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

Jeremy Aynsley; Christopher Breward; Marius Kwint

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859732526 ISBN 13: 9781859732526

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 shapinghuman 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 withinthe 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 howthe 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 Author

Marius Kwint University of Oxford Christopher Breward Professor in Historical and Cultural Studies,London College of Fashion Jeremy Aynsley Joint Victoria & Albert / Royal College of Art Postgraduate Programme in History of Design

Edition details

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1859732526
• ISBN 13: 9781859732526
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Jeremy Aynsley, Christopher Breward, Marius Kwint