The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

In one of the most comprehensive analyses ever written on the subject, Michael Tymkiw reassesses the relationship between Nazi exhibition design and modernism. While National Socialist exhibitions are widely understood as platforms for attacking modern art, they also served as sites of surprising formal experimentation among artists, architects, and others, who often drew upon and reconfigured the practices and principles of modernism when designing exhibition spaces and the objects within. In this book, Tymkiw reveals that a central motivation behind such experimentation was the interest in provoking what he calls "engaged spectatorship"—attempts to elicit experiences among exhibition-goers that would pique their desire to become involved in wider processes of social and political change. For historians of art, architecture, performance, and other forms of visual culture, Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism unravels long-held assumptions, particularly concerning the ideological stakes of participation.

Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism

An Australian botanical narrative : a practice-led enquiry into representations of Australian flora on the ceramic vessel as an expression of environmental culture

The thesis investigates contemporary textile practice and its links to traditional forms of textile art. It focuses on the 19th century German circumcision binders (“Jewishing cloths”), ceremonial Torah scroll wrappings, which documented male births. The case study examines images on the seams of a 1836 binder, showing that the seams acted as a transitional territory, where the embroiderer consciously played around with traditional images, transposing the concern with birth and fertility into a concern with a cultural identity formation during the Jewish emancipation in Germany. 

The contemporary museal staging of the binder is criticised as a nostalgic vision of Judaism, refusing to recognize the binder's contemporaneous position, ignoring its singularity as a contradictory repository of modern Jewish identity hi/stories. On this critique the practical part of the thesis is based, developing as an appropriation or a “re-actualisation” of a traditional textile format in the contemporary textile practice. Such “re-actualisation” is positioned in the relevant textile art context and reflected through my textile practice and an “autobiographical” account of it. Through its practice-based and written components the thesis reflects upon and makes way for creation of works, where my autobiographical female stories of Jewishness in Israel are staged as a fictional binder. The shifting position of cloth in between the historical and the contemporary accounts, in between autobiography, practice and research, is addressed through the concept of subjectile by J. Derrida.

The practice investigated “hands on” the particularities of the 1836 binder, exploring its letters, images, materials and techniques, appropriating and reshaping them. This practical exploration modified the research, shifting its emphasis towards the embodied and performative reading of the binder and related rituals. The thesis proposes a general design for a research-based practice. Alongside its contribution to the history of Jewish textiles and contemporary textile practice, it unfolds interrelated “biographies” of research and textile practice.

Binding autobiographies : Torah binders revisited

Warp-knitted brushed fabrics are special pile fabrics with uneven and declining piles that consist of broken filament ends. It is difficult to predict the finial pattern of the pile surface in the ...

Computer simulation for warp-knitted brushed fabric with patterned piles:

This article engages with Walter Benjamin's critical readings of velvet linings in nineteenth-century domestic interiors and fashions in The Arcades Project, as well as Jacques Derrida's more recent etymological and symbolic excavation of the hymen as textile, to argue for sensuous textiles as literal and figurative mediators of the nineteenth-century bourgeois desire to possess, articulated in the act of touching. Through an examination of velvet's “softening” of the domestic interior over the course of the nineteenth century and significant parallels between domestic furnishings and women's fashions, it explores an age in which sensuality was subsumed within the fabric of everyday life, but palpably present in the lining's “velvet touch.” Within the cultural landscape of an increasingly modern Paris, marked by Haussmannization, industrialization, and a burgeoning consumer economy, velvet gowns and linings functioned not simply as protection from modernity, but also as facilitators of a new consu...

The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of the Interior

Ceramic Millennium: Critical Writings on Ceramic History, Theory, and Art Garth Clark (ed.)

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Forum: Visual Studies—The Art Historians’ View

Between the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 and the Deutscher Werkbund's first major exhibition of mass-produced products in Cologne in 1914, German stoneware underwent a remarkable process of technical and aesthetic modernization. In collaboration with artists and cultural critics, the German region known as the Westerwald transformed its provincial, handcrafted vessels to rank among the exemplary mass-produced goods selected and deployed by the Werkbund to promote—at a domestic, grass-roots level—the development of a modern, national style. But this modern transformation was complicated by the legacy of the past: the Westerwald's heritage of indigenous craft affected its manufacture of modern products. This article traces the Westerwald's paradoxical approach to modern design as a reflection of Wilhelmine Germany's ambivalent modernism and employs “modern” stonewares in an interpretation of the Werkbund's vision for a technological future conflated with a vernacular past. Analysis of Wester...

A Ghost in the Machine Age: The Westerwald Stoneware Industry and German Design Reform, 1900–1914

Abstract In the wake of Germany’s ascension to nationhood in 1871, “deutsches Holz”—the stuff of half-timbered houses, Bierkellers, and three-legged chairs—became the building material of a new nationalist politics. But in 1933, after a decade of modernist innovations in steel, glass, and concrete, wood appealed once more to the German cultural consciousness. Amidst economic depression, social upheaval, and political turmoil, wood felt familiar and trustworthy, warm and reassuring—ubiquitous and cheap. But whose Holz was it? This essay employs wood as both substance and symbol to investigate the entangled crises of the German nation, the German Werkbund, and, in particular, Werkbund leader and architect-designer Richard Riemerschmid, in the teeth of the Nazi propaganda machine. 

“Deutsches Holz”: Wood, Wirkung, and the Werkbund in 1933

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Papers

The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of the Interior

Ceramic Millennium: Critical Writings on Ceramic History, Theory, and Art Garth Clark (ed.)

Forum: Visual Studies—The Art Historians’ View

A Ghost in the Machine Age: The Westerwald Stoneware Industry and German Design Reform, 1900–1914

“Deutsches Holz”: Wood, <i>Wirkung</i>, and the Werkbund in 1933