Method and the Landscape

This weeks readings could be categorized as a mix of material cultural method and how landscape influences our understanding of material culture. In the article Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America by Kenneth L. Ames, we are taken on trip through the American Victorian era through hallway furniture like the hall stand and the card receiver. During Ames's dissection of these items in understanding the culture of this long gone cultural period, he highlights the importance of literature, picture, and archival information to supplement our current understanding of a past culture. Through his object analysis, Ames discusses the importance of the environment in which these items are typically placed within the context of the Victorian upper-middle class home.

Although it is important to understand and analyze an objects appearance and place within an archival context, landscape plays an integral role for an object's importance within a culture and society. In A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, John Brinckeroff Jackson describes the varied aspects of the American landscape, from forests to roads, and they impact culture (and how culture impacts the landscape. What I found intriguing was his chapter on how American culture has changed overtime in their perceptions and interactions with the natural environment, and the fact that the involving wilderness and nature as something we can blend with is proving detrimental to the environment as a whole. The ways in which humans interact with their environment and alter their landscape in regards to their values and beliefs will be an integral aspect to my own analysis of the Celsiana rose. Like other flowers and plants of importance within our cultures, the Celsiana has been altered and changed through human intervention to promote the aspects of beauty and fragrance for which it was highly regarded. It is also important to understand how overtime the importance of the Celsiana rose has been altered, and how present day concepts of nature impacts its relevance today.

Objects and Images

This weeks readings revolved around images and the meanings and messages that they provide to the cultures they serve. Roland Barthes demonstrates the three ways in which an image produces context and signs for the viewer through linguistic, coded, and non-coded messages. [1] These messages are utilized to anchor meaning to the images (in the case of linguistic messages), and the provide encrypted cultural context or information through the images themselves in the case of the coded message. Ultimately, Barthes deconstruction of images provides us with tools to understand how individuals and groups can witness the same image and come away with a different meaning. His tools also add to how we can understand the creator's intentions in creating the image or object that they have chosen to add to our cultural frame work. Adding to Barthes's concepts of images is Wendy Bellion and her book Citizen Spectator, in which she argues that illusions influenced the cultivation of particular skills "of looking" which influenced the larger American cultural landscape.[2] Bellion uses prominent artistic works by such artists as Charles Wilson Peale to demonstrate how the art of visual illusion or trompe l'oeil facilitated particular meaning and thinking within the cultures they facilitated. Ultimately, Barthes and Bullion have added to our conversations on objects and material culture by providing us with tools in how to engage images as objects or images of objects and their influence and context within a society's overall culture. In my own object analysis of the Celsiana rose, I hope to engage with the concept of how their image influenced the cultures of early American in contrast to how it is perceived today. Did those of the past utilize the image of the Celsiana in a way to interpret messages to the masses or small majority? How to we pull messages from their images today in comparison to the past?

[1] Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image,"
[2]Wendy Bullion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America, (University of North Carolina Press: 2011).