OBJECTS AS HISTORY – LECTURE 1

As we all know – History is the study of a whole lot of series of past events connected with a particular person or thing. But to further study this subject, Objects as history we broke it into 2 parts – Objects and History and tried to understand each individually.

History – Refers to the past, the events, the stories, the mythology and the chronology.
Objects ( with respect to history ) – Refers to the turning points in history ; eg – the wheel, tools, art pieces, artifacts, etc.

History is an important aspect to study design because it is the understanding of what was the previous century like, the materials used, why were they used, the tools, the pigments, the designs carved, origin of the artwork and how it has evolved over time.

Artifacts are also a great deal to study the previous eras . Artifacts are objects made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest. It is something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure.

We then moved on to understanding the difference between history, object and artifact, we learnt about the different ages- Stone Age, Bronze Age, etc. Stone Age is divided in three- Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic.

Art and History go hand in hand but are different in some aspects –

Art helps us record history, the emotions and feelings depicted through art also conveys a message.
to understand the creations, discoveries and the materials that were used then. The method the artisans used and the stories they want to convey is all depicted through visual culture, or Art.
Art was used as a means of communication between the people when they did not have a language or a spoken dialect.
Art thereby provides a means of factual difference between all the historic accounts and items.
Visual culture is an act of seeing, and visually understanding culture and the various cultural aspects, etc

Next our faculty showed us images of paintings.

One of the images was of the very first cave painting that was created in France. It was so primitive that historians felt that it was done by kids.
The next one was of a painting in Argentina which shows a number of hands on a side of a cave, some of which are coloured and some which have colour outside. This cave painting shows how they kept a track of the members, and also show how they wanted to show their presence in that particular cave.
The ones in Spain were highly precise and intricate. The paintings here were huge and the details were many. We believe that they must have used their fingers in order to do the drawings as brushes were not invented yet.

Since brushes were not invented by that time, we decided to study what tools were used in the Neolithic, Paleolithic and Chalcolithic Age.

The tools used in the Neolithic Age were – scrapers , blades, arrows, spearheads, adzes, chisels, leaf shaped flint, hand axes, etc.

The tools used in the Paleolithic Age were – rudimentary chipped stone tools, wood, bone, blade cores, end scrapers, awls, burins, clovis points, etc.

The tools used in Chalcolithic Age were – knives, axes, fishing hooks, pins, chisels, rods, etc.

Conclusion : this lecture taught me about how History and Art go hand in hand, the difference between Artifact and Object, History and Art. Then i studied the tools, their invention, life before their invention, the difference between the tools used in the – Paleolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic Ages. I also learnt how important history is for art, how design and art are related, and how history is extremely crucial for design and what we can adapt from history and art to reinvent design and improve it in such a manner that it fulfills all our modern requirements.

Citation :