Biro Yaëlle, Étienn Noémie (eds.) Rhapsodic objects: art, agency, and materiality (1700-2000)

Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2022. — 235 p.: ill. — e-ISBN 9783110757668.A fragment of red-dyed cloth knotted onto an iron nail; almond-shaped pieces of white glazed ceramic positioned into the socket of the eyes; a section of an iron fling-shot trigger embedded into a wooden sculptural form. These material fragments are all integral to the physical form given by a Kongo ritual practitioner, nganga, in collaboration with a Kongo master carver, to a nkisi or container of spiritual power, in the nineteenth century. The European origins of these three manufactured components (cloth, porcelain, and iron) are representative of art-making in a global world that had been connected through trade for centuries. Even the dye used to color red the cloth tied to an iron nail carries complex significance, as curator James Green will explain in the present volume. Collectively, the authors of this book focus on the layered significance of forms and materials that constitute art and material culture. Like the thread of a cloth, patterns, materials, and techniques can be unraveled, revealing along the way embedded histories and relationships. In our perspective, objects are simultaneously products and producers, results and processes, visions and stories. They are, in short, rhapsodic. Art history as a discipline is evolving and encourages us today to study works of art in all their complexities and contradictions. How do we grasp material culture beyond a visual reading of a work’s iconography or an anthropological study of its function in its original context? Is it possible to simultaneously consider its visual appearance together with its particular materiality and temporality? Moreover, how do these questions apply in the context of art history’s expansion, as art historian Michael Yonan has emphasized, taking into account media such as textile or porcelain that were partly excluded from the Western concept of art.