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Program
communication, modernity, perception, post modernity
Freitag, 17. Mai, 9:30-13:30

I. Wahrnehmung | Perception

Lawrence Kruger, Determinants in the Temporal Domain of Framing

Lydia Haustein, Bild, Repräsentation und Wahrnehmung

Jerry Moore, Dynamic Frames: Reconstructing Ritual Performances in the Ancient Andes

Olaf Breidbach, Internal representations – internal worlds and the perception of objects


15:00-19:00

II. Bildkonzepte | Visual Concepts

Gerhard Wolf, Augenflug und Federbild. Bildkonzepte zwischen Metaphern und Materialitäten.

Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft

Michael Diers, Augenblick und Bewegung oder Fotografie als Film

Round Table, Neurobiologie und Bildwissenschaft: ein möglicher Dialog?


Samstag, 18. Mai, 10:00-13:30

III. Bildproduktion | Image Production

Benjamin Buchloh, Richter's Realisms: From Socialist to Photographic

Jyotindra Jain, Clemente’s India experience

Andrew Perchuk, Robert Irwin: Against the Gestalt

15:00-19:30

IV. Bildwissenschaft

Caroline A. Jones, The Modernist Sensorium, a critical history of Clement Greenberg

Hans Belting, Bildwissenschaft. A conception from Karlsruhe

Horst Bredekamp, Kunstgeschichte als historische Bildwissenschaft

Terry Smith, Difference and Reconciliation: Art Writing in the Clash between Cultures

Änderungen vorbehalten

Sprache: englisch-deutsch/Simultanübersetzung, Eintritt frei

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Abstracts:
LAWRENCE KRUGER,
Determinants in the Temporal Domain of Framing
The scale and absolute dimensions of art can be traced
historically to technological and social determinants, but the
limitations of seeing are largely shaped by biological factors
regulating the time domain of visual events. If we tend to think of
non-cinematic images only in terms of an art of space, but not of
time, we omit cognizance of biological reality. Vision operates
effectively only in a large series of temporal frames, and if the
eyes and head are immobilized we quickly can detect little more than
luminance. We examine our world through saccadic eye movements and
enduring blinks, and have only succeeded in overcoming the blurring
effect of after-images and the disappearance of stabilized images
through the development of "shutter" devices that have enabled
visualization of the unseen. Technological advances in controlling
the duration of image exposure on the retina and in the production of
photosensitive emulsions and spatially distributed digital detector
devices, has reshaped the degrees of freedom accessible for
imaginative expression and consequently has become a key determinant
of the course of modern art history.
This presentation will address the basic biology of multiple frame
imaging, examine the impact of early measurements of fast
physiological processes (e.g. Helmholtz and Marey), and how the
scientific world interacted with key developments in the birth of
photography (e.g. Daguerre and Fox Talbot). The early photographic
artists (e.g. Muybridge and the Lumieres) and the inventive spirit of
technology (e.g. Edison, the Skladanowskys, Edgerton and the digital
revolution) have sequentially refashioned how humans have learned to
examine and display their visual world.


JERRY MOORE, Los Angeles
Dynamic Frames: Reconstructing Ritual Performances in the Ancient Andes
The concept of "framing" in interpersonal action has a solid history
in ethnography (e.g., in works by Goffman and Bateson), but has had
little impact on archaeological approaches to past societies. The
notion of the viewing frame is destabilized when applied to dynamic
and mobile performative displays. Sensorial dimensions in addition
to vision come into play, using what Victor Turner called "all the
sensory codes to produce symphonies in more than music." In this
discussion, I will explore the design logics and technologies of
displays associate with prehispanic mortuary theatricals performed by
the Moche (AD 100-750), Chimú (AD 900-1470) and Inka (AD 1200 - 1532)
cultures of ancient Peru.


OLAF BREIDBACH, Jena
Internal representations - internal worlds and the perception of objects
Following the concept of internal representation, signal processing
in a neuronal system has to be evaluated exclusively on the basis of
internal system characteristics. Thus, this approach omits the
external observer as a control function for sensory integration.
Instead the configuration of the system and its computational
performance are the effect of endogenous factors. Such
self-referential operation is due to a strictly local computation in
a network. Thereby, computations follow a set of rules that
constitute the emergent behaviour of the system. Because these rules
can be demonstrated to correspond to a 'logic' intrinsic to the
system, it can be shown that pictorial representation follows those
rules that are essential for any neurosemantic.

It is possible to describe perception not just as a representation of
something that is already known, but as an active process in which a
frame of viewing developed out of subject intrinsic dispositions.
Thus, an alternative to the idea of an expert system is found. Such
expert system can be shown to reflect a cabbalistic tradition that
was outdated already in the discussions on anthropology at the end of
18th century, but which nevertheless persisted in library systems and
the ordering schemes of scientific collections.

This presentation will sketch the basic ideas of neuronal aesthetics,
showing how far aesthetics can be based on neuroscience and
describing how far neuroscience itself is based on certain aesthetic
assumptions not reflected in that science.

As the ideas presented lead to principal ideas of how a computational
system with parallel processing works like, it is far away from any
naive neurologism but - on the contrary - shows itself being based on
a kind of neuro-platonism neither reflected by neurophysiology nor by
neuroanatomy. It describes aesthetics not as the outcome of a mere
passive attitude, but as being formed in an active process. Viewing
is not reduced to a kind of abstract objectification procedure, it is
based on an objectification of subjectivity. Thereby, the talk will
eventually show some pathways to deal with the problem how to verify
statements about viewings.


LYDIA HAUSTEIN
Abstract: Bild, Repräsentation und Wahrnehmung
"Der Grundvorgang der Neuzeit ist die Eroberung der Welt als Bild" (Heidegger)

Wir alle sind direkt oder indirekt davon beeinflusst, dass heute
zwischen dem Interesse an der Kunst und ihren
philosophisch-theoretischen Grundlagen ein Gleichgewicht besteht. Die
Frage nach dem ontologischen Status der Kunstwerke verdeckte
innerhalb dieser Entwicklung lange die Frage nach den Bildern. Beide
konstituieren sich wesentlich durch Wahrnehmungsprozesse. Wahrnehmung
in Natur- und Geisteswissenschaft öffnet sich als Begriff, der
Vielerlei zu assoziieren erlaubt und dessen Interpretation nicht
deckungsgleich bleibt. Eine der Wahrnehmung inhärente spezifische
Subjektivität verstärkt die Argumentation gegen jeden Monismus in der
Kunst- und Bildtheorie, also gegen eine Vorgehensweise, die die
Sprache der Bilder auf einen einzigen Deutungsansatz einschränken
möchte. Wahrnehmung markiert ein Grundverständnis gegenüber der
sichtbaren Welt, das gemeinsam mit unserem Wissen über die Welt eine
notwendige Wechselbeziehung eingeht. Wahrnehmung markiert die Weise,
in der wir der Welt zugehören und inwieweit sie für uns offen ist.
Wahrnehmung rahmt und modelliert unsere bildliche Alltagserfahrung,
da wir zwar der Welt gegenüberstehen, gleichzeitig aber auch Kraft
unserer Verkörperung in der Welt positioniert sind.
Nahezu alle Wissenschaftler stimmen seit Einsteins und Heisenberg
darin überein, dass das Wesen aller Dinge im Akt der Beobachtung
liegt, also in der experimentellen Versuchsanordnung und im
körperhaften Bewusstsein zugleich. Wenn der subjektive
Wahrnehmungsapparat des Untersuchenden selbst zum prinzipiellen
Bestandteil seiner Studien erhoben wird, drängen sich interessante
Verschachtelungen der Beziehungen von Subjekt und Objekt auf.
Der Begründer einer formalistischen Kunstgeschichte Alois Riegl legte
fest, daß es die von uns gesuchte Erinnerung sei, die Wahrnehmung
bestimme. Die Erkenntnis, daß Erinnerung eine Funktion der
Gegenwartsprägung sei, stellt bei seinem Schüler Giedeon nur einen
weiteren Schritt zum Bewußtsein über das Manipulations- und
Zwangspotential dar, das im Bilderstrom einer ausufernden
Mediengesellschaft liegt. Die Transzendentalphilosophie, die sich
früher mit diesen Differenzierungen beschäftigt hatte, trat in ihrer
Zeit mit den präzisen Analysen der Hirnforschung in einen
wissenschaftlichen Wettstreit.
Bilder sind schon immer einbezogen in einen geschichtlich bedingten
Verstehensprozeß, der den Perspektivwechsel vom analysierenden zum
synthetisierenden Wissenschaftsparadigma begleitet. Die Kommentierung
der biotechnischen Bildwelten variiert zwischen hysterischer
Ablehnung und euphorischer Zustimmung.
Wenn heute in dieser Diskussion viele das Rad neu erfinden, scheint
es sinnvoll, an die seit Kant wichtigste Differenzierung der
Wahrnehmung zu erinnern: die vom Anschaungsvermögen der Sinnlichkeit
und des Begriffsvermögen des Verstandes. Während Kant in seiner
Kritik der reinen Vernunft die Zweifel über eine objektive
Wahrnehmung noch ausräumen konnte, indem er davon ausging, daß die
Menschen in einer gemeinsamen Erfahrungswelt leben, können wir diese
Anschauung nicht mehr teilen. Medien stellen Werkzeuge dar, die
Kultur bilden und bewusstseinsverändernde Eingriffe in Gesellschaften
vornehmen. Je intensiver sie die Modellierung der globalen Welt in
Angriff nehmen desto militanter verhindert sie eine differenzierte
Erforschung der "Bild-Maschinen".
Das explosiv anwachsende Wissen der Neurobiologie über physiologische
Vorgänge, also das, was im Gehirn geschieht, wenn wir sehend und
denkend unsere Aussenwelt erfassen, führt zu neuen Fragen an
"polyvalente Wirklichkeitsbezüge" in den digitalen Medien. Historisch
bewährte Definitionen scheinen sich nicht nahtlos auf die
Wissenschaftsdebatte mit ihren Schlagwörtern einer "neuronalen
Ästhetik" übertragen zu lassen. Der analytische Blick der
Wissenschaften scheint sich wieder einmal in die Gegenrichtung zu
kehren - das Leben wird aus dem Innersten des Zellkerns betrachtet.
Neue Blicke und komplexe Erkenntnisse des denkenden Sehens verlangen
jedoch immer noch nach konkreten Versuchsanordnungen und
philosophischen Rahmungen, die Beziehung des sehenden Menschen zur
digital erzeugten Welt verständlich machen.
Bildschirmrealität ist Realität. Perfekte Wirklichkeit
konstituierende Verfahren wie das Advanced Real Time Tracking oder
die Augmented-Reality zeigen, wie die Bildidee aus dem Fokus der
Neurowissenschaften in die repräsentativen Bildmuster zurück fliehen,
um sich der verfeinerten Methoden einer innovativen Kunstgeschichte
zu bedienen. Wenn auf Sichtbarkeit gründende Gewissheiten nicht mehr
gelten, verändern sich die kollektiven Rituale der Wissenschaften und
Künste. So stützten sich viele Neurologen heute argumentativ eher auf
eine Art atavistischen Bildzauber, als auf die Erkenntnis, dass Bild,
Gedächtnis und Urteil der Individuen spezifischen sozialen
Bedingungen unterliegen, die sich permanent wandeln. Doch sollte auch
oberflächlichen Überlegungen einleuchten, dass den mannigfaltigen
Raumanschauungen der virtuellen Welten und Bildersphären eine Art
repräsentative oder imaginäre (C. Castoriadis, J.Dewy) Einheit
zugrunde liegen muss; denn wäre dies nicht der Fall, dann läge eine
solche Welt jenseits aller menschlicher Erkenntnis. Die
Kunstgeschichte geht deshalb davon aus, das auch solche Bilder nicht
passiv erworben werden. Merleau-Pontys differenzierte zwischen
bewußtem und unbewußtem Sehen und formulierte seine These, daß nichts
schwerer zu wissen sei, als was wir eigentlich sehen. Marshall
McLuhan, der Nestor der modernen Medienwissenschaften, beschrieb
bereits in den 60er Jahren, dass die Geschichte der internationalen
Medien die Geschichte des Sehens und der Wahrnehmung beinhalte. Beim
Betrachten eines Bildes findet eine Raum-Zeit-Verdichtung statt. Was
man vom Gesehenen zurückbehält, ist so in das gegenwärtig Gesehene
eingebettet, daß es das Bewußtsein auf Grund der dort erfolgenden
Verdichtung aufnahmebereit für das Kommende macht. Die Trennung der
Künste in zeitliche und räumliche beruht auf einem Mißverständnis und
stellt sich für ein ästhetisches Verständnis als destruktiv dar. Wie
die Physiker so beziehen sich die Künstler auf die Einheit von
Raum-Zeit oder wie John Dewey es formuliert, befaßt sich der Künstler
mit einem Wahrnehmungs- statt mit einem Begriffsmaterial: im
Wahrgenommenen fallen das Räumliche und das Zeitliche immer zusammen.
In "Echtzeit" wandelten sich am 11. September die brennenden Türme in
Manhatten vor unseren Augen zu Topoi von Zerstörung und Gewalt - aber
auch zur Parabel vom unfaßbaren Potential medialer Bilder.
Unverzüglich vollzog sich der Wandel vom Ereignis zum Bild des
Geschehens. Es wurde die Notwendigkeit deutlich, daß Künstler nach
der essentiellen Kluft zwischen dem Abgebildeten, der Wirklichkeit
und ihren Bildern fragen oder wie Boris Groys es kürzlich in anderem
Zusammenhang formulierte, nach dem medienontologischen Verdacht, dass
der submediale Raum innerlich anders beschaffen sei, als er sich auf
seiner Oberfläche zeige. Interessanterweise nutzte bereits Cassirer
den Begriff der künstlichen Medien, als er davon sprach, das der
Mensch immer mehr in einem symbolischen statt in einem natürlichen
Universum lebe. Kunstwerke, Symbole oder Riten stellen für Cassirer
die zwischen geschalteten Medien dar, mit denen der Mensch seine
Orientierung innerhalb der symbolischen Welt findet.
Die Bilder von der Zerstörung der Twin Towers wirken wie die visuelle
Bestätigung solcher Modelle. Sie bekräftigen die These der
Medienkünstler von der tiefen Verinnerlichung medialer Bilder, die
die Wahrnehmung bestimmen. Mit ausgefeiltem technischen Rüstzeug
produzieren die Medienkünstler Raum-Zeit-Gebilde, die Risse, Brüche
und Lücken im Mediensystem aufzeigen und die Unterscheidung von
Virtualität und Aktualität in den collagierten Zusammenstellungen der
abgebildeten Welt vereinfachen. Wenn sie die komplexe Beziehung von
Wahrnehmung und Sichtbarkeit zum Thema machen erhellen sie in der
Spanne vom technischen Aufbruch der 60er, symbolisiert im Bild der
Mondlandung bis zum Bild der Zerstörung der Zwillingstürme die neuen
sozialen Morphologien und diffusen Verschmelzungen der
Wahrnehmungsrealitäten. Sie streichen heraus wie Form, Inhalt,
Produktion und das Potential der Einbildungskraft einander bedingen
und das zeitgenössische Bewußtsein rahmen. Der uralte Wettstreit der
Kunstgeschichte, als Geistesgeschichte oder Formgeschichte zu
bestehen, wird die Syntax der Bilder eher klären als eine scheinbar
objektive neuronale Sichtweise.
II. Bildkonzepte


ANNE FRIEDBERG
From the mid 15th century writings of Leon Battista Alberti to the
late 20th century computer software trademarked by Microsoft as
Windows," the window has a deep cultural history as an architectural
and figurative trope for the framing and mediating of the pictorial
image. While the window functioned as a metaphor for a fixed
viewpoint through a single frame for Alberti, the "Windows"" trope in
computer software has become emblematic of the collapse of the single
viewpoint, relying on the model of a window that we can't see
through; multiple windows that overlap, obscure.

This paper will 1) debate with accounts of the ruptures (the argument
of Jonathan Crary) and/or continuities (the argument of "apparatus"
film theorists Jean Louis Baudry and Stephen Heath) between
Renaissance perspective and the photographic and cinematic camera and
2) argue that while moving image technologies may have provided a
challenge to Quattrocento perspective and its concomitant symbolic
system by offering multiple perspectives sequentially, it has only
been with the advent of digital imaging technologies and new
technologies of display in the 1990s that the media "window" began to
include multiple perspectives within a single frame.


MICHAEL DIERS,
Augenblick und Bewegung oder Fotografie als Film [Moment and movement
or photography as film]
Daß der Film gelegentlich Werke der bildenden Kunst in sein
ästhetisches Kalkül einbezieht und nicht nur dekorativ sondern auch
dramaturgisch nutzt, ist ein Gemeinplatz; daß sich ferner Filmbilder
gelegentlich an Werken der klassischen Kunst als Vorlagen
orientieren, ist ebenfalls vielfach belegt; daß schließlich bildende
Kunst und Fotografie ihrerseits auf den Film - seine Ikonographie,
Technik und Ästhetik - rekurrieren, ist zwar auch keine neue
Erkenntnis mehr, bislang jedoch als Phänomen insgesamt, zumal im
Blick auf die Konsequenzen der medialen Transposition, erst in
Ansätzen untersucht.

Aus diesem reichen Spektrum medialer Interdependenzen und
Interferenzen möchte der Vortrag anhand einiger ausgewählter
künstlerischer Arbeiten den Medienvergleich zwischen Fotografie und
Film herausgreifen. Gefragt wird danach, wie das jeweilige Medium die
Wahrnehmung und Erwartung des Betrachters in spezifischer Weise prägt
und schärft und was passiert, wenn die eine Bildgattung die andere
zitiert beziehungsweise im Sinne eines "frame of viewing" darauf
Bezug nimmt. Gezeigt werden soll unter anderem wie die jüngere
Fotografie sich einerseits auf filmische Ikonographie und
andererseits auf filmische Bildverfahren bezieht. Dabei geht es
insbesondere um Aspekte der fotografischen Anverwandlung von bewegten
Bildern und ihre Rückverwandlung in stehende, stille Bilder. So
etabliert zum Beispiel der Fotograf Andreas Gursky über diesen
impliziten Paragone eine eigene Gattung filmischer Fotografie, die
sowohl der Malerei als auch dem Film Konkurrenz zu machen sucht.

GERHARD WOLF,
Augenflug und Federbild. Früneuzeitliche Bildkonzepte zwischen
Metaphern und Materialitäten.
Der Beitrag untersucht die Spannung zwischen fliegendem bzw.
stillgestellten Auge und sinnlich-materiellem Bild in
wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit.
Die Metaphorologie des Bildes als Fenster, Spiegel, Schatten,
Schleier etc. bei Alberti, Cusanus und Leonardo wird im besonderen
von den Vorstellungen eines Ursprungs der Bilder her analysiert. Dies
mündet in die Frage nach dem Verhätnis von frühneuzeitlichen
Wahrnehmungs- und Darstellungsmodellen zur Materialität und "Technik"
der Bilder, sei es des niederländischen Ölbildes oder mexikanischen
Federmosaiks in ihren wechselnden "Rahmen".

Winged eyes and feather(ed) pictures. Early Modern Concepts of Image
Between Metaphors and Materiality
This contribution studies the tension between the flying or "fixed"
eye and material images in scientific as well as artistic discourses
of the Early Modern period. It analyses the metaphorology of pictures
(seen as window, mirror, shadow or veil) in Alberti, Cusanus and
Leonardo, with a special focus on the various theories or legends of
the origin of images. Under these premises my talk will question the
complex relationships between different models of
perception/representation and the materiality or technique of early
modern pictures, Netherlandish oil paintings as well as Mexican
feather mosaics, in their changing frames.


III. Bildproduzenten (processes of image production)

BENJAMIN BUCHLOH
Richter's Realisms: From Socialist to Photographic
This lecture will explore the precarious coexistence of a variety of
figurative representational conventions in the work of Gerhard
Richter. Beginning with his education as a Socialist Realist Mural
painter in Dresden and culminating in the radical abnegation and
reversal of the terms of his artistic production after his arrival in
the West in 1961.

The paper will attempt to clarify how various models of
anti-modernist returns to representation (Neo-Classicist and Realist)
formed the general background of Richter's history : the initial
presence of New Objectivity, the Fascist enforcement of a
particularly insiduous type of Neo-Classicism, the Socialist fusion
and variation of both legacies after 1948 in the DDR at the Academy
in Dresden where Richter received his first education and the
eventual adaptation to the photographic modes of representation under
the impact of American Pop Art.

This attempt at an archaeology of painterly practices could explain
Richter's apparently enigmatic commitment to a project of painterly
discontinuity and rupture.


ANDREW PERCHUK
Robert Irwin: Against the Gestalt
This paper argues that Robert Irwin's work from the late 1950s
through the early 1970s was predicated on an encounter between viewer
and artwork in real time and space in which perception was pitted
against conceptualization. Beginning with Irwin's interest in Zen
Buddhism in the late fifties, which stressed the heuristic necessity
of direct experience, his paintings confound attempts to abstract
them. The Late Line paintings (1962-64) seem to be simple works for
the mind to grasp-in each a monochromatic, even field of color is
divided by two lines at given points-yet it is in fact impossible to
experience the paintings in the manner one conceives of them. While
Minimalism arose in New York in the early sixties from a specific
reading of Frank Stella's paintings, on the West Coast, Irwin reacted
strongly against Stella's emblematic imagery. For Irwin, the strong
Gestalt forms in Minimalism order perceptual experience
hierarchically, encouraging the viewer to focus on simple, coherent
shapes and to dismiss all other visual stimuli. To counter Gestalt
perception, Irwin participated in the perceptual experiments with
sensory deprivation being conducted by the aerospace industry in
Southern California, taking part in the massive "Art and Technology"
project organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from
1967-71.


JYOTINDRA JAIN
Images of Alterity: Francesco Clemente in India
In the entire body of Francesco Clemente's Work the locale is of
utmost importance. A feeling of 'disquiet' in the atmosphere of
'dullness' and 'cultural hegemony of the West' had triggered
Clemente's desire to be 'somewhere else', in an alternative space,
quit in the early years of his career. In India, for the first time,
he was astonished by the multiformity of its visual culture which
"opened up an enormous range of expressive possibilities he had not
known in Rome". The perpetual journeys between his proverbial Three
Worlds, i.e. Rome, Madras, New York which began in the 1970s have
continued till date, repeatedly drawing him to India over the last
two decades, including prolonged stays of six months to a year of
working there.

This paper will map Clemente's explorations of India's philosophies,
rituals, iconographies and legends; its bazaars and places of
pilgrimage; its mass-produced popular imagery and its proliferating
traditions of crafts which served as constant sources of his
inspiration - a sort of "mental backdrop for his work, much the same
way that the drone exists as a background constant in Indian music
(R. Foye).

An overpowering enormity of floating images in India and the almost
chaotic cross-currents of values and ideologies intensified the
feeling of fragmentation in Clemente which he came to terms with in
his art by means of a degree of openness and heterogeneity of form.
By the sheer experience of diverse and disjunct images and mediums,
India made Clemente realise that there was an alternative possibility
of accepting fragmentation without arranging the images "in any
hierarchy of values." For Clemente "one image is as good as another",
they have the same expressive weight and that he has no preferred
medium. For him they each exist simultaneously not hierarchically.

In the liberal ideology of Theosophy, Clemente saw 'universal
language of human experience'. He once said of Theosophy: "Being here
is like being in the waters in which people like Mondrian were
fishing S that spirit gave rise to something like American
Expressionism, people like Clyfford Still or Franz Kline". Staying in
the vicinity of the Theosophical Society in Madras, Clemente produced
the "Pondichery Pastels". Using the format of the Indian miniature
painting, Clemente iconised the ordinary object of the everyday
through the language of clichés and common places - "places where
many different meanings of people connect".

During his travels with his first mentor Alighiero Boetti to
Afghanistan in 1974, Clemente had learnt about the immense creative
possibility that existed in local collaborations. With the idea of
appropriating another's way of thinking and working, Clemente
collaborated with cinema billboard painters in Madras in 1976; with
young trainees of Mughal miniature painting in Jaipur in 1981; with
papier mache craftspersons in Madras in the same year; with folk
painters of Orissa in 1989, and at ancient bronze foundries in
Tanjore in 1994. These collaborative works opened up wonderful new
possibilities of finding a certain creative distance from one's own
self and thereby attaining a measure of unpredictability in one' s
work. It is perhaps this eclecticism of images, idioms, materials and
technique which led deAk to describe Clemente as "Chameleon in a
state of Grace" and to explore his cultural waywardness.

The paper will follow the trajectory of Clemente's India-inspired
works, which engender not ethnic but unique and nevertheless
universal language of expression.

IV. Von der Kunstgeschichte zur Bildwissenschaft

HANS BELTING,
Bildwissenschaft. A conception from Karlsruhe
Bildwissenschaft is a term which is difficult to translate into
English. It was, almost hundred years ago, a project from Aby
Warburg, which later on became betrayed and contradicted by
iconologists who do not deserve that name. Today, iconology has to be
reinvented to meet our present concerns and experiences. At
Karlsruhe, an interdisciplinary group comprising seven disciplines,
is engaged in a new approach to iconology in contemporary terms which
also extends the area of research to images outside the art territory
properly speaking. It thus becomes a key issue whether art history is
prepared for participating at a general discourse in iconology of
that new type or whether it wants to retreat into its traditional
limits, even in the sense that art criticism and the analysis of
contemporary art obeys such limits.


HORST BREDEKAMP,
"Kunstgeschichte als historische Bildwissenschaft"
Es gehört zu den Besonderheiten, vor allem der deutschsprachigen
Kunstgeschichte um 1900, dass sie sich nicht in Spezialwissen in
Bezug auf die Hochkunst erschöpfte, sondern als historische
Bildwissenschaft im allgemeinen Sinn zuständig war. Die materielle
Grundlage lag seit Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts im Zuwachs des
Kunstgewerbes, das den heutigen Begriff des Designs umschließt und
bis zu Kleidungsmoden, Karosseriemodellen und Briefmarkengestaltung
reichte.

Dieser Zuschnitt wurde 1933 unterbrochen, ab 1970 aber wiederbelebt.
Zu fragen wird sein, wie sich das Verhältnis einer so verstandenen
historischen Bildwissenschaft zum Nebeneinander von art history und
visual studies im englischsprachigen Raum verhält.


CAROLINE JONES,
The Modernist Sensorium, a critical history of Clement Greenberg
Objects of visual art are peculiar kinds of inanimate things that
need other, more animate things to function. Together the artwork and
its interpreter form one talking thing - in my study, this conjoint
thing is American art critic Clement Greenberg with (ad seriatum)
various objects of modern art.

What structured Greenberg's visibility, and what gave him the
systematic tools to produce his extraordinarily modernist regime,
were patterns and flows established at both larger and more
microscopic scales than the pictures he wrote about. At the
periphery of his vision were paintings seen but not written down,
political practices engaged in and abandoned, economic relations that
shifted over time, national cultures in ascendance, previous
compositions and various colors (occasionally creatively
misperceived), industrial traditions of segmented human movement, and
even the experiential specificity of Manhattan's urban grid.

Greenberg is viewed as a subject in two frames: the one theoretical
(using the Deleuzean concept of the subject as a fold in a dominant
visibility), the other historical (examining Greenberg's formalism as
an aspect of what I call a mid-century bureaucratization of the
senses). This paper will emphasize the latter frame, producing a
broad description of the modernist sensorium in which the subject
Greenberg played his part.


TERRY SMITH
The pivotal question facing art history today is the same old one:
how might we adequately articulate the intricate, sometimes
accidental but always material relationships between the
potentialities and the limitiations of media, artistic precedent,
psychic necessity and social demand that shape the genesis and
reception of works of art?

These days, this question is being asked at a particular moment in
the history of inquiry. The conjunctive/disjunctive methodology of
what used to known as "the social history of art" remains. in my
view, the ground plan for any viable art history, yet it has, over
the past thirty years, been radically, and for the most part
productively, revised by feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, by a
variety of poststructuralisms, particularly deconstruction, by an
awareness of the imagery of the sexualities, queer theory, by
postcolonial critique and by the demands of the nascent history of
vision and visuality. It will, inevitably, be asked by other critical
methodologies to come.

More importantly, the pivotal question is being asked, now, under the
conditions of contemporaneity. In the new world disorder, multiple
temporalities, the untimely and inequity rule all relationships.
These occur within (i) dominant globalizing and national cultural
formation, and in the internationalizing subcultures linked to them,
such as the Contemporary Art world or the market for Impressionist
and Old Master art, (ii) within indigenous, local, regional,
colonized and postcolonial cultures, and (iii) in the complex
communicative channels that constantly open and close between these
cultures.

I will explore the implications of this situation for art historical,
visual culture inquiry today, making special reference to
contemporary Aboriginal art in Australia.

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The Speakers:
communication, modernity, perception, post modernity
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh is professor of art history in the department of art and archaeology, Barnard College/Columbia University, New York. He will complete his monographic study of the German painter Gerhard Richter, which seeks to establish several frameworks for viewing Richter's art.

Lawrence Kruger is research professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine of the UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles, California. His current projects include a study of early contributions to multiple frame imaging in France.

Jerry Moore is associate professor of anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is interested in the recent research on how visual perception may make to a better understanding of how built environments were experienced by ancient peoples, particularly in Mesoamerica and the Andes.

Terence Smith is director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Sydney, Australia. His project seeks to elucidate the development of specifically modern and postmodern structures of seeing.

Andrew Perchuk is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history of art at Yale University. In his dissertation "Mapping the Surface: Art and Modernism in Los Angeles, 1962-1972," he examines the perceptual investigations undertaken by a group of artists in Los Angeles.

Anne Friedberg is associate professor of film studies at the University of California, Irvine. Interested in the visual system of the frame and how the frame transforms that contained within it, she will investigate the history of one particular trope of framing, the window, from Alberti to Microsoft.

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Frames of Viewing
Perception, Experience, Judgement
In recent years a number of disciplines have returned to the fundamental problem of how body, mind, and culture combine to produce perception and aesthetic experience. Contemporary approaches from studies of contexts of beholding to measurements of eye movement to theories of the gaze belong to a rich history of attempts to comprehend perception and its consequences, among them the judgment of certain experiences and objects as aesthetic. This scholar year is devoted to the exploration of attempts, past and present, to understand how art is framed by perception, experience, and judgment.

Innovative work on the history of art has brought to light the performative character of viewing. As often as not, the first audiences for many of the works that now stand or hang in the isolation of the museum did not apprehend them as objects of stationary contemplation. These first viewers were frequently in motion, engaged in collective or ritualized behavior, induced by specific settings and their impact on all the senses to attend to a painting or sculpture in highly selective ways. Through play of light and spatial surprise, buildings themselves orchestrate the attention of viewers. Position, time, and expectation condition what can be seen and held in mind. Since many portable objects have been removed from their first contexts and architecture altered in function, those art historians who aim to reconstruct "the beholder's share" face formidable theoretical and empirical challenges.

How do artworks reinforce or resist the intricate mental habits that govern viewing in a given time or place? What is the relation between the "eye" that is developed for works of art and how we perceive the world more generally? How does this eye vary in regard to painting and sculpture, video and performance?
Frames of viewing—be they natural or cultural—are normally invisible to the viewer; how is it that the physical nature of some artworks can make the framing visible? Are the visual media today contributing to the growth of visual intelligence among spectators or simply to their more effective manipulation?
Optical impressions are organized in the brain and made meaningful through associations with previous knowledge. Frames of viewing involve retinal nerve cells and emotional experience, pattern recognizers and learned judgments, the visual cortex and social tradition. Nature and culture operate together in perception, and the study of this operation has been central to art history.
Understandings of this operation, of course, have changed; there is a history of perception, and of especial interest to the Research Institute is how this history intersects with the history of art. After a lengthy period when the idea of social construction has seemed all-powerful in the humanities, is it time once again for us to consider the domain of universal human traits hard-wired, as it were, by evolution into the nervous system? Certainly artists have had practical insight into these traits, translating the effects of optical perception into a repertoire of techniques. And some exceptional artists have tested and dramatized the limit of such repertoires. One of the aims of this scholar year will be to open a dialogue between different approaches to perception: the historical, psychological, and physiological.

Scholarship at the Getty Research Institute is directed toward a more comprehensive understanding of the visual arts in a variety of contexts. With our focus on frames of viewing, we will be connecting the arts with the cognitive sciences, history, anthropology, philosophy, film, and media studies to name only the most obvious of the relevant disciplines. The Research Institute welcomes projects that will illuminate the arts through a focus on perception and experience, or that will illuminate perception and experience through a focus on the arts. The combination of research should enable us to more fully grasp the history of art and the critical judgments through which we construct that history.