Friends of Interpretable Objects

Because Tamen is willing to go out on various disciplinary and logical limbs, this is a book like no other. It will appeal to students of literature and the visual arts, it will be debated by the more humanistic of philosophers, and it will perform noble cross-over activity between those disciplines and material from theories of law, science, and ecology. The book will work in this admirable way for those who are open-minded, inquisitive, and seducible by some lovely instances of intellectual wit. -- Leonard Barkan, Princeton University Friends of Interpretable Objects is an idiosyncratic, breath-taking inquiry into the human capacity to cherish the material object world and to hate it, to hold it responsible, and to grant it its own humanity...This book should be read by art historians, anthropologists, curators, literary critics, and anyone who has ever shouted at a car or kicked a door. -- Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things As its wacky title might indicate, this is a book of striking originality. Its subject, broadly speaking, is art, whose works are the interpretable objects of the title. In another sense, however, Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation...There is quite simply nothing like it...The learning is real...Written in a highly idiosyncratic style, learned but not hermetically so, Friends of Interpretable Objects takes wide aim at an audience that could conceivably come from many walks of life: from the museum world, from art history, law, philosophy, not to mention that educated general reader whose voracious habits take in a far richer banquet of ideas than we can ever imagine. -- Ingrid Rowland, Professor of Art History, University of Chicago The art world and interpreting institutions of museums can learn from Tamen's artful journey across disciplines and ways of knowing and experiencing the world around us. Friends of Interpretable Objects opens up the museum and places artworks into networks of interpretation that make them part of the cognitive worlds we share with diverse animate and inanimate bodies and objects. -- John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, Guggenheim Museum

Tamen shows how inanimate objects take on life through interpretation—notably as they are collected and housed in museums. He claims that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a “society of friends.” Thus, he suggests, our tendency as humans to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects both a life and a society.

A strikingly original work, Friends of Interpretable Objects re-anchors aesthetics in the object of attention even as it redefines the practice, processes, meaning, and uses of interpretation.

Miguel Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation--notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a "society of friends." Thus, Tamen suggests, our inveterate tendency as human beings to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects not only a life but also a society. As his work unfolds, "friends" also takes on a legal sense, as advocates, introduced to advance the argument that the social life of interpreted and interpretable objects engenders a related web of social obligations.

Focusing on those who, through interpretation, make objects "speak" in settings as different as churches, museums, forests, and distant galaxies--those who know the best interests of corporations, endangered species, and works of art--Tamen exposes the common ground shared by art criticism, political science, tort law, and science. Learned and witty, with much to teach art historians, environmentalists, anthropologists, curators, and literary critics, his book utterly reorients our understanding of how we make sense of our world.