Kategorie: Lectures

Dr Philipp Ekardt

NOMIS-fellow (eikones), University of Basel

Monday, 10 December 2018, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS).

Aby Warburg’s concept of the Bilderfahrzeug implies a theory of
image-transmission which relies on the notion of a displacement of
material ‘carriers’ (a palpable medial support) on which such images
‘travel’. This lecture focuses on the period around 1800, and in
particular the works of Goethe – primarily his novel ‘Elective Affinities’
(1809), as well as Lady Hamilton’s ‘attitudes’ – offering a perspective on the mechanisms of image-circulation at that historical and cultural moment. Investigating Goethe and Hamilton also allows us to differentiate our general understanding of image-transmissions.

Looking at Goethe’s literary accounts of so-called ‘tableaux vivants’
(living images), and Hamilton’s art of theatrical poses and their
mediation, it becomes clear that the activity of building assemblages and
the aesthetic and artistic concept of composition are of central
importance here. Both form part of a constellation in which images are
less seen as ‘traveling’ on concrete carriers than as appearing,
disappearing and reappearing in fortuitous material configurations which
have been composed. The tableaux vivants and the attitudes form part of a
system in which also magical and aesthetic moments of resemblance, or the
creation of vistas in parks have their place.

Professor Stephennie Mulder

Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture

University of Texas, Austin

London, 2 May 2018, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS).

If Aby Warburg’s goal was to establish the autonomy of the image, that goal has certainly reached its apotheosis with the rise of digital media. On Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, images reign, and they have become powerful tools of manipulation and persuasion.

The rise and fall of the Viking “Allah” story, which captured headlines around the world for its seductive claims about the discovery of a Viking textile with Arabic writing, was propagated and argued largely by means of a highly manipulated image, but it was also a sequence of images that allowed me to deconstruct false claims about the textile, when I wrote a 60-tweet Twitter thread debunking the story in October of last year. In this image-rich environment, the work of art historians, cultural historians, and media scholars has never been more urgent, as university administrators work to deconstruct and defund the arts, humanities, and traditional paper libraries, thereby restricting our access to the analog history of images, consigning us to the endless matrix of digital duplication. How can the prescience of Warburg’s vision be put to use in the world of social media image construction and circulation, where “truthiness” reigns over “truth”? How does Bilderfahrzeuge work in the tangled networks of the digital age?

Professor Sven Dupré

Professor and Chair of History of Art, Science and Technology, University of Utrecht

Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology, University of Amsterdam

London, 13 June 2018, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS).

Despite experimentation with X-Ray technology applied to the diagnosis of paintings in German science laboratories in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was only in the 1920s and 1930s that the technology became more widely and systematically applied to art. Alan Burrough’s acquisition of the first and extensive archive of X-ray images of paintings, first of the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the most important driving force behind this. Burrough’s efforts were inspirational for Kurt Wehlte, the German Maltechniker, who in the 1930s established a laboratory for the X-Ray investigation of paintings in Berlin. In this talk, Professor Dupré will speak about how and in which ways X-ray investigations of paintings were consequential for art history.

The Bilderfahrzeuge Lecture Series at the Warburg Institute 2016-17

Programme

(also available as a PDF)

Professor Tamar Garb

Durning-Lawrence Chair of History of Art
Department of History of Art,

University College London (UCL)

London, 1 March 2017, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

This lecture looks at a remarkable photograph taken by the South African war correspondent in WW2, Constance Stuart (Larrabee) at the moment of the liberation of France. The photograph, one of nine in a series, depicts one of the femmes tondues the sheared women collectively punished for having ‘associated with the Germans’. It is read in relation to other photographs in the series as well as the agenda of Libertas, the first picture magazine in South Africa, for whom Stuart worked. But there is more to Stuart’s relationship to the image than the need to document the occasion. What seeps out from the image is something that exceeds documentary’s desire, inadvertently articulating both the photographer’s and the protagonist’s position in history.

Professor Tristan Weddigen

Chair for Early Modern Art
Kunsthistorisches Institut
University of Zürich

Rudolf Wittkower Visting Professor
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome

London, 8 February 2017, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

One century from the first publication of one of the most influential books of art history, Heinrich Wölfflin’s “Principles of Art History” of 1915, Professor Weddigen’s paper will explore one major part of its global reception: its impact on Hispanic and Latin American art and architectural history and aesthetics since the 1920s. The aim is to show how Kunstwissenschaft was translated, adopted, and appropriated for the construction of national, political, ethnic identities.

Professor Sachiko Kusukawa

London, 11 January 2017, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

Professor Stephen Bann

London, 14 December 2016, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event on our Eventbrite page here.