The Structure of the Thesis

This thesis is about what happens when we see an art object – in this case, an art medal – and understand from it something that is real, but not actual. It asks how we can understand the relation of material and content in artistic practice.

This first chapter gives the principal themes. The starting proposition is that art objects give access to qualities that arise from the object but that are not actually part of them. These qualities are real. Domestic photography is an example of this process at work: we can see an image of a person whom we love, and feel that the image really has the quality of that person. We feel this even though common sense dictates that the object in question is a limited material thing. Though they exploit different technologies, a portrait medal functions in the same way: a bounded material object gives a real sense of the person it depicts. The portrait medal and the photograph are material things. In each case, their content is the person (and the ideas associated with the

person) that they depict. In the case of contemporary practice, the content is similar – the intellect of the artist. All of this content is somehow ‘inside’ the artwork, or palpable from or through its surface.

This thesis deals with structurally similar relations of content and matter. A sense of involution is implicit in the phrase ‘material culture’: every made thing is a folding together of material and content; but whereas fine art values

content, craft practice celebrates material. For this reason artists are considered to be an ontological problem whereas craftsmen are considered to be an

epistemological problem. In the specific context of my personal experience, these two cultures fall across the material cultural fold in two contrasting directions. The aim of the thesis is to understand how material and content are folded together, and in gaining this understanding it is hoped that new avenues of expression will be opened up for practice.

The principal object of analysis is the art medal, which sits across the cultures of art and craft. Chapter two introduces the art form and describes its history. The Constantine, the French medal made some time around 1402, is described. This medal influenced Pisanello’s later work, and it is this that

stimulates a period of intense production in Italy in the mid to late 15th _century.

The general properties of the humanist art medal are given: on one face there is a morally idealised portrait. This gives the physical appearance and the moral ‘air’ of the sitter; here there is already a movement from morphology to virtue. The obverse presents a coded and literary representation, a more interior language. This is how the medal ‘folds’ content and material.

Chapter two also reviews the dominant cultures of interpretation. There are two schools: an older ‘numismatic’ approach that is fostered by curators and collectors and that is as old as the art medal itself – this serves to maintain collections; and a newer ‘academic’ approach that treats the medal as a source of evidence in support of more open study. Numismatics relies on methods of iconography and connoisseurship, and more recently, scientific materiality. The physical completeness and self-containedness of the medal is important to its capacity to depict the inner qualities of the person. Connoisseurial method relies on a similar perception of artistic quality. This instinct is described by numismatists as being ‘naturally endowed’, an inward trait of the practiced viewer. In this way, the numismatist and their object of study are mirrors of each other. The academic school, by contrast, is dominated by a sensuously detached method, and in particular by ideas of agency.

Chapter three returns to the context within which I hope this research will be useful: contemporary practice. It presents an impersonal counterpoint to the context presented at the start of the thesis. It describes the relationship

between discourse and making, art and craft, and in particular the figure of the artist and the craftsman, and how ideas of these figures have been exploited. There are several case studies given. The medals of Alexandre Charpentier (1856-1909) show that by the start of the twentieth century, the image of the artist and the craftsman were available for quotation, and that they were associated with different ideas of potential: ideal and unbounded in the case of the artist; real and skilled in the case of the craftsman.

The medal sits between received ideas of the skilled hand and the artistic brain. The original purpose of this research was to use the medal as a site for developing new identities for sculptural practice. This project can be seen in

Cathie Pilkington’s work. In the work of Felicity Powell and Chloe Shaw the hand is explored as a site for negotiating self and other and as an index of personal and authorial identity. In these three contemporary cases, the hand has two values, as a site of making and a site of meaning. Ultimately these two values cannot be disentangled.

If the contemporary work tests the argument for ideas of craft as an ‘escape-hatch’ (Adamson 2007:69), a way for artists to think differently, the final case-study presented in chapter three shows the limitations of this approach. In Nicholas Hilliard’s medal of Elizabeth I (1589), it is most evident that making and meaning cannot be separated. This object demonstrates extraordinary technical competence. This is the driver for its iconographic message: supreme regal power. The strength of the monarch is conveyed by the apparent magic of the medal’s facture. The conclusion of this chapter is that to concentrate on ideas of craft and art is to miss the point, because it places emphasis on what these terms mean as abstract ideas, and this is already a retreat from practice. In this conception, craft will always be fine art’s inferior other, and only one side of the fold is valued.

Chapter four presents the theoretical and methodological work by which the relation of material and content can be approached at a more fundamental level. This work begins by defining meaning and interpretation. It suggests that there is a necessary movement implicit in any attempt to analyse an object for what it ‘really’ is. We can see this idea of movement in the very act of looking at an artwork, because we cannot dig into a medal or a photograph, and find the real person nested inside the object. What we find is a quality of that person. This quality is real, but not actual.

Using the ideas and beliefs inherent in numismatic study as its guide, this chapter takes key statements associated with each of the respective methods identified in chapter two and critiques these in order to develop a synthetic methodology by which the question of material and content can be

approached. The conclusion of this chapter is that ‘quality’ arises from the index of art both as an abstraction and a form of contact. Rather than defining

denoted symbolism, the chapter posits meaning as movement along an axis, from inner judgement to exterior transformation, from representation to action. To perceive quality is to weave a surface of meaning between thought and material. There is no meaning without movement in both directions. Thought and material are mutually immanent.

In developing this methodology, the art medal acted both as object and guide. Had I set out to understand the relation of content and material in contemporary sculpture, I would have had a vast and competitive array of theoretical approaches to draw from. However, in my early researches into the medal, I found that there was a defined school of numismatic study, and that this drew on a small number of implicitly stated methods. Through careful reading of numismatic literature, I was able to infer the ideas and beliefs that underpinned these methods, and then – (because numismatic method is only rarely explicitly stated) – to identify clear expressions of these ideas and methods from other authors whose work was closely proximal to the field of study. In this way, the art medal provided its own tools for analysis.

The synthetic methodology is necessary because numismatic study relies on approaches drawn from iconography and from connoisseurship, and these are not philosophically consistent with each other. Without the work of chapter four, I would not be sure that the conclusions of this research are robust, and that they do not simply present a mirror of the object of analysis. That is why it was necessary to develop a philosophical position in relation to the nature of human perception and experience. This is the work that concludes chapter four.

Chapter five presses the analytical tools developed in chapter four into use. It presents a significant contribution to numismatic knowledge in showing that the Constantine is dependent on the iconography of Baldwin II, last Latin Emperor of Constantinople. This discovery required a great deal of archive work, as well as the interrogation of several image databases, among them the iconographic library of the Warburg Institute, London. An account of this work is presented in the Appendix.

The broader conclusion of chapter five is dependent on the discovery of the medal’s inheritance of the iconography of Baldwin II. This connection clarifies

the medal’s role in its original context: meaning emerges in the art medal through being handled alongside other objects in a collection. The materiality of the medal, its particular sense of interiority, is profoundly active in generating content. My analysis demonstrates that the art medal combines two directions of engagement with the world, a sensuous and mimetic visual language, and a more conceptual and literary abstraction. Medals are tactile, and – often – heavy things. They have a palpable and interior body, and it is this sense of inwardness that gives weight and import to the diffuse content that these objects draw together and give presence to. In this way, the medal as a material object cannot be considered separately from the medal as a source of

signification; neither can the medal be fully understood except as part of a broader system of other material objects.

In the case of the Constantine, the medal folds together an image of Baldwin II with a number of other references. These have different temporalities

associated with them, ranging from the time of personal biography, historical time and the time of Christian eschatology. The conclusion of this chapter is that the Constantine is a material device for prospection: by pairing the medal with other objects the beholder could use it to construct from among a range of potential meanings. In this way the object is exemplary of the axis of movement from interior judgement to exterior transformation. The connection with the iconography of Baldwin II is supportive of an emergent view in numismatics that the early medal, and in particular Pisanello’s adoption of the form, is associated with the cause of Eastern Christianity and crusade. In the context of our

question, the relation of material and content in artistic practice, the

Constantine is instructive as a material surface that gives access to qualities

from which content is actively constructed, in a manner of active play. In other words, as its collector uses the medal, turning it over and moving it around, pairing it with objects within a larger system of objects, it is continually made and remade. It is the materiality of the medal that draws these qualities together and makes them present.

The work of chapter five explores the question of content and material in an historical and necessarily speculative way; the final chapter of the thesis returns

to a more contemporary and tangible context. As this roadmap to the thesis explains, the project came from the demands of my own practice. It was motivated by my experience of the culture of fine art, in which I had been educated and in which I work, and my view – which was an intuition at the start of the project – that a simple activity of making can be, in itself, constructive of meaning. That is what started this research, though it was only through the art medal that I was able to approach an answer. In chapter six, I consider the practice and working methods of the British woodcarver and furniture designer David Pye, in order to set the lessons that I have drawn from the art medal in a more available and contemporary context for other makers. This penultimate chapter demonstrates exactly how the mental and the material are mutually dependent, interpenetrative and expressive. The chapter applies the findings developed from my work with art medals to another case, and shows these findings to be useful and instructive in this context as well. The chapter presents a concrete instance in which making is negotiated though materially situated systems of cognition, and this shows how we can understand a material object in relation to its makers’ intent as this is distributed through their tools and materials.

The conclusion of this chapter, and of the thesis as a whole, is that there is a structural similarity between the practice of human identity in daily life, the nature of perception and human experience, and the practice of making. All of these are necessarily involuted and materially situated activities in which movement on an axis between judgement and transformation, similarity and difference is a necessary condition of experience. In this way, this research draws the materials and techniques of practice out of their supplemental relation to intellectual or denoted meaning. Its main contribution to knowledge is to recognise material and content as imbricated aspects of experience.

This research will be useful for art and craft practioners in directing attention to what happens when we work with materials, and why this is

important. In this way, the research has moved from an approach that sought to play with the differences between art and craft to focus on what fine art and craft share, as material practices. Ultimately, the continually redrawn divide

between art and craft is not productive, and to focus on this split is to focus attention at the least interesting aspect of both zones of practice. It is more provocative to look in a granular manner at what happens when we make things, at the way in which material work is meaningful. That is exactly what this research offers. By presenting this new understanding of the relationship

between material and content in the art medal, I have been able to move beyond the rather tired divide between the zones of practice of art and craft, and to focus attention on what really matters in each case: the way in which making and the experience of made things is both mental and material.

2. Art Medals