Page - 26 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

26 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation history of objects, including as it does ephemeral yet material entities like music and theater. One might ask how a theatrical performance could count as a material entity. There are specific material conditions in which theater occurs, specific modifications of real and imagined spatial boundaries, which stage designers achieve through op- tical and physical transformations of architecture. Music, likewise, might exist in its purest form in the mind of a composer, but its conveyance to others occurs mater- ially, either through printed scores or through the specific cultural conditions that govern performance. All art is in some manner of understanding a skilled manipula- tion of matter to produce desired effects on the senses. There are several implications to Prown’s definition of material culture. The first is that it demands the convergence of disciplines. The study of landscape modification, for example, can be undertaken by an art historian, but may just as well take place in a different university department, that in the United States is termed Landscape Architecture or Garden History. The study of devices, likewise, may fall to historians of science or historians of technology, scholars not necessarily trained in the study of art. Yet these objects are designed as much as anything else, and they do in fact change appearance over time and become obsolete, much as works of art change style and go in and out of popularity. Prown’s list calls for a truly interdisciplinary study of culture, including – but by no means limited to – painting and sculpture, and indeed is the study of nearly all human experience as understood through material transformations. Perhaps it is understood best as the history of design, again in its broadest sense. The second point, less obvious from this list, is that Prown’s definition keeps its focus on the object as a basis for historical analysis. This is a more radical move than might first appear to be the case. In the United States, for example, the “visual turn” of the 1990s has pushed art history to become a discipline of images, not objects, and questions of optics, the gaze, technologies of vision, and other such concepts have been normalized into the scholarly discourse. German-language scholars have followed suit in naming visuelle Kultur, Bildwissenschaft, or Visualistik as interdisci- plinary projects devoted to the visual, and they have battled with and sometimes subsumed art history into their missions. The danger here is that most of the art we study, and nearly all the Habsburg-Lorraine cultural legacy that is the focus of this volume, does not just consist of imagery, but are also of things. Emphasizing the visual over the tactile, physical, and experiential components of historical art robs that art of an essential component of its significance. Material culture studies, in re- orienting attention to the object and its materiality, the physical presence and object- hood of art, holds the potential to access meanings inherent in objects that otherwise would remain closed.