Tools, Technology, and Making

          Our class is setting foot in a pottery studio in Old City Philadelphia to make our very own pottery! In some ways, this is a self-conscious exercise in creating something to help connect us to some of the material cultural theories we’ve discussed in the past month. The actual creation and manufacture of my own object, the Pennsylvania bicentennial license plate, is what intrigues me the most about its history. Who really owns it before, during, and after its production?

            Professor of furniture design David Pye offers a framework to help us understand two different kinds of craft and workmanship. Free workmanship is a type of production which Pye associates with risk. There is no predetermined end result, which accounts for the risk that is involved in achieving an imagined final product. This risk, according to Pye, does not exist in regulated workmanship. This is one in which the final result is predetermined and cannot be altered once the process of production is set in motion. Pye also thinks about the idea of quality – things of “best” quality are more expensive in comparison to something of “ordinary quality” (Pye 348). This makes me think of its value, a monetary one in the context in which Pye uses the phrase. I imagine that its value relates to its function – just how well does an object serve its intended purpose? And what cultural markers surround its production and public perception that makes a group determine something as valuable or not?

            Evgeny Morozov engages in a conversation about the changes in popular perceptions of “making things” over time. The Arts and Crafts movement, explains Morozov, died out by the end of World War I. It offered an attempt at fostering autonomy in industry, but as critiqued women’s advocate Mary Dennett, the worker has no freedom to toil on crafts, and she considered how this question surrounded around persistent issues of inequality. Morozov thinks about the reemergence of the “maker” movement in the 1960s through today. He argues that this movement serves as a democratizing effect in which people can sidestep a reliance on a larger capitalist system of mass production.

            These readings seem to emphasize human agency and the potential that “making” has on expressing choice and individuality. However, in the context of my object, I’m not sure that this necessarily applies at face value. I can’t help but think about Mary Dennett and her critique that mass production and the cost of human labor leaves no time for what Pye is describing as a workmanship of risk. I’ve begun preliminary research on the production of license plates, and I’ve found several newspaper articles that document that Pennsylvania did indeed have license plates manufactured in prisons around the time of the 1976 bicentennial. I cannot say for certain that my particular object was made in a prison, but it does make me contend with this possibility. How do I create a study that examines the agency of those who produced it, when seemingly, bodies are being used as labor to create an object that is largely used as a measure of civilian regulation, surveillance, and control? If in theory, choice is not an option for the makers, then what does it say about the chain of networks I’m trying to understand? I have more questions than answers at the moment, but Pye and Morozov have helped me to think about what can happen when choice and democratization might not necessarily define production.

           

                

Anthropological Approaches to Material Culture

“Don’t read what we have written; look at what we have done” (Deetz 260).

            Anthropologist James Deetz advises his readers to approach the past from a different kind of historical record. Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (1977) reconstructs what we think we know about early American settlements in New England and Virginia by using archaeology to show the relationship between objects and the culture to which they belonged. He looks at several different objects including ceramics to tap into changes in dietary habits in early America; New England gravestones that tell us about the shift from communal Puritan ideology to an emphasis on the individual as a result of the Age of Reason and; housing structures and how they conveyed changes in social structure over time. As Deetz substantiates how objects can tell us about larger cultural functions, he takes great care to make several important points. Most importantly, Deetz addresses his contemporaries by reinforcing the definition of historical archaeology. A relatively new field for his time, Deetz makes his case for its usefulness by going to great lengths to distinguish it from prehistoric archaeology so as to make it its own subfield. He explains that historical archaeology helps to uncover “stuff” that textual evidence is silent on, especially historically marginalized groups. We’ve talked about this quite a bit in class, but Deetz shows us how objects help to uncover some of those silences created in the historical record, but also perpetuated by historians. 

            This is best exemplified in his chapters on excavating information about the African-American past. He traces the history of Cato Howe, who was freed from slavery after his military service in the Revolutionary War. The excavation of the community of Parting Ways helped to shed light on Cato’s life and others. Deetz concludes this chapter by explaining that a culturally relativistic approach is necessary to understanding Parting Ways because an Anglo-American cultural context does not explain Cato and the African-Americans who lived outside of that context.

            This important tenet of anthropological study is explored in Grey Gundaker’s “Tradition and Innovation in African-American Yards.” Gundaker employs an anthropological perspective as he asks questions about the types of meanings that African-American yards convey. Gundaker explores spatial relationships, organizing principles, and variations in themes as a way to make sense of these types of meanings of the objects displayed in the yards he studies. He writes about the objects in yards as having a “vernacular language” and a “flexible visual vocabulary” (Gundaker 59). Deetz likewise explains the idea that objects all have a grammar that governs them, “a set of rules for the creation of artifacts mutually accepted by the members of the culture producing them” (Deetz 154).

            An anthropological approach to understanding my own object is helpful, though challenging when I have rarely applied it in my own approach to history. However, archaeology helps me to think about provenance. Where, how, and why was the license plate found? Anthropology serves as a tool to listen to the language and vocabulary that the license plate communicates. Maybe this is in the structure, or the function, or understanding how it communicates with other license plates or even complementary objects of identification. Employing these methods is a gateway to reaching Deetz’s point that objects speak, too. 

Week Two

                In this week’s readings, we are introduced to the idea of reproduction, connoisseurship, and other methodological approaches and issues within other fields regarding material cultural study.

                Walter Benjamin’s manifesto explores the idea that authenticity is the first mode of importance in determining the value of an artwork. According to Benjamin, the historical trajectory of an object depends exclusively on the authenticity of a particular work. The innovations of the last several centuries such as photography and other modes of artistic expression alter the lens through which we are perceiving reality. This causes the loss of the artwork’s “aura,” an intangible concept that is lost when something is reproduced from an original. This tension between a perception of reality and reproduction is certainly one that occupies the issues of material object study, as introduced by Prown and Fleming last week.

                In tandem with Fleming, Charles F. Montgomery is also largely responsible for producing watershed material culture process and theory at the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program. In his work on connoisseurship, Montgomery stresses the importance of being aware of larger trends that objects follow. This means knowing the different styles and trends that may contextualize your object. While Montgomery’s list of how to determine several descriptive attributes of objects tends to focus more on what seems to be furniture and the decorative arts, I found his method to be very useful to me for my license plate study. Understanding how my license plate was used in the “form follows function” context can really shape my findings. I’m not sure if my license plate was simply a vanity plate to commemorate the bicentennial as evidenced by the Liberty Bell imprinted on it, or if it served as identification for a vehicle. Whatever the answer to these questions, the function of the object is vital to understanding how the use of the object changes its meanings.

                The following reading “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies” by Michael Yonan delves into the mystery of why art history has remained distant from material culture studies. I myself have intellectually viewed the two as distinct as well prior to taking this class. Yonan makes a call to eliminate this divide by looking at Prown’s definition of material culture as a way to argue that it is broad enough to encompass art as well. While Yonan argues that consuming the two together might submerge the field of art history, it might be a good start towards looking at artworks with a different perspective.

                Finally, Jennifer L. Roberts’ essay on the transatlantic travel of American artist John Singleton Copley’s painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) employs a material object approach to understanding how this painting was part of a larger system of networks. Roberts disrupts the traditional narrative used for the painting to explain the physical travel of the painting was a complicated ocean voyage. This was my favorite reading for this week, since Roberts’s vividly depicts how Copley’s painting fit into a larger maritime culture. While Roberts employs a mixture of art historical and object analysis in her essay that might not necessarily apply to a license plate, this is definitely a model for me to follow. I want to be able to create a history of my license plate with a comparable amount of visual details and connections to the larger culture that Robert was able to do so seamlessly.