Ellery Foutch
I'm an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at Middlebury College, where I teach classes on the art and material culture of the U.S. as well as critical museum studies.
I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2011 with a dissertation titled "Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale's Butterflies, Heade's Hummingbirds, Blaschka's Flowers, and Sandow's Body" and am currently revising and reworking this material as a book project (abstract below).
My recent articles include an exploration of patents for portable magic lantern projectors and illuminated, wearable technologies, and an analysis of nineteenth-century glass ballot boxes and notions of political transparency. My current book manuscript investigates fascinations with perfection and its preservation in art and natural history of the nineteenth century.
The pursuit of perfection pervades 19th-century American art and culture. While historical interpretations of this era posit a binary opposition of competing desires—an embrace of progress and new technologies, versus anti-modernist nostalgia—my work identifies and analyzes a previously unstudied phenomenon: the desire to stop time at a “perfect moment,” pausing the cycle of growth, decay, and rebirth to arrest and preserve a perfect state, forestalling decay or death. Four case studies in diverse visual media illuminate this notion of the perfect moment: Titian Peale’s Lepidoptera portfolios and specimen cases; films, photographs, and sculptures of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow; and Harvard’s collection of Blaschka Glass Flowers.
Address: Axinn Center, Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont 05753 USA
I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2011 with a dissertation titled "Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale's Butterflies, Heade's Hummingbirds, Blaschka's Flowers, and Sandow's Body" and am currently revising and reworking this material as a book project (abstract below).
My recent articles include an exploration of patents for portable magic lantern projectors and illuminated, wearable technologies, and an analysis of nineteenth-century glass ballot boxes and notions of political transparency. My current book manuscript investigates fascinations with perfection and its preservation in art and natural history of the nineteenth century.
The pursuit of perfection pervades 19th-century American art and culture. While historical interpretations of this era posit a binary opposition of competing desires—an embrace of progress and new technologies, versus anti-modernist nostalgia—my work identifies and analyzes a previously unstudied phenomenon: the desire to stop time at a “perfect moment,” pausing the cycle of growth, decay, and rebirth to arrest and preserve a perfect state, forestalling decay or death. Four case studies in diverse visual media illuminate this notion of the perfect moment: Titian Peale’s Lepidoptera portfolios and specimen cases; films, photographs, and sculptures of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow; and Harvard’s collection of Blaschka Glass Flowers.
Address: Axinn Center, Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont 05753 USA
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Papers by Ellery Foutch
This essay explores the rhetorics of visibility and transparency that made themselves manifest in material form in the mid-19th century: a glass ballot box, designed, patented, and manufactured in New York in 1856-1857 and later illustrated in dozens of political cartoons and allegorical representations of the democratic process. Just as the hanging chad, the butterfly ballot, and the Diebold voting machine came to exemplify fears and anxieties about voting, democracy, and representation at the turn of the twenty-first century, Jollie’s glass ballot box is a compelling embodiment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century election concerns, of both anxieties and aspirations for American democracy.
http://common-place.org/article/glass-ballot-box-political-transparency/
This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Talks by Ellery Foutch