Venue:
Suur-Kloostri 11, Tallinn,

room: the library of the department of cultural heritage and concervation, II floor

5.-09. September, 14.00-17.30

Registration ended: Heili Sõrmus he ili.sormus@artun.ee

The doctoral seminar displays a critique of German visual studies by starting with the question about the subject of observation. Jacques Lacan establishes a phenomenological approach in Séminaire XI. In a next step we retrace the psychoanalytical, historical, and philosophical sources of Bildwissenschaft by discussing in a comparative way Aby Warburg’s term of Nachleben, Erwin Panofsky’s Renaissance, and Sigmund Freud’s Nachträglichkeit. We follow the idea back to Vasari’s notion of rinacsita in order to analyze the different understandings of a re-enactment of the past. His tripartite model of history finds a modern transformation in Georg F.W. Hegel’s Aesthetics whose teleological concept ends up with the problem of how to conceptualize contemporariness other than just as the blind spot of presence. The Hegelian concept of the “idea” contains in nuce the perception model of 20thCentury penomenology.

How to deal with the leftovers of German Idealism and the essentialist tendencies in image theory? As an antidote I propose a pinch of Peiceian semiotics after Umberto Eco, stirred by Niklas Luhmann’s System Theory.

My own researches in this context see:

Hegel’s Art History (Trauer der Vollendung 1985), Cambridge University Press 1999

Vom Bild zum Kunstsystem, 2 vols., Cologne: Walther König, 2006

Preparatory reading:

Lacan, J. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. London: Vintage. ( Lugeda peatükid „The Line and Light” lk. 91–105 ja „What is a Picture?” lk. 105–119)

Freud, S. 2011. The „Wolfman” and Other Cases. (Chapter IV “The Dream and the Primal Scene” p. 227 – 246 and a comment of Sigmund Freud from chapter V “Some Matters of Discussion” p. 255-259) http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/sites/all/files/Wolfman.pdf

Warburg, A. 1999. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Los Angeles, CA : Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. (Lugeda peatükk „Dürer and Italian Antiquity” lk. 553–558)

Panofsky, E. 1972. Renaissance and renascences in western art. New York: Harper & Row. (Lugeda peatükk „Renaissance and Renascences” lk. 42–113)

Vasari, G. 2011. Preface to the Lives.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25326/25326-h/25326-h.htm#Page_xxiii

Hegel`s Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art. 1975. T.M. Knox (transl.) Oxford: Claredon. (Read the introduction „The work of art, as being for apprehension by man`s senses, is drawn from the sensuous sphere” p. 32 – 41, chapters „The Kantian philosophy” p. 56 – 61 and „The end of the Romantic form of art” p. 602 – 611).

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