Wenyi Qian

“Paper, Scissors, Stone: Modular Imagination and the Ornament in Motion in Late Sixteenth-Century Inlaid Table Designs”

This presentation is a study of the material, aesthetic and operational agency of ornament drawings on paper in the process of crafting hardstone inlaid tables in late sixteenth-century Italy. Drawing on designs for inlaid tables in several albums housed in Rome and Madrid, as well as a series of colored and uncolored drawings in Florence that could be related to an extant inlaid table in Palazzo Pitti, I excavate their generative, collaborative, and open-ended quality in order to better describe the ways in which they participated in and drew upon artisanal modes of making and thinking. I propose “modular imagination” as a kinaesthetic mental operation that bridges conception on paper and the making of artefacts and sets copious ornaments in motion from paper to stone. This mental operation is mirrored by a set of artisanal paper techniques—cutting, pasting, and assemblage. I further elucidate the various ways in which graphic, chromatic, and textual elements in drawings point towards distinct material and technical aspects of the final object. As such, my study connects furniture designs emphatically to material facture, in a way to further break down the boundary between making and thinking that undergirds notions of early modern design.

Kimberley Chow

“‘The Poet, a Painter in his way’: Painting an Aesthetics of Intimacy Through Exoticism and Orientalism in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.”

This paper explores the ways Aphra Behn’s exoticism and orientalism in Oroonoko constructs an aesthetic art object in the form of her titular character, Oroonoko. Oroonoko, as text and character, consists of an amalgamation of different literary genres overlapping, intersecting, and pieced together that I call Behn’s Oroonoko scrapbook, creating the first layer of the authoress’s visual textuality. The second layer comprises of decorating, ornamenting, and varnishing her scrapbook through the exotic and oriental with Oroonoko as the focal point. This second layer works to elicit an aesthetic response from the reader in which Behn’s decorative aestheticization of text and character allows her to lay authorial claim over Oroonoko. Finally, I analyze the horrific climax of the text: Oroonoko’s seemingly pointless disembowelment and dismemberment. The question I consider is why does Behn work to create a beautiful art piece by repeatedly aestheticizing and decorating him, only for the art piece to be destroyed in such a gruesome and gory manner in the text’s finale? I argue that Oroonoko’s destruction is Behn’s ultimate claim to artistic authority and that her “Royal Slave” submits to no one but her.