Events

2nd November 2012 Workshop: "Not praising, burying"

A workshop/symposium, to be understood as an artwork, that brings together archaeology, art practice, art history, philosophy, classics and history to interrogate assumptions about status, art and culture through classical Greek pottery will take place at the Fitwilliam Museum. This talk will describe this type of art practice and its processes. A few of the workshop participants including artist and Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Alana Jelinek, archaeologist David Gill, and Kettles Yard's Sarah Campbell will present their impressions.

Further info: About the workshop Initiated by Alana Jelinek, this event brings together a range of artists and academics plus members of the public to discuss cutting-edge scholarly ideas and interrogate those ideas through art practice. The workshop starts with the position presented in Artful Crafts by eminent archaeologists Michael Vickers and David Gill, where they argue that ancient Greek ceramicists were a low-status class within society and that the objects they made were not high status or artistic objects but mere skeuomorphs of more prized objects made of gold, silver and ivory. Prof David Gill will be presenting this thesis at the beginning of the workshop. Participants will then attempt to understand its implications through a process of making, not replicas of past red- and black-figure pottery, but renegotiations of the proposed type of object in the light of this new understanding. Other formal contributions to the discussion will include an art historian's and a philosopher's response, though every participant is expected to participate fully in the discussion in order to understand afresh these supposedly well-understood objects. The process of making and thinking, where thinking informs making and making informs thinking, will be highlighted in this workshop, not the newly created vessels as product. These are to be understood as mere by-products of a larger artistic process. The process used in the workshop will be documented and presented as an artwork at a later date.