I'm really stoked about being invited to an upcoming workshop at the Menil Collection on Byzantine materiality. The workshop is in conjunction with the 2013 exhibition "Byzantine Things in the World", which seeks out new ways of understanding the Byzantine viewer's relationship to objects and phenomena. This is a provocative question that many historians struggle with: how can we recover exactly what it meant to "see" in different periods, particularly periods that pre-date modern scientific ideas about vision and materials? (I think that it's going to be useful for my own work, since I'm asking a lot of questions right now re: what exactly people in the mid-20th-century got out of looking at a drawing. Did they feel the texture of the paper, or sense the graphite as a "quieter" medium than paint, or simply get a general sense of the depicted form? An oblique connection, but useful nonetheless.)
The presentations look fabulous, and range in scope from studies of ecstatic vision in Byzantium to examinations of individual objects (1000-year-old locket engraved with a duck, anyone?). My paper is an inquiry re: images of Christ's face in Byzantine architecture using the Menil Byzantine Fresco Chapel as a model (see above). I can't wait.
