Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Imagine a world without things. There would be nothing to describe, explain, remark on, interpret, or complain about. Without things, we would, in short, stop speaking ; we would become as mute as objects are alleged to be. In nine original essays, internationally renowned historians of art and of science seek to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality. Things That Talk aims to escape the opposition between positivist facts and cultural readings that bifurcates the current historiography of both art and science. Confronting this impasse from an interdisciplinary perspective, each author singles out one object for close attention : a Bosch drawing, the freestanding column, a Prussian island, soap bubbles, early photographs, glass flowers, Rorschach blots, newspaper clippings, paintings by Jackson Pollock. Each object is revealed to be a node around which meanings accrete thickly. But not just any meanings: what these things are made of and how they are made shape what they can mean. Neither the pure texts of semiotics nor the brute objects of positivism, these things are saturated with cultural significance. Things become talkative when they fuse matter and meaning; they lapse into speechlessness when their matter and meanings no longer mesh.

Art and science. --- Semiotics and art. --- Object (Aesthetics) --- Object (Philosophy) --- 7.01 --- 7.03 --- Pollock Jackson --- Grosz George --- collage --- montage --- krantenknipsels --- rorschachtest --- Rorschach Hermann --- plantkunde --- botanica --- fotografie --- zeepbellen --- Pfaueninsel --- eilanden --- zuilen --- architectuur --- Bosch Hieronymus --- designtheorie --- productdesign --- perceptie --- waarneming --- kunsttheorie --- kunst en wtenschap --- kunst --- Philosophy --- Aesthetic object --- Aesthetics --- Art and semiotics --- Art --- Science and art --- Science --- Art et sciences --- Sémiotique et art --- Objet (Esthétique) --- Objet (Philosophie) --- Object (Aesthetics). --- Sémiotique et art --- Objet (Esthétique) --- Art and science --- Semiotics and art --- Semiotics --- Object (Philosophy). --- Sémiotique --- Objet --- Analyse de l'art --- Culture