2. inserted into systems of visual discourse that saw the world before I did, and will go on
seeing after no longer see?It may?be that I always feel myself to live at the center of my
vision?but?that vision is decentered by the network of signifiers that come to me from the
social milieu.? Norman Bryson, ?The Gaze in the Expanded Field,? in Hal Foster, ed., Vision
and Visuality (Seattle, WA: Bay View Press/Dia Art Foundation, 1988), pp. 91-94.3. ?From a
Eurocentric perspective, art history came to be constructed and construed as a universal
empirical science, systematically discovering, classifying, analyzing, and interpreting
specimens of what came thereby to be naturalized as a ?universal? human phenomenon. It
was devoted to investigating the ?natural? artisanry or ?art? of all peoples, or rather of all
those peoples and cultures invented by art historians?[From this perspective it was
believed that] all specimens of art in this vast and unsurpassable archive sit as if they were
delegates or ?representatives??that is, as representations?in a congress of imaginary equals,
as the myriad of manifestations making up a ?Universal World History of Art.? ?There was
no ?outside? to all of this: all alien objects were ranked as primitive, exotic, charming, or
fascinating distortions of a central classical (European) canon or standard?? Donald
Preziosi, ?Performing Modernity: The Art of Art History,? in Amelia Jones and Andrew
Stephenson, eds., Performing the Body/Performing the Text (London: Routledge, 2005) pp.
27-28.4. ?Left to its own devices, unlit by the spotlights of the story and before the first
fitting session with the designers, the world is neither orderly nor chaotic, neither clean nor
dirty. It is human design that conjures up disorder together with the vision of order, dirt
together with the project of purity. The thought trims the image of the world first, so that
the world itself can be trimmed right after. Once the image has been trimmed, the trimming
of the world (the desire to trim it, the effort to trim it?though not necessarily the feat of the
trimming accomplished) are a foregone conclusion. The world is manageable and demands
to be managed, in as far as it has been remade to the measure of human comprehension.
Francis Bacon?s injunction ?Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed? was not an
intimation of humility and less a counsel of meekness. It was an act of defiance.?? Zygmunt
Bauman, ?In the Beginning was Design or the Waste of Order-Building,? in Hazel Clark and
David Brody, eds., Design Studies: A Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2009), p. 167.