Matter Nature “Matters” Ultimately: A Material Ecological Reflection on Psalm 65

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hendrik Viviers
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Material World ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Things ◽  
Material Religion ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Fertile Land

Modern insights in philosophy, anthropology, psychology, communication studies, religion studies and art history (to name but a few), exemplify the so-called material turn in the study of religion, of how matter “matters,” even ultimately. Contributions in the recently founded journal, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, highlight these insights. Humans animate material “things” (e.g., land, nature, temples, shrines) with meaning, and they in turn become “agents” to mediate the meaningful world they stand for. Humans and matter become co-constitutive in this dynamic. Our senses and sensibilities play a crucial role in this “world making” endeavour, when interacting with the material world around us. Ecological hermeneutics concurs, regarding Earth as a “subject” in her own right. This study found that an ancient poem, Psalm 65, resonates with these modern insights. The psalm expresses a skilful interconnectedness in its composition, but moreover, it interconnects temple(-goers; vv. 2–5), the orderly cosmos (vv. 6–9) and the fertile land (vv. 10–14) in unified and thankful song towards their creator and sustainer. The sensual experience of the “goodness” in the temple in Zion, the awe-inspiring cosmos, and the “goodness” of the fertile land, realises this “world of bliss.”

scholarly journals Materiality and Classics: (Re) Turning to the Material

2019 ◽  
Vol 139 ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Material World ◽  
New Directions ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Turn

AbstractIn this article I review 11 books published since 2010 that bring the ‘material turn’ to classics. Some start from emic ancient perspectives on matter and materiality; others take their cue from current theoretical models such as those of the new materialisms. All offer new insights into our relationship with the material world and consider the material object as active within different paradigms. In reviewing these important volumes together, I question entrenched boundaries: from those between (sub-)disciplines to those between human and non-human agents. I explore the material turn not as an isolated phenomenon, but, first, as a cyclical ‘re’-turn and, second, as an integrated set of ideas incorporating (to name but a few strands) aesthetics, cognitive humanities, embodiment, affect and the senses. The books reviewed range from literary studies to archaeology to art history to material culture to heritage. Taken together, they set new directions for classics, and indeed for our thinking about our place in the world.

scholarly journals Temptation, Resistance, and Art Objects: On the Lack of Material Theory within Art History before the Material Turn

2019 ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Charolotta Krispinsson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Visual Culture Studies ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn

Niccolò di Pietro Gerini's painting “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” (1390-1400) serves as a point of departure for this essay. It depicts Saint Anthony during a lapse of self-control as he attempts to resist an alluring mound of gold. Since the mound is in fact made of genuine gold leaves applied to the painting's surface, it works both as a representation of temptation as well as an object of desire affecting the beholder. The aim of this essay is to explore different approaches to materiality before the material turn within the art history discipline by examining two opposing directions within the writing and practice of art history:  the tradition of connoisseurship; and the critique of the fetish within the theoretical apparatus of new art history and visual culture studies of the 1980s and 90s. As an expression of positivism within art history, it is argued that connoisseurship be considered within the context of its empirical practices dealing with objects. What is commonly described as the connoisseur's “taste” or “love for art” would then be just another way to describe the intimate relationship formed between art historians and the very objects under their scrutiny. More than other humanist disciplines, art history is, with the possible exception of archaeology, an object-based discipline. It is empirically anchored in the unruly, deep sea of objects commonly known as the history of art. Still, there has been a lack of in-depth theoretical reflection on the materiality of artworks in the writings of art historians before the material turn. The question however, is not ifthis is so, but rather, why?In this essay, it is suggested that the art history discipline has been marked by a complicated love-hate relationship with the materiality of which the very objects of study, more often than not, are made of; like Saint Anthony who is both attracted to and repelled by the shapeless mass of gold that Lucifer tempts him with. While connoisseurship represents attraction, resistance to the allure of objects can be traced to the habitual critique of fetishism of the first generations of visual culture studies and new art history. It reflects a negative stance towards objects and the material aspect of artworks, which enhanced a conceived dichotomy between thinking critically and analytically in contrast to managing documents and objects in archives and museum depositories. However, juxtaposing the act of thinking with the practice of manual labour has a long tradition in Western intellectual history. Furthermore, it is argued that art history cannot easily be compared to the history of other disciplines because of the simple fact that artworks are typically quite expensive and unique commodities, and as such, they provoke not just aesthetic but also fetishist responses. Thus, this desire to separate art history as a scientific discipline from the fetishism of the art market has had the paradoxical effect of causing art historians to shy away from developing methodologies and theory about materiality as an act of resistance. 

The Dikpālas of ancient Java revisited: A new identification for the 24 directional deities on the Śiva temple of the Loro Jonggrang complex

2012 ◽  
Vol 168 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 274-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Acri ◽  
Roy Jordaan
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Master Plan ◽  
Unresolved Issue ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Clockwise Direction ◽  
Temple Complex ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prime Objective ◽  
The Temple

Caṇḍi Śiva, sacred centre of the famous ninth-century Loro Jonggrang temple complex at Prambanan, Central Java, is decorated with numerous iconic and narrative reliefs. Starting from the eastern staircase and traversing the perambulatory in a clockwise direction, we find the narrative reliefs of the Rāmāyaṇa on the balustrade wall on our left, and the iconic reliefs of twenty-four seated male deities, each flanked by several attendants – collectively referred to in the accompanying iconographic plan as ‘Lokapālas with attendants’– on our right, that is, on the temple body proper. The prime objective of the present inquiry is propose a new identification of this set of twenty-four deities forming Śiva’s entourage, which remains an unresolved issue in the art history of Central Java. Our findings will have implications for our understanding of the iconographical master plan of Loro Jonggrang, and, in a wider sense, of certain developments in Indo-Javanese and Balinese iconography.

scholarly journals BUILDINGS, LANDSCAPES AND REGIMES OF MATERIALITY

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 135-148
Author(s):  
William Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Material World ◽  
Single Generation ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Agency ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Distinguished Scholar

ABSTRACTBeginning with a surprisingly exuberant response to the landscape recorded by a distinguished scholar, this paper explores the agency of things and places though time. It argues that the recent ‘material turn’ is part of a broader re-enchantment of the world: a re-enchantment that has parallels with a similar process at the turn of the nineteenth century. Tracing this history suggests that within the space of a single generation the material world can be enchanted or disenchanted, with things and places imbued with – or stripped of –agency. In other words, different periods possess what we might call different regimes of materiality. Any approach which assumes the existence of material agency throughout history, or which imports our assumptions into a period which did not share them, will necessarily fail. Before we look at the material world, therefore, we need to examine how the material world was looked at, how it was conceptualised and how it was experienced. We need to apprehend its regime of materiality.

Image, Object, Art

2016 ◽  
Vol 133 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
Old Chinese ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Image Object

Through “conversation” with a more than four thousand-year-old Chinese vessel, this essay engages with some of the fundamental principles of the discipline of art history espoused in recent decades. In particular, it situates Bildwissenschaft and thing theory and the material turn within ongoing debates on art and artifacts and delineates a more fluid approach to the study of image, object, art (Bild, Ding, Kunst).

Egypt in Roman Visual and Material Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlín Eilís Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Intercultural Exchange ◽  
Material Turn

This review article addresses current controversies and opportunities in research on the roles, uses, and meanings of “Egypt” in ancient Roman visual and material culture. Accordingly, the article investigates problems of definition and interpretation; provides a critical review of current scholarly approaches; and analyzes the field’s intersections with current intellectual developments in the broader fields of archaeology and art history. It is argued that research on Roman Aegyptiaca can gain much from, and is poised to contribute substantially to, (1) 21st-century archaeology’s “material turn”; (2) the construction of new interpretive frameworks for cross-cultural interactions and “hybridization”; and (3) increased attention to the relationships among artifacts, contexts, and assemblages. Roman visual representations of Egypt provide a rich testing ground for research on intercultural exchange, the lived experience of empire, and the complex entanglement of people, things, and images.

scholarly journals BETWEEN ‘CELESTIAL MAIDEN’ AND ‘SACRED PROSTITUTE’: THE MYTH OF THE DEVAͲDS5 IN THE IMAGINARY OF THE CONTEMPORARY INDIAN CLASSICAL DANCE PRACTITIONERS

SYNERGY ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marinescu Angelica ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Indian Classical Dance ◽  
Medieval India ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Indian Art

One of the most controversial discussions in the contemporary Indian arts environment remains the connection of the post-colonial classical dance practice with the DevadƗsƯ or the MaharƯ, the temple dancing girls. Born in the Early Medieval India, amidst and in close connection to the Bhakti and the Tantric movements, abiding in the temple institution, the so-called ‘DevadƗsƯ temple system’ remains a mystery, between awe and fascination to the nowadays practitioner and connaisseur of Indian arts. While tracing back the socio-religious contexts that brought the temple dancers on the foremost place of the stage of Indian art history, the author looks for the understanding of this myth in the imaginary and the reality of contemporary practitioners, from the perspective of a foreigner researcher-cum-practitioner of an Indian art form. The paper is based on consulting the existing literary sources concerning the DevadƗsƯ system, and the research is focusing on the nowadays classical dance practitioners’ imaginary (re)construction(s) of this system. Till today, here she stands, the woman-as-dance practitioner, either Indian or from any other part of the world, at the cross-road of all myths, imaginarily rooted in the past, but living all the aspirations of the nowadays social, cultural, religious, political dynamics, neither celestial maiden, nor sacred prostitute.

scholarly journals The Material Turn in the Study of Israelite Religions: Spaces, Things, and the Body

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Mandell ◽  
Jeremy Smoak
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Religion

This study discusses how a material religions approach might be applied to the study of Israelite religions. After providing a discussion of recent theory on space and the body in the study of religion, we give several suggestions for how these ideas can apply to Israelite tomb and temple spaces. Our approach brings the study of Israelite religious texts and material culture (back) into the broader study of material religion. To this end, we prioritize the role that the body plays in shaping perceptions of these spaces and in determining the use of things in ritual practice.

scholarly journals Counter-Memory, Heterochronia, and “History Painting” (After Géricault): Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Veronica Tello
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Art History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Linear Time ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Media Art ◽  
History Painting ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Politics Of History ◽  
Visual Cultures

This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (2001-2005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies for SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics do not generate an aesthetics of exposé but rather an aesthetics of “fictionalization.” This aesthetic is defined by the recalibration of documentary and speculative data as a means to reconceive the landscape of the perceptual. The findings of this research demonstrate that the use of disparate fragments—or data—to visualize otherwise diminishing historical events underpins contemporary history painting’s capacity for advancing a distinct economy of affect that circumvents the limitations of the news media and its “monopoly on reality.”

scholarly journals “Who of us has never traced light over these walls”?: The archaeology of Stanisław Grochowiak’s poems

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-144
Author(s):  
Helena Hejman
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Art History ◽  
Concrete Element ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Ars Poetica ◽  
Archetypal Images

Through a simple wall, a transparent element of everyday life, Stanisław Grochowiak’s poems enable one to uncover the existential concrete element, matter endowed with an amazing hypnagogic potential, a chronicle of ‘objectness’. In the poet’s imagined world, the wall constitutes both an empirical item and a phenomenon, which transcends the ontology of matter, which determines its semantic fluidity: at one point it resembles an anthropological document (a place of cultural/biographical inscription) only to, a moment later, resemble the basis for surrealist visions or the material of an artifact. The wall seems to be the limit of the zone of mental comfort or, e.g., expose the in-body plane, which, like the walls of pre-historic caves, is covered with archetypal images from (the) childhood (of humanity). This study, based on contexts in art history, psychoanalysis, and a material turn, is an attempt at identifying the references which focus “on the wall” in the following works: “Płonąca żyrafa”, “Malarstwo”, “Zejście”, and “Ars Poetica”.

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