Vessels beyond Containment

From earliest times, humans have engaged with vessels, whether natural and handmade. Vessels as portable or movable objects conserve and transport other materials, such as liquids or food. They consist of a shell, case or envelope which separates an inside and an outside, between density and porosity. Made from a great variety of materials and shapes, vessels span a large array of forms, and they act as prime agents of transcultural exchange. The study of vessels presents immense methodological challenges for disciplines concerned with visual and material culture.

This research project posits that vessels are conceptually and materially multidimensional; they are ontologically, aesthetically and historically complex. The selection and display of just those most precious, rare, intact, and ornamented examples beyond glass cases in museum displays, and the two-dimensional images in publications tend to flatten this complexity. As sites of interface between humans and their environments, vessels present a wealth of affordances, involving potential reflections on space, body and matter, on thingness and morphology, on natural, social and transcendental worlds, as well as on dynamics of production, translation and decoration.

The 2023 conference “Vessels Beyond Containment” brought together historical case studies from South and East Asia to the Mediterranean to African, Pre-columbian and other contexts. These cases brought to the fore transmaterial aesthetics and ecological concerns, tensions between the bodies and surfaces of vessels, between image, ornament and sound, as well as terminologies and the literary lives of vessels, while also looking at those painted and represented in other media. Methods ranged from turning vases, jars and jugs around in one’s hands, or soft bags in their textility; from describing and analyzing a single artistic vessel, to engaging clusters and groups of vases and boxes. Approaching vessels this way as smart, multisensorial and interactive objects, one may ask: In what ways may vessels illuminate the spaces they create, occupy, enter, support, conceal, and reveal? What technological, sensorial, and material communications do they form and inspire between themselves, the people (or beings) who make and use them, and the world at large? From an art.

Historically grounded research on vessels thus promises to open up broad avenues for understanding them as synergic objects that reflect and comment on intersecting visual, material, social, ritual, religious, economic, environmental, and technological systems and networks. This implies the study of perforated and broken vessels, or in general of vessels beyond containment.