ARTH 6856 - [Producing Cloth Cultures]

Next Offered: 2020-2021. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Permission of instructor required. Co-meets with ARTH 4856/VISST 4857.

A. Alexandridis, K. McGowan.

It is a fundamental part of human activity to dress or cover one’s body and environment. While the symbolic significance of such clothing has long been recognized, the activity of producing fabric itself deserves more attention. By this we do not only mean the various techniques and technological devices involved in spinning, weaving, stitching, or sewing, but also the analogical activities and metaphors they entailed. What stories did they tell? How did their connection to writing, remembering, lovemaking, or ruling one’s kingdom, to name but a few examples, play out metaphorically in cloth? And how did fabrics depend on or transform the transmission of techniques, fashions and motives, but also gender, concepts of the body or the built environment?

This team-taught seminar explores the presence, production, function and meaning of fabric in the built and lived environment. In a comparative approach we will explore evidence from Greco-Roman and Asian Art from the distant past to the contemporary moment.