Framing self/other relations through curatorial strategies of containment and classification in eighteenth-century porcelain display

Court culture in eighteenth-century Europe was shaped by an aesthetics of encounter, exchange and transformation. As the quantity of luxury commodities imported from China, Japan, and elsewhere exceeded the wondrous singularity with which they had once been associated, the need to contain and classify became ever more pressing. Changing tastes in the display of ceramics illustrate with powerful clarity some of the curatorial strategies developed to enforce this containment, as well as the tensions between order and chaos, sensual abandon and scientific definition, that the material presence of the other could strain to the point of collapse. Two of the most widespread strategies were the “mounting” of imported ceramics with elaborate appendages of gilt-bronze, silver and gold, and the coordinated display of entire ceramic collections in “porcelain rooms”. Following the rise of neo-classical tastes in the late eighteenth century and the revulsion for aristocratic excess inspired by the social revolutions of this era, these forms of display rapidly fell out of favour. The legacy of this disregard remains apparent in the relative lack of scholarship dedicated to mounting or porcelain rooms relative to other aspects of the trade in export ceramics, and these phenomena have rarely been considered as related expressions of the same impulse. I propose, however, that they represent parallel expressions of a desire to define relations between self and other at a time of cultural openness and transformation, when objects from elsewhere were deployed as key players in the search for new forms of identity.