Textile

An Iconology of the Textile in Art and Architecture

Project Summary

The fabrication of textiles is one of the oldest and foundational cultural technologies. The objective of the interdisciplinary research project is to investigate the historical meanings, functions and theories of the textile medium in art and architecture from the Middle Ages to the present. The exploration of this specific artistic medium should result in a historical theory of the textile in its artistic performativity. The traditional notion of iconology, which is currently undergoing a reevaluation within the hermeneutically oriented disciplines of image research, is the methodological point of departure. The project focused on the textile discourse engages in a field of research situated between art and architectural history and within cultural and visual studies, involving also other disciplines such as literary studies and social history. Moreover, it aims at connecting the two scientific cultures of the university and the museum, as the theoretical approach is accompanied by studies of concrete textile objects. It also draws transdisciplinary expertise from contemporary art. The project deals with interconnected subject areas such as textile media of painting and sculpture, constructions of space, sacred textiles, tapestries, and installation art. Other fields of research are the myths of the origins of the textile, questions of representation, relations between textuality and narrativity, transmediality, modernity and the assumed femininity of the textile arts. This cross-disciplinary perspective requires a variety of instrumental methods ranging from iconography to anthropological approaches, and from gender studies to textual analysis.
One Principal Investigator and several Doctoral and Postdoctoral Researchers aim to performing basic research in an innovative and contemporary field, in order to contribute to the establishment of the history of textile art as an academic discipline and to the advancement of art and architectural history towards a general history of images, artefacts, and media.
The project is financed by the Swiss national science foundation (former SNSF Professorship, since 1 March 2008) and by the European Research Council (ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant, from 1 September 2009) until 2012 and 2013 respectively. TEXTILE is also an associated project of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Mediality - Historical Perspectives (Project E.8).