Material Memories: Design and Evocation: v. 5 (Materializing Culture) - Hardcover

Jeremy Aynsley, Christopher Breward & Marius Kwint

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 185973247X ISBN 13: 9781859732472

Publisher: Berg Publishers, 1999

Synopsis

This book examines the way that objects 'speak' to us through the memories that we associate with them. Instead of viewing the meaning of particular designs as fixed and given, by looking at the process of evocation it finds an open and continuing dialogue between things, their makers and their consumers. This is not, however, to diminish the role of design in shaping human consciousness. The contributors do not view objects as blank carriers onto which humans project prior psychic dramas, but rather, place crucial importance on the precise materials from which they are made, their social, economic and historic reasons for being, and the way that we interact with them through our senses. This book therefore studies the physical within the intellectual, directly testing the concept of material culture. With telling illustrations, and spanning the Renaissance to the present day, leading scholars converge across disciplines to explore the souvenir-value of jewellery, textiles, the home, the urban space, modernist design, photography, the museum and even the sunken wreck. Together they show how the sense of the past and of history, far from being a 'radical illusion' as some post-modernists claim, has been a deeply felt reality.

About this title

About the Authors

Jeremy Aynsley is Professor of Design History and founding Director of the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton, UK.

Chris Breward is the Director of National Museums Scotland. He was trained at the Courtauld Institute and the Royal College of Art, London and has previously worked as Director of Collection and Research at the National Galleries of Scotland, Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and as Principal of Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. His published interests include the relationship between art and fashion, visual and cultural histories of masculinity, and histories of city life. He is the author of Fashioning London (Bloomsbury, 2004) and co-editor of Material Memories (Bloomsbury, 1999), The Englishness of English Dress (Bloomsbury, 2002), Fashion and Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2005), Fashion's World Cities (Bloomsbury, 2006), and Styling Shanghai (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Edition details

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 185973247X
• ISBN 13: 9781859732472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Jeremy Aynsley Christopher Breward & Marius Kwint