Global Histories of Design, 1400-1800
7th Global Arts workshop
Friday 6th February, at the Seminar Room A, Research Department,
V&A Museum
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
a) Institutional Background: This event is the final installment in a series of seven scholarly gatherings under the heading of Global Arts, an AHRC-funded Network including the University of Warwick, the Ashmolean Museum, and the V&A. It is also the second in a more targeted series of workshops which will lead to a book entitled Approaches to Global Design History. The first of these events, “Design in the Global Economy.” will be convened by Dr. Sarah Teasley at Northwestern University on December 5 and 6, 2008. A third and final event, “Global Histories of Design, 1800 to the Present,” will take place at the Royal College of Art on May 1 and 2, 2009. An indicative description of the Global Design History project follows.
b) Disciplinary Background:
The original orientation of the discipline of Design History (since its emergence in the 1970s) towards individual (“named”) designers and iconic objects, most of them postdating 1850, has given way to a much broader set of interests. Studies of gender, consumption, and critique; investigations of business practice; an extension of the field’s chronological coverage back to the medieval period; and theoretical engagements with a wide array of cognate disciplines such as art history, literary criticism, cultural history, sociology, anthropology and the history of science have all enriched this still-young scholarly field.
c) Emergence of Global Design History
However, design history has remained constrained within a model of expertise based in area studies. Euroamerica has remained the clear centre of the discipline. Only in the last few years have design historians in Europe and the United States begun to study a broader geography, with particular emphases on Japan, India, China, and Brazil—and even here, the tendency has been to extend the franchise of the discipline without challenging its basic methodologies.
Recently, however, small but active design history communities have emerged in South America, Japan, and Hong Kong. A few scholars have written exemplary works of design history that are explicitly global in their reach. Also encouraging is the development of graduate coursework in the history of design in Asia. This maturing of the field’s spatial outlook raises a tantalizing new possibility: that design history might contribute to a vital project sweeping the humanities at present, the broader understanding of ‘globalism’ and processes of globalization. The proposed volume is intended as a major contribution towards this objective.
d) Questions to be addressed
While addressing questions of method, the book will also offer statements about specific contexts within the field of global design history: the influence of Ottoman art and architecture on Europe, Persia and India; the European adoption of Asian aesthetic forms; the Latin American adoption of Asian and European decorative solutions; the role of capital cities in creating international design, etc. Some papers will focus on very short timeframes and locales (even on specific objects), while others will map extensive chronologies and geographies. Authors will reflect on non-European traditions in design history; on how such traditions could be meaningfully studied by comparing and connecting them and by relating them to better-known European approaches and narratives. The book will also analyse the relationship between local generation of design and global frameworks of historical investigation.
The very definition of the word “design” is obviously at stake in such an endeavour. For the purposes of this project, we propose that design historians are a loose collective of scholars with common interests in such key issues as materiality, aesthetics, interactions between production and consumption, and professional practice. While we are aware that “design” may look very different to a specialist in Chinese architecture and a specialist in French fashion, we nonetheless contend that this field can act as a common ground between such disparate contexts. From this perspective the fluid usage of the term “design”, and its various translations and adoption in diverse geographies, is itself a subject worthy of study.