There have been lots of Material Culture happenings recently; here is just a glimpse!

Joel Huntley

Guest Speaker for Art History 363: American Decorative Arts and Interiors: 1620-1840

September 21, 2012/special topic: ceramics

Anna Andrzejewski

Guest Speaker for Art History 464: Dimensions of Material Culture

September 27, 2012/special topic: cities

 

Guest Speaker for Art History 363: American Decorative Arts and Interiors: 1620-1840

September 28, 2012/special topic: wood

Marc Vallon

Baroque Bassoon Professor in Music School

Lecture and demonstration of musical properties

with the baroque instrument – changes from

early to modern times.

October 5, 2012

Greenhill Lecture: Humor in Cold Dead Type - Save the Date

Humor in Cold Dead Type: Performing Artemus Ward’s London Panorama Lecture in Print
a lecture by
Jennifer A. Greenhill, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
Thursday, November 8, 2012 at 6 p.m. in Elvehjem Building, Room L140

Save the date as well for an afternoon graduate student workshop with Professor Greenhill on race, abstraction, and illustration.

Greenhill’s recently completed book Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012) investigates the strategies artists devised to simultaneously conform to and humorously undermine "serious" artistic culture during the late nineteenth century, when calls for a new cultural sophistication ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor.

This talk explores the materiality of print and awkwardness of typographic humor through a study of Artemus Ward’s Lecture (As Delivered at the Egyptian Hall, London), an experimental volume published in 1869.  The book attempts to preserve the hilarity of a recently deceased American humorist, Charles Farrar Browne, known as “Artemus Ward,” the character who made President Lincoln laugh during the Civil War and inspired Mark Twain as he developed his own comic techniques. It does so with explanatory glosses on the lecture’s content, thirty-six woodcut illustrations depicting the various scenes of Ward’s visual aid, an execrably painted panorama, and experimental typography meant to evoke the humorist’s delivery of his material.

Excessive in its contrivances, Ward’s book demonstrates the inevitable awkwardness of intermedial translation projects, perhaps especially those focused on preserving the subtleties of comic performance and the interactivity of the theatrical encounter. But the book’s awkwardness is symptomatic of its overriding logic and therefore signifies more than simply a failed effort to translate the stage to the page.  It signifies, Greenhill argues, the degree to which Ward’s editors had internalized his entertainment and his reputation more generally, as a humorist given to excess and lecturing on a subject—Mormonism—that had its own reputation for immoderation. The book offers a powerful example of mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of “muchness,” as Ward would say, but it does more than this: it suggests the ways that typographic expression might not only index surface features of a performance, but also reveal the deep structure of the event and the social framework in which it found form.

Sponsored by the UW-Madison Material Culture Program, University Lectures Committee, Department of Art History, and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture

Material Culture Courses - Fall 2012

Afro-American Studies 674: Seminar: Beyond Primitivism: African and African-American Art in Museums - Frieda Tesfagiorgis

Art History 300: The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece - William Aylward

Art History 364: History of American Art, 1607-Present - Lauren Kroiz

Art History 464: Dimensions of Material Culture - Ellery Foutch and Lauren Kroiz

Art History 865: Seminar: Material Culture of the Enlightenment: Art, Technology and Design - Ann Smart Martin

Classics 700: Seminar: The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece - William Aylward

Design Studies 421: History of European Interiors: Ancient through 18th Century - Monica Penick

Design Studies 430: History of Textiles - Courtney Henson

Design Studies 639: Seminar: Culture and the Built Environment - Jung-Hye Shin

Design Studies 642: Seminar: Taste - Preeti Chopra

Design Studies 920: Seminar: American Design in the Atomic Age: 1940-1965 - Monica Penick

Geography 305: Introduction to the City - Sarah Moore

Geography 560: American Environmental History - William Cronon

Landscape Architecture 375: Cultural Landscapes of Food - special topics course - Janet Gilmore