Margaret Graves: The Poetics of Absence: Technologies of Impress and the Limits of Art History

Smart Lecture

Margaret Graves: The Poetics of Absence: Technologies of Impress and the Limits of Art History

Lecture
CWAC 157
Add to Calendar 2025-05-20 17:00:00 2025-05-20 17:00:00 Margaret Graves: The Poetics of Absence: Technologies of Impress and the Limits of Art History We invite you to join the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago for this upcoming lecture as part of the 2024-25 Smart Lecture series. The lecture is Tuesday, May 20th in CWAC 157 at 5:00pm CT with a Q&A session and reception to follow. The history of Islamic art is full of material impressions. Stamps, seals, punches, dies, moulds, and matrices have left their traces on metal, clay, paper, and leather, each time permanently marking a surface with the form of something that touched it only briefly. Sometimes the actual instruments of impress survive, but more often we know them only through the traces they have left behind, the strike of a punch into an earthenware matrix or the arrest of molten copper alloy in a mould. These technologies of impress were central to a very wide range of artistic practices in the pre-modern Islamic world and have left their mark all over Islamicate intellectual history. They have shaped—and been shaped by—cognitive models for apprehending the world. From the clays of Creation in Qur’anic exegesis to the pervasive use of metalcasting and moulds as metaphors for poetic production in Arabic and Persian,this project seeks to show how the technologies of impress have shaped cognitive habits and enabled certain kinds of worldmaking in the Islamic world and beyond. At the same time, it uses the instruments of impress to rethink entrenched art historical value structures and trouble deeply rooted ideas about mimesis, representation, and irreplicability as the basis of “meaning” in art history. Margaret S. Graves is the Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. She is a specialist in the art of the Islamic world, with a primary research focus on the plastic arts of ceramic, metalwork, and stone carving in the medieval era and the nineteenth century. She received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Edinburgh and taught at Indiana University from 2012 before joining Brown University in 2023. She publishes on the art of the Islamic world and beyond, most recently the co-authored Ceramic Art (Princeton University Press, 2023)   CWAC 157 Department of Art History drupal@seastar.uchicago.edu America/Chicago public
Stone with engraving

We invite you to join the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago for this upcoming lecture as part of the 2024-25 Smart Lecture series. The lecture is Tuesday, May 20th in CWAC 157 at 5:00pm CT with a Q&A session and reception to follow.

The history of Islamic art is full of material impressions. Stamps, seals, punches, dies, moulds, and matrices have left their traces on metal, clay, paper, and leather, each time permanently marking a surface with the form of something that touched it only briefly. Sometimes the actual instruments of impress survive, but more often we know them only through the traces they have left behind, the strike of a punch into an earthenware matrix or the arrest of molten copper alloy in a mould. These technologies of impress were central to a very wide range of artistic practices in the pre-modern Islamic world and have left their mark all over Islamicate intellectual history. They have shaped—and been shaped by—cognitive models for apprehending the world. From the clays of Creation in Qur’anic exegesis to the pervasive use of metalcasting and moulds as metaphors for poetic production in Arabic and Persian,this project seeks to show how the technologies of impress have shaped cognitive habits and enabled certain kinds of worldmaking in the Islamic world and beyond. At the same time, it uses the instruments of impress to rethink entrenched art historical value structures and trouble deeply rooted ideas about mimesis, representation, and irreplicability as the basis of “meaning” in art history.

Margaret S. Graves is the Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in Honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. She is a specialist in the art of the Islamic world, with a primary research focus on the plastic arts of ceramic, metalwork, and stone carving in the medieval era and the nineteenth century. She received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Edinburgh and taught at Indiana University from 2012 before joining Brown University in 2023. She publishes on the art of the Islamic world and beyond, most recently the co-authored Ceramic Art (Princeton University Press, 2023)