Fungible Things: Economies of Desire in the (De)formation of Chinese Bronzes

Moser, Jeffrey

doi:10.1086/721212

Cited by 2 publications

References 4 publications

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Why Drawing Still Matters

Meyer¹

2023

Drawing the Greek Vase

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This chapter explores drawings of Greek vases from three turning points in the history of ceramic studies and in archaeological thinking more broadly: they reveal how these objects were made sense of through the emergent taxonomies of early modern antiquarianism, how Neoclassical critics reinterpreted the materiality of the painted decoration as form and reconceptualized the act of drawing itself, and finally how drawing allowed painted pottery to be accommodated in the all-embracing classifications of scientific archaeology that crystalized in the twentieth century. The final section considers how drawing aided the formation of processes of knowing, inviting the consideration of touch, embodied viewing, and craft in general into object-based research. Throughout, the aim is to shift the conversation from evaluating drawings of vases as more or less accurate visual records to the transformations which the practice of visualization itself accomplishes—how it shapes the viewer’s perceptions and has given rise to new frameworks of interpretation.

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Why Drawing Still Matters

Meyer¹

2023

Drawing the Greek Vase

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Cauldron, Copper, Cash: Medieval Bronze in Motion and Flux

Moser

2024

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

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Medieval Chinese thinkers conceptualized ancient bronzes in anthropocentric terms—as mute, inert objects that required the engagement of a perspicacious human subject for their value to become apparent. They also regarded bronzes as animate things that had the capacity to act independently of direct human manipulation, and they situated bronzes within frameworks of material vitalism that parallel many aspects of the “new materialism” associated with contemporary theorists like Karen Barad and Jane Bennett. This article interprets both of these understandings as containment strategies designed to rein in and constrain bronze's ever-present capacity for liquefaction. As with other metals, bronze was forever oscillating between solidity, in the form of discrete, functional objects, and liquidity, as a mutable substance of tremendous potency. Both states spawned different metaphors. Tracing this tension between solidity and liquidity, from the casting of the Nine Cauldrons and the origin myths of Chinese civilization through the medieval challenge of adapting a metallist currency regime to an expanding economy, this article explores how the cultural logics and natural tendencies of bronze were intertwined.

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Fungible Things: Economies of Desire in the (De)formation of Chinese Bronzes

Cited by 2 publications

References 4 publications

Why Drawing Still Matters

Why Drawing Still Matters

Cauldron, Copper, Cash: Medieval Bronze in Motion and Flux

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