Undergraduate Course: Living Frames: Nature, Body and Display in Premodern Art (HIAR10207)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Where does an art object end and the 'real' world begin? This course examines tensions between artifice and nature, exploring how premodern objects were and are irrevocably entangled with the living world and the implications this has for how we should interpret, collect, preserve and display them. Because the course focuses on the performative, amuletic and ritualistic aspects of premodern art, a primary question is how viewers' bodies (past and present) and the natural world engage with and animate artworks. |
| Course description |
This course investigates the intersection between premodern art and the living world. It analyses works that vary in scale, material, form and function, from a delicate filagree brooch buried with a young Viking mother in Orkney to a seven-metre stone cross embedded in the Irish landscape. Art historians typically discuss, display and illustrate these works as static objects. Necklaces are displayed suspended in plexiglass. Monuments are surrounded by low, fixed lights as opposed to dynamic skies. In illustrations and exhibitions, what is cropped away, and how does that skew our interpretation? The course analyses the complex ways premodern artists used frames to convey meaning. It considers the role of the human body as a frame, both in artistic representations and in audiences' physicality. It delineates how objects made from natural materials such as skin, bone, hair, stone, and bodily excretions drew significance from their connection to nature and natural processes. Weekly seminars include topics such as 'framing human remains: reliquaries and display cases'; 'skin on skin: touching books in medieval Europe'; "amuletic jewellery: protecting the body in Coptic Egypt', 'living stone: mosaics and marble in Rome' and 'hell-pits and Hebridean skies: eco-iconography'.
The course seminars, readings, site-visits and assessments focus on four kinds of framing:
1. Historical, art historical (interpretation and context)
2. Display (exhibition, institution)
3. Nature (site, material)
4. Bodies (living, dead)
In each week of this ten-week course, we will examine a different kind of framing of genre of object (e.g., amulets, relics, illustrated manuscripts, etc.). Students will critically assess these collaboratively through class discussion, lectures, and site visits. Some seminars will take place in museums and heritage sites. Independently, students read assigned weekly readings (typically, two articles) and build a portfolio around different approaches and methods of framing. At the end of the course, students will critically assess and suggest different ways of framing a specific historical object genre in an essay. Weekly two-hour seminars will be a mix of lecture and discussion of set readings and themes. Some will take place in museums and heritage sites.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should have completed at least 3 History of Art courses at grade B or above, and we will only consider University/College level courses. **Please note that 3rd year History of Art courses are high-demand, meaning that they have a very high number of students wishing to enrol in a very limited number of spaces. These enrolments are managed strictly by the Visiting Student Office, in line with the quotas allocated by the department, and all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate knowledge of relevant historical and art historical frameworks
- Critique institutional and art historical approaches to displaying and interpreting premodern art
- Assess the significance of natural and environmental contexts and content in premodern art
- Analyse the role of bodies and nature in the interpretation, framing and creation of premodern art
- Produce their own frameworks, as text and/or image, shaped by a nuanced reflection on course themes
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Reading List
Clary, Katie Stringer. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Heritage, and Death. 1st ed. Routledge Handbooks on Museums, Galleries and Heritage: London: Taylor & Francis, 2023.
Ganz, David and Barbara Schellewald, Clothing Sacred Scriptures: Book Art and Book Religion in Christian, Islamic and Jewish Cultures. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.
Hahn, Cynthia J. The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object. London: Reaktion Books, 2017.
Overbey, Karen Eileen. Sacral Geographies: Saints, Shrines and Territory in Medieval Ireland. Brepols, 2012.
Platt, Verity J., and Michael Squire. The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History. Cambridge: University Press, 2017.
Pulliam, Heather. "Between the Embodied Eye and Living World: Clonmacnoise's Cross of the Scriptures." The Art Bulletin 102, no. 2 (2020): 7-35. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
This course will help students to develop their abilities as critical and reflective thinkers, by asking them to analyse and evaluate critical arguments put forward in a variety of texts.
Creative problem solving: The course will help students develop their abilities as creative problem-solvers and researchers, by asking them to explore how artists and institutions have framed art works, and to develop convincing interpretations (both visual and textual) in relation to those examples.
Effective communicators: The course will help students develop their skills as effective communicators, through written text and images, through their portfolio and essay, as well as in spoken form, through the individual recorded presentations that form a component of the portfolio. The emphasis on seminar class discussion will help students develop their skills as effective communicators, through listening to and engaging with others' ideas and working constructively through group discussion to develop new understanding. |
| Keywords | human and animal bodies,frames,display,heritage,nature,premodern art |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Heather Pulliam
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Mx Hannah Pennie Morrison
Tel: (0131 6)51 5763
Email: |
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