1. While museums and institutions have collected material culture for a long time, no comprehensive academic discipline exists for studying it. 2. Material culture is the study of artifacts to understand the beliefs, values, and assumptions of a society. Artifacts themselves provide evidence for such study. 3. Studying objects can provide insights into a culture that words and deeds alone may not, as objects allow us to empathetically experience the past through our senses. They may also be more representative of a broader cross-section of society than written sources.

1. MODULE 10
OBSERVING THE OBJECT
Art 100
Understanding Visual Culture

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

3. The Grand Entrance
Krannert Art Museum Addition, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1985

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

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

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

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

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

9. Piece of obsidian (volcanic
glass)

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

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

12. Take a look around the room
where you are right now.
1. List 10 artifacts that you can see from
where you are sitting. Which of these
ten would you propose to study as most
revealing of our contemporary culture?
2. What can you see around you that is
naturally occurring, rather than
manmade or modified?
Post on Compass.

13. Why bother with objects? Wouldn’t words and deeds be more
revealing of culture?
Jules Prown  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
“Mind in expressed their beliefs more explicitly and
openly in their words and deeds than in
Matter” 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
(1982) learned from more traditional literary and
behavioral sources?
p. 3

14. What could be culturally
revealing about the study of
objects? value can be understood through
 1. Cultural
multiple lenses when dealing with material
objects.
 Inherent value.
 Value in original context, at a later point, today.
(subject to frequent change)
 Use value.
 Aesthetic, spiritual, relational values.

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

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

17. Group question
What different kinds of value can we isolate and
appreciate in this pendant?

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

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

20. What could be culturally
revealing about the study of
objects?
3. Objects are physically real, capable of empathetic use.
“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).”