The Extraordinary Life of a Work of Art

It’s tempting to think of a work of art as a fixed object, frozen in the time in which it was created. But art, like life, continues to evolve. Inspired by Rodin’s The Thinker, the Keithley Symposium’s inaugural presentation, Life of an Object: The Thinker as Prism, on September 27 and 28 will explore the extraordinary lives of works of art and how their meanings may shift over time.

Artist Jim Hodges opens the symposium with a keynote address at the Tinkham Veale University Center, Case Western Reserve University, on Thursday, September 27, at 5:00 p.m. After he first visited the CMA, Hodges grew fascinated with the museum’s The Thinker, which was damaged by a bomb in 1970, and it has informed his thinking over time. In his keynote, he will consider the potential for liveness in objects— their potential to change in meaning over time — and the role of museums in making that liveness possible. One of Hodges’ sculptures, Untitled (bridge of harmony), 2012–2014, is in the Donna and Stewart Kohl Sculpture Garden on the museum’s east lawn.

On Friday, September 28, the symposium moves to the CMA for panel discussions and workshops. Led by internationally acclaimed artists, conservators, curators, and scholars, each panel will examine a life stage that an artwork goes through. Each panelist will engage that life stage through a different lens. Afternoon workshops will run concurrently. Each workshop will offer an opportunity to explore the theme of the conference in smaller groups.

“With this symposium, we are bringing together an international, interdisciplinary group of thinkers who are invested in understanding the connection between materiality and meaning and how the meanings of objects shift over time,” explains Key Jo Lee, assistant director of academic affairs at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “We are hopeful that whether you are a complete newcomer to art or art history or a deeply invested scholar yourself, you will learn something.”

Here, Lee elaborates on the symposium and what attendees can expect from this biannual event.

CMA: How did this symposium come together?

Lee: Planning began with the idea of iconoclasm, which traditionally means the destruction of objects based on a desire to destroy an icon in an effort to destroy what that icon represents. Such efforts are often, but not always, driven by political or religious strife.

The attempted destruction of The Thinker changed its meaning forever.

When we were considering the symposium and its focus on an object’s life, we were also considering a quote by the then director of the museum Sherman Lee about the aftermath of the bombing of The Thinker:

“One’s first reaction is to lament that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put The Thinker back together again. But is it not even a more significant work, damaged as it is? No one can pass the shattered green man without asking himself what it tells us about the violent climate of the U.S.A. in the year 1970. It is more than just a work of art now.”

Director Lee thought The Thinker had gained meaning because of, not in spite of, its damaged state. From a contemporary vantage, it invites you to think differently about it, about the year 1970 when it was bombed, and about 1913 when it was cast.

“One’s first reaction is to lament that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put The Thinker back together again. But is it not even a more significant work, damaged as it is? No one can pass the shattered green man without asking himself what it tells us about the violent climate of the U.S.A. in the year 1970. It is more than just a work of art now.” — Sherman Lee, CMA director, 1958–1983

CMA: Besides physical alterations, what are some other ways that the meaning of objects can shift over time?

Lee: With this symposium, we are trying to show how art objects can unlock moments in history.

For example, the artist Fred Wilson is one panelist who will focus on the afterlives of objects. Wilson’s oeuvre is distinguished by his practice of mining the archives and storage facilities of museums and creating installations of historic objects that imply labor and trauma of enslaved black flesh without offering the viewer actual bodies to contemplate. For his landmark 1992 exhibition, Mining the Museum, Wilson went into the archives of major museums and pulled out colonial objects including a beautiful eighteenth-century tea set and a pair of shackles.

The installations he created were arranged so that you could not avoid the entanglement of slavery with the production of these fine objects. In this way, Wilson forced visitors to reckon with the traumatic origins of revered objects without reinscribing the violence of the slave trade upon those vulnerable to its past and present iterations. He challenges us through a confrontation with the troubled beauty of what he places on display by emphasizing their materiality, or how and of what these objects are made.

Or consider the portrait miniature, of which the CMA has a wonderful collection.

When we consider these miniatures, we are often drawn to their small, personal scale, the delicacy of the ivory support, and considerations of mastery of technique involved in creating these precious objects. However, it is rare that we consider how the materiality of these objects — the how and what — contributes to their meaning.

From where did the ivory come? Often the African continent. Also, ivory must undergo an incredible transformation to become receptive to watercolor. Prior to reaching the hands of the painter, tusks have been harvested, bundled, insured, and shipped. Tusks, much like tree trunks, grow as a spiral. Therefore, they must be unrolled, pressed, and cut into the eventual wafer-thin supports. This complicated story of transport and manufacture is deeply bound to the meaning of portrait miniatures, but how so?

Watercolor and ivory are not natural partners. An ivory surface must be chemically prepared to bond with the water-based pigments in watercolor paint. Without these processes, they would reject each other. As such, the material intimacy between support and medium is a fragile one that can illuminate the often painful intimacy between the potential beauty and the potential brutality of objects. Or it can illuminate the beauty in that which is often perceived as brutal. How might we attend to these subtleties whether we are professionally trained or very new at engaging art objects? How does the museum as a context impact these questions?

“…the material intimacy between support and medium is a fragile one that can illuminate the often painful intimacy between the potential beauty and the potential brutality of objects. Or it can illuminate the beauty in that which is often perceived as brutal. How might we attend to these subtleties whether we are professionally trained or very new at engaging art objects?” — Key Jo Lee, assistant director of academic affairs at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Questions like these and many more will be explored at the symposium through panels of experts, Q & A, and hand-on workshops, including a close-looking session, an examination of prints outside of their frames, and a look at clippings files in the Ingalls Library and Museum Archives.

For a full program listing or to register for the free symposium, please visit our website. The Keithley Symposium is co-sponsored by the Case Western Reserve University Department of Art History and Art, the Case Western Reserve University College of Arts and Sciences, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.