CONF: Towards a Post-Culturalist Art History (Berlin, 28 April 2016)

Towards a Post-Culturalist Art History
Freie Universität Berlin, “Rostlaube”, Room JK 33/121, Habelschwerdter
Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, April 28, 2016
Registration deadline: April 21, 2016
Art-historical and visual-culture writing has often assumed that pictures produced in a given historical and geographical milieu track a visual culture, that is, established ways of seeing informed by a relatively stable configuration of shared meaning. Is this just an indispensable methodological abstraction, or is it possibly detrimental to our understanding of the temporally and/or geographically distant forms of pictorial experience? The workshop will tackle this question taking as its departing point the recent work by Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley), who has been developing a model of ‘succession to visuality’ as a historical process that is never totalized and is not well characterized in strong culturalist terms that assume a consolidated culture constituting one’s visual experience. Professor Davis will present an overview of his position, followed by three papers by Prof. Gerhard Wolf (KI Florenz), Dr. Hans Christian Hönes (Warburg Institute, London), and Dr. Jakub Stejskal (FU).
PROGRAM
11:00am
Welcome and Introduction
Jakub Stejskal (Freie Universität Berlin)
11:30am
What Would a Post-Culturalist Art History Look Like? + discussion
Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley)
12:30pm
LUNCH BREAK
2:30pm
TBA + Discussion
Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)
3:30pm
Speculative Origins, or: Why Art History Needs Prehistory + discussion
Hans Christian Hönes (Warburg Institute, London)
4:30pm
COFFEE BREAK
5:30pm
Unusual Visibility: What Would a Post-culturalist Aesthetics Look Like? + discussion
Jakub Stejskal (Freie Universität Berlin)
6:20 pm
Final discussion
This workshop is organized by Dahlem Humanities Center’s POINT Fellow, Dr. Jakub Stejskal. Please register via e-mail by April 21, 2016 at
jakub.stejskal@fu-berlin.de. Reading material will be provided.
Related event: DHC Lecture with Whitney Davis: ‘A Thin Red Line: The Presence of Prehistoric Pictoriality’, 27 April, 6:30pm, Freie
Universität Berlin, “Rostlaube”, Room JK 32/102, Habelschwerdter Allee
45, 14195 Berlin.
http://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/dhc/programme/termine/DHC-Lecture-mit-Whitney-Davis.html

Share this post

News from the field

The Scott Opler Fellowship in Architectural History

The Scott Opler Fellowship in Architectural History for the period 2025-2027 Worcester College, Oxford is pleased to be able to offer a two-year residential Fellowship in the study of Renaissance or Baroque architectural history through the generosity of the Scott...

Professor (100%) in Prospective Architectural Theory

KU Leuven has a full-time vacancy for independent academic staff (ZAP) in the field of architectural theory. We are looking for internationally oriented candidates with an excellent research file and teaching competence in the area of theoretical reflection on...

International Conference on Adaptive Reuse

What stories do abandoned buildings still hold? Can they be transformed to serve new purposes without losing their essence? How can architects balance history and innovation? This conference delves into the art and challenge of adaptive reuse, where past and present...