On Richard Riemerschid and Thingliness: An Interview with Freyja Hartzell

By Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24)

Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05) is an associate professor specializing in European and American design, architecture, and art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This spring, MA student Mackensie Griffin sat down to talk to Hartzell about her new book Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things, published by MIT Press last year.

Mackensie Griffin: Hi, Freyja. I want to begin by saying congratulations on the publication of your book! When did this project begin, and why were you drawn to Richard Riemerschmid as a subject?

Freyja Hartzell: It really began when I was doing my MA at BGC in 2002, so I’ve been working on this project for about twenty years! I was in an art nouveau course with Amy Ogata, who was an inspiring professor here for many years, and I saw this incredible silverware design by Riemerschmid, who was a German Jugendstil (“Youth Style”) designer. I’d never seen anything like it—it looked like something between plants and bones. I became fascinated, and I kept kind of going back to him. What I found was that there wasn’t very much published in English on his work, so I was forced to dust off my German and go read what I could.

MG: In your book, you describe a vibrant world of objects that seems to have engaged the human imagination and your imagination. You use the word “thingliness” to describe Riemerschmid’s designs, so I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that and how thinking about objects as living beings figures into your research.

FH: Yeah, I think that’s really at the core of the whole project. I came to use “thingliness” because I was trying to find a translation for the German word Sachlichkeit It’s an important word for design and architecture in that period, but people use the English word “functionalism” as shorthand for that term. It’s usually understood as something very dry and straightforward. I was trying to reconcile how the word Sachlichkeit was applied to Riemerschmid’s work because when I look at Riemerschmid’s work, I see the opposite of that. So I looked into how that word had been used historically. What I arrived at was this idea of not straightforwardness in the sense of sobriety or objectivity, but a kind of object that, through its form or through its materials, really tells a story about what it is. Almost like the way I’m wearing my clothes or my hair tells you something about who I am. Or even how we react to meeting particular people. We might like them right away, and we’re not even quite sure why: it’s something about the way they look and the way they talk, and the way their body moves. I came to understand the word Sachlichkeit in relation to Riemerschmid’s work much more along those lines, so I came up with the adjective “thingliness.” It’s almost a transliteration of Sachlichkeit because Sache, the root of that word, can mean “thing” or sort of “matter.” Like when you say, “Let’s get to the heart of the matter,” that’s kind of what Sache is. It’s like the essence of something.

So that’s how I arrived at “thingliness.” It also lines up in many ways with a kind of current discourse in object studies. The scholar Bill Brown is credited with coming up with this idea of “thing theory,” which is in many ways similar to what I’m talking about with “thingliness” in the sense that it explores the thing as being different from the object. His idea of the thing is that it’s somehow beyond just a utilitarian object in that it has a kind of force or a presence. His work was useful for me because I didn’t want to impose a theory on the past, but I saw that what I was finding in my historical research had a lot in common with his work and with some current work that’s really about the nature of the object. Sometimes people call it “object-oriented ontology,” but that also gives you a sense of this idea that objects have some sort of presence beyond what we usually credit them with.

In this book, I play around a lot with the notion of objects coming alive. I think it might be important to make the distinction that I’m not so much pretending that objects come alive, but I’m really talking about blurring the lines between the way that we typically understand relations between subjects and objects. I feel like Riemerschmid’s objects— for example, a mustard pot with feet that he designed in 1902 (pictured below)—start to approach the subject and encourage the user to start to think differently about what our relationships to objects are, and maybe start to unsettle that perceived stability that I exist over here and the thing exists over there. I got really interested in that because I started to realize as I was doing more research that it wasn’t just about a fantasy that Riemerschmid had, although I think he was very fanciful, imaginative, and playful. I think he was doing what I would call “serious play.” He was really invested in that kind of fantasy, but also that these objects, being kind of animated in their forms, were able to take on roles in the household.

The example that I use all the time when I talk about this is a beer mug he designed: it’s a piece of salt-glazed stoneware that has a long historical tradition in German society, and people would’ve understood it as something fundamentally German. In the early twentieth century in Germany, design was being taken really seriously. People were thinking carefully about their purchasing choices and what to have in their houses. This mug would have seemed modern but also historically rooted. The combination of modernity, historicism, and a physical, animated appeal creates an experience for the user. It becomes much more about a narrative or a tableau or a play that’s happening in the interior, and it’s influencing the people who use it just as much as the people who use it can pick the thing up and take a drink out of it. I like using the word thingliness not only because the sound of the word mimics Sachlichkeit, but it also evokes the kind of playful animacy that I’m trying to convey in the writing. I tried to write the book in a way that invites the reader to play within that space. Even though it’s a scholarly book, I also want it to be a book with which people can become absorbed in the same way that they would become absorbed in using the objects.

MG: Yes, definitely. I found your writing to be very engaging, and I loved the wide range of sources you pull from: you incorporate fairy tales, theory, art history, and natural history. I also noticed quotes from theater historians and a puppetry scholar. I personally respond to that kind of writing, and I feel like it engages a variety of interests and people. It made me wonder about your approach to researching and writing this book and if you have a process?

FH: Yeah, that’s a great question because I’m working on a new project now, and I’m trying to figure out what my process is! I try to strike a balance. I guess what I mean by that is I kind of work from a hunch. Looking at an object or reading a text, I tend to have an instinct. Usually, the research process kind of flows from that instinct. What I find in my own work is that my job is to really stay honest, and when I’m in the archive, to bring my instinct about the form or the objects that I’ve seen into contact with the archival material and really try to figure out if my hunch is correct. Sometimes that’s a daily process. When I’m doing really active research, if I’m on a fellowship or I’m traveling, and I’m looking at archives, I try to go into the archive every day with a new question. Not so much what am I looking for, but what am I asking of this material? What is it that I’m trying to figure out? That’s usually helpful, especially because anybody who does archival research knows that it’s really easy to get overwhelmed. You’ve got all kinds of stuff in front of you, and you could go down a rabbit hole. Sometimes you do, and it’s a great rabbit hole, but I think it really helps me to stay rooted in the object and then to bring that object into conversation with the more textual sources that I’m looking at. I say this in the book too, but it’s important to me that I’m not writing text and applying it to the object. I’m not theorizing and then being like, “And here’s an example of my theory.” I’m working from the object out and trying to see where it occupies historical space.

For this project, I did a lot of periodicals research, and I found these brilliant intellectuals writing in a very earnest way about design objects. There was very strong interest in the philosophical and intellectual dimensions of design. That kind of blew me away because the things that I saw in Riemerschmid’s objects they also saw. That was a wonderful confirmation to me because it was like, okay, I’m not just some goofy art historian or design historian coming in and imposing my opinions on this stuff. I’m seeing something that was seen one hundred years ago.

So I guess my process is a balance between bringing in historical literature, keeping in touch with the objects, and then also thinking about what contemporary scholars are wrestling with. Some of this interest in object-oriented ontology, or neovitalism, is part of what we’ve been talking about at BGC for a while now, with the concept of active matter: that objects are made up of energetic matter. They have lives, and they change and decay. In this project, it was exciting to see all those things come together and then try to figure out a way to write about it to make it so that readers would actually care. That was probably the biggest challenge.

MG: Well, I’d say that you’ve succeeded. Having taken your class “Doll Parts” in my first year at BGC, I saw a lot of connections between our class discussions and your work on Riemerschmid. I know that you’re currently working on putting together a BGC Focus Exhibition related to that class and your research on dolls. I’m just wondering if you also see intersections between these two projects?

FH: I’m glad you asked because I had to really think about that. It’s going to be a Focus show, and I’m also writing a book on this topic. I think it’ll be called “Doll Parts: Designing Likeness.” It’s funny, when I pivoted to the doll topic, I was like, “Well, now for something completely different!” But I quickly realized that the subject–object relationship that I was talking about earlier really connects the two projects. In many ways, I feel as though the doll is kind of the quintessential object for this because it’s designed to be a companion and to look like us. Of course, the big question is why do we design something that looks like us, and what does that mean? People say to me, “Dolls are so creepy. Why are you working on dolls?” I think that another word for creepiness is “uncanny,” and I think the whole point of the uncanny is that it does destabilize the relation between the subject and the object.

We have this thing that we know is not alive, but at the same time we imagine what its life might be. If we say it’s creepy, it’s because we have this fantasy of the doll coming to life and doing something weird or being dangerous or getting up to no good. I think it’s that strange place that I’m interested in exploring. And I feel like if I pick up

Riemerschmid’s mustard pot, it’s not so different from a doll, but thinking about dolls is almost like going to the source.

I’d like somebody to argue with me about this, but I don’t feel like I know another type of object that gets at this question of “Where is the boundary between the subject and the object?” in the same way that the doll does. To make a long answer short, I’m exploring the same questions, but now with the quintessential material object. I think another reason for me to work on the doll project is that I want to keep exploring these ideas that are so fascinating to me, but I don’t want to write about a single artist. I don’t want to write about a man. I want to be working at this intersection of race and ethnicity and gender and ability. Dolls are the best objects to be able to expand the scope of who this project is about and who it’s for.

MG: It is interesting to think of objects as dolls. I don’t think we think that we form the same attachment with a beer mug as a child does with a doll, but maybe we actually do. They’re like adult playthings.

FH: Right? I know we talked about this in the course, but so many things can be a doll without having to have all the attributes that we think about. One of the students in my class this semester brought in corn husks, and we made corn husk dolls. They’re made of almost nothing, and still, they can be dolls.

MG: Absolutely. My niece has a scrap of blanket that she has carried around with her since she was a toddler, and she named it Margaret as one would name a doll.

FH: I love that. We’ve also got this impulse to animate things. We seem to all do it when we kick technology that isn’t working or we yell at stuff. We can’t seem to understand that only humans are human. I find that totally fascinating.

MG: True, everyone forms an attachment to their objects, and they’re our constant companions. Just a final question on that note: I was curious if you have specific objects or furniture at home that you think of as a living being or a companion or something that sort of guides you?

FH: Well, the answer to that question is a bit sentimental, but I guess that’s kind of part of it. A couple of years ago, my mom passed away. Her house was a Connecticut saltbox house built in 1707. I inherited that house and moved in with my kids. I was just saying this to somebody the other day, and I think it all the time: that house, it’s a person. It’s absolutely saturated in history. It’s mind-boggling to think about all the people who lived there and used that house. It is the materials, the design, the fireplaces, the way that I walk around it, in and out of the spaces, touching it, and bumping my head on things! It feels like a living thing that I’m collaborating with. Even when it falls apart and does bad things, it feels like somebody I’m negotiating with. I grew up all over the world and I had homes that I loved, but I think this is the first time that I felt that way about a building. It would be very, very hard for me to leave that house. Part of it is because of my mom, but a lot of it is this feeling of having a partnership with an inanimate thing. It’s this daily give-and-take. I want to go home and tell the house that I just told you that [laughs].

MG: You should, don’t keep any secrets from the house! [laughs] But thank you for sharing. I think that’s beautiful and a perfect way to bring this conversation to a close.

Andrew Kircher

I am BGC’s director of Public Humanities + Research. In addition to my core responsibilities—public programming and media, gallery education, research programs, and fellowship—I launched a new course in spring 2023 called “Public Humanities.” A group of six students (including three international exchange students) explored critical theories of public engagement, participated in curator meetings for upcoming BGC exhibitions, and learned practical skills including budgeting, contracting, and navigating intellectual property rights. This course culminated in a fully developed public programming proposal for an upcoming exhibition of their choice. While this was designed as a liminal exercise—a practice-based learning process— many of the thoughtfully designed programs submitted by the students will, in fact, be realized in the years to come!

My interactive art installation The Gift was installed at the main branch of the New York Public Library and was in a presentation from March through June 2023 at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs. I collaborated on A Thousand Ways, an interactive experience that has toured to more than fifty locations in ten countries and has been translated into six languages. I recently was dramaturg for a new research-based artwork by Sister Sylvester and Nadah El Shazly, The Constantinopoliad, on the early life of poet C. P. Cavafy, supported by the Onassis Foundation.

Deborah L. Krohn

I spent the fall semester putting the finishing touches on my Focus Exhibition and accompanying book, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800, which opened in mid-February. My fall 2022 class, based on the research for the book and exhibition, culminated in a student-created website that used images from a seventeenth-century deck of playing cards illustrated with images based on the manuals for carving meats and fruits that are featured in the exhibition. For the exhibition’s opening week, I was thrilled to host master napkin folder Joan Sallas, who helped stage the sculpted linen napkins and delighted students and the public with his spirited workshops. Other sold-out public events included a symposium titled “Instruments of Dining” that featured the well-known creator of historic installations Ivan Day, historian Molly Taylor-Poleskey, and art historian Evelyn Lincoln, and an evening program with Day in dialogue with the early music ensemble Sonnambula, which performed period table music. A final public event featured a screening of a new film about food in Paris called The Way It Was. Directed by art historian Stephen Scher with James Ivory as executive producer, the film was shot during the 1970s and recently re-cut. Among my other recent publications is a book chapter, “Verbal Representations of Furniture,” that appeared in A Cultural History of Furniture: The Age of Exploration, 1500–1700, edited by Christina M. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury in 2022.

Meredith B. Linn

In 2022–23, I was busy teaching, organizing conferences, giving talks, and finishing writing projects. During the fall semester, I taught “Archaeologies of American Life” and “Medical Materialities.” In the spring, I co-taught “Unsettling Things” with Drew Thompson and “Digital Archaeological Heritage” with Caspar Meyer. I supervised Kenna Libes’s PhD exam and MA ʼ23 Emily Harvey’s qualifying paper, and I participated in BGC’s “Shape of Time” public event, organized by Jeffrey L. Collins and Joshua Massey. With Catherine Whalen and Columbia University colleagues Mary Marshall Clark, Amy Starcheski, Eileen Gillooly, and Chris Chang, I co-organized the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium meeting, during which I gave a walking tour of the Seneca Village site, a workshop on public humanities and material culture, and, with

Catherine, an object workshop using BGC’s Study Collection.

This year I also gave walking tours of Seneca Village to the Metropolitan Chapter of the New York State Archaeological Association and an NYU class. I presented talks about Seneca Village for the Louis Latimer House Museum, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and a course at Fordham University. With Jessica Striebel MacLean and Felipe Gaitan-Ammann, I co-organized a symposium about urban archaeology at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Lisbon; there, I presented a paper about my new research on Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City.

An article I workshopped at BGC in 2021, “Neither Snake Oils nor Miracle Cures: Interpreting Nineteenth-Century Proprietary Medicines,” was published in Historical Archaeology, and a book chapter I co-authored with Nan Rothschild and Diana diZerega Wall was published in Advocacy and Archaeology: Urban Intersections, edited by Kelly Britt and Diane George. My two book projects are nearing completion: the monograph Irish Fever is being page set and the publication Revealing Communities, which I am editing, will soon return from peer review.

Finally, BGC doctoral candidate

Tova Kadish and I taught BGC’s Summer School for Undergraduates, focusing on the archaeology of New York City. Teaching

François Louis

I offered two courses in fall 2022: “Design and Material Culture of the Qing Period, 1644–1912” and “Tang Gold and Silver.” The latter was done in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jason Sun, curator of early Chinese art, kindly made it possible to have several viewing sessions in the Met’s storage including one with Michael Seymour, curator of ancient Near Eastern art. In the spring term, I taught a course on the decorative arts of Mongol China (circa 1200–1400). I also resumed my tenure as director of doctoral studies for the year, filling in for associate professor Ittai Weinryb, who was on research leave.

Last fall I was a discussant for a conference panel, “Inscribed Metalwork from China,” at the University of Pennsylvania and a contributor to the Bard Graduate Center event “Reading The Shape of Time, 60 Years Later.” In September, I will give a paper at the Conference of the European Association for Asian Art and Archaeology to be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. My talk is part of a panel on collecting, titled “The Object that Isn’t.” I have also been invited to speak on Liao dynasty art at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, together with BGC doctoral student Boxi Liu. Next spring, I will be on sabbatical leave. I hope to see my article on “Jue tripods” in press by then.

Annissa Malvoisin

Throughout the past academic year, I gave several public and guest lectures including the David F. Grose Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Classics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the Ceramics History Seminar at Alfred University; and “Collective Histories: Display Practice of Ancient African Collections” at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.

In fall 2022, I traveled to London to conduct research on the display of African art in museum collections and to view the exhibition Africa Fashion, which opened in June 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum and was co-curated by myself and the institution’s curator of African art. In spring 2023, I co-curated Sakimatwemtwe: A Century of Reflection on the Arts of Africa

I presented my doctoral and curatorial research on the display of African collections on two separate panels—first at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle and then at the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) Annual Meeting in Boston. On a separate panel at ASOR, I presented my research on interregional connections between late antique Egypt and Meroitic Nubia and Iron Age Nigerian Nok, Malian Jenné-Jeno, and Garammantian Fezzan (Libya) through material culture.

I contributed to the exhibition catalogue of Africa & Byzantium, opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in fall 2023, and will publish a review of the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina in a forthcoming issue of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

I offered a new course on African art at BGC in spring 2023, titled “Global Materials along the Nile: 3400 BCE–500 CE.” During the summer, I planned the upcoming symposium

“Exhibiting Africa” with associate professor Drew Thompson.

Jennifer L. Mass

This year I developed a new course, “Science and Sylvester Manor,” which consisted of seminars on the technologies behind the nineteenth-century collection that comprises most of the extant material in the Sylvester Manor building, a Georgian home dating to 1735. This is Bard Graduate Center’s first laboratory-oriented course in which the students were asked to evaluate their chosen objects (or decorative finishes) through a scientific lens. Each student selected a semester-long research project focused on an object from the manor and studied this object using elemental and molecular analysis (X-ray fluorescence and

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Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, respectively). We visited the manor in September, giving the students an opportunity to select their objects for study, examine these objects in relation to the rest of the collection and document them in situ. In selecting the objects for study, we worked with Donnamarie Barnes, the director of history and heritage at the manor. The course proved to be immensely popular, and the students enjoyed delivering the results of their research as presentations and papers for the manor staff. The manor is incorporating the results of the students’ research into their interpretation tours.

My article, “Selenium-Based Black Bronze Treatments, as Compared to Other Patination Technologies of Ancient and Historic Black Bronzes,” was selected for publication in Technè, a French journal of technical art history, as part of a special two-issue series on the technologies behind black surfaces on works of art. In addition, I have had a book chapter accepted for publication, “New Advances in Technical Art History,” which will be included in All About Appraising: The Definitive Appraisal Handbook (3rd Edition), which comes out in 2024. Two journal articles that I wrote were published this year: “Modigliani’s Painted Nudes: a Technical Study” and “Works by Modigliani that Have Paintings beneath the Visible Surface.” Both appeared in Tate Papers, no. 35, 2023. I also have several manuscripts in progress, including

“When Is Art Crime a History Lesson in Disguise? A Reassessment of Authenticity Focused on Objects versus Paintings,” a commissioned article for a special issue of the Journal of Art Crime that will be edited by Jehane Ragai, and “The Chemistry and Physics of Color inside the World’s Most Magnificent Paintings and Gemstones,” a book chapter for a volume on color edited by Benjamin Zucker.