As a collaborative of art historians and students of visual culture, Material Collective seeks to foster a safe space for alternative ways of thinking about objects. Read more about us.
From the Blog
Posts and contributions View all posts and articles-
Surface and Substance
By Kerr Houston Sometimes an apparently imminent death sparks a heightened interest in what, exactly, is being lost. Take, for example, the common codex. As Jonathan Wilcox notes in his introduction to Scraped, Stroked and Bound (a rewarding new collection of materially engaged interpretations of medieval manuscripts published by Brepols), polemical pieces of writing that […]
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Scale and the Challenge of Sand
The following was co-written by Asa Simon Mittman and Ben Tilghman for the session SCALE, organized by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, at the Third BABEL Biennial in Santa Barbara. You can (and should) also read Karl Steel’s contribution to the session here and Eileen Joy’s here. Picture for a moment a skinny little eight-year old boy […]
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Collaborating at Babel 2014: Thinking Collectively about the Atlantic
Once upon a time (or, rather, sometime two years ago), a nineteenth-century Americanist (Melissa Gniadek) and an Anglo-Saxonist (Donna Beth Ellard) decided to propose a session for BABEL’s October 2014 meeting in Santa Barbara, CA. But what do an Americanist and Anglo-Saxonist have to say to one another? This was precisely the question that first […]
From the Manifesto
May 10, 2012 Read More-
For us, this is not a mere exercise—we stand by our manifesto. And we revel in this opportunity to raise a glass with all y’all, right here and now.
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We value: experimental processes; risk-taking; transparency, revelation; a blank space; joy in faltering, together. So say we all. So say we all.
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We are as much a support group as a scholarly group. We share the joys and sorrows of career, life and our academic work.
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We are the Material Collective, a group of medievalists interrogating visual materials. We seek to cooperate, encourage, share, promote transparency, touch, desire, destabilize, amuse, and blunder.
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Our project touches upon both form and content, as we pursue a lyrical and experimental style of writing along with a more humane, collaborative, and supportive process of scholarship.
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As we celebrate, dwell in, and embrace the basic materiality of our objects, we work to find ways to foreground the material of the objects themselves into larger historical analysis.
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Our specific interests vary, but we are all committed to prioritizing the materiality of things, the relationships between those things and the human beings who experience them, and the intimacy of past and present moments in time.
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We strive for transparency in our practice, and we encourage the same in our institutional surroundings.
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Central to this effort is a desire to support each other as we attempt to create experimental approaches, and to embrace both the successes and potential failures of our ventures into new ways of thinking.
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We are also working to increase the legitimacy of these approaches in the academic world, primarily by practicing them, loudly and often.
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We encourage spontaneity in writing art history, including an acknowledgement of our subject positions; therefore we embrace the incorporation of personal narrative and reflection in our historical interpretations.
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As a collaborative of students of visual culture, Material Collective seeks to foster a safe space for alternative ways of thinking about objects.
