ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Semper's texts from the London period propose to merge the bodies of objects with the bodies of persons. The discussion is located in particular in Semper's study of ceramics. His readings of Alexandre Brongniart and Jules Ziegler, and, earlier, Karl Otfried Müller, precipitate an understanding of potteries as something that is simultaneously representative of higher arts and intimately entangled with the everyday lives of people and by extension with a type of habitus that Semper begins to understand in terms of putative national and racial categories. The final section of the chapter takes a look at the bodily metaphors in the manuscript of Kunstformenlehre where Semper states that artistic activity began with the decoration (Schmuck) of the body. He begins to interpret artefacts and their emergence in terms of bodily metaphors, which see things as appendages that are indicative of subjective qualities of personality and enabling them to be communicated through narrative means. Objects are also read as embodiments of assigned categories of subjectivity, which enable Semper to perceive a strong determinant link between socio-cultural groups of people (e.g., nations and races) and the artefacts that they make and use.
