The Visual and Its Logos: Art-Historical Turns
Horst Bredekamp
In retrospect, the art historians who came to the Wissenschaftskolleg as Fellows can best be characterized as moles. Hegel conferred this honorary title on researchers who do not follow the zeitgeist in any visible way, but who tunnel in front of it, suddenly breaking through the ground in many places at once before the zeitgeist has captured the general imagination. In this sense, a range of art-historian Fellows has worked as intellectual excavators.
It remains to be seen whether this is a strength or a weakness. The persistent, often remorseless revision of both methodologies and areas of study brings the risk of self-disintegration, and not many other disciplines in the liberal arts have tackled it in the same way. In virtually no other place have art historians pursued both themes with the same exalted desire for openings and solutions. This results in a thematic and methodological diversity that cannot be reduced to a single framework or formula. In this sense, too, Hegel's avant-garde conception of zeitgeist gains relevance as an ongoing, broadly dispersed excavating operation. Perceptions of art history are necessarily disparate, yet this disparateness means there will always be a new delving in an unexpected place.
Methodological revisions
This perception served as a leitmotif for the first two art historians, Lothar Ledderose and Martin Warnke, who came as Fellows in 1982/83. Just when the nineteenth century was being rediscovered under the guise of a rigid social history, Warnke broke with a theory that viewed artists of the early modern period as prominent examples of modern individuality in the same camp as a rebellious middle class. The idea that the aristocracy made it possible for artists to overcome the constraints and regulations of crafts and guilds, thereby giving them an early autonomy, represented an attack on a core element of modernity's self-conception. With this revolutionary thrust, Warnke's opus on court art exerted an influence that extended far beyond art history.
With their advance to a form-oriented social study , which concentrated on the Würzburg frescos by Tiepolo, Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall (1992/93) leveled similar criticism at the models applied by the sociology of art in the early modern period. The critique of mechanical explanations also exerted a major influence on scholars who insistently questioned the meaning of the concept of the avant-garde. They included Stanislaus von Moos and Tilmann Buddensieg, who joined forces at the Wissenschaftskolleg to delve at the roots of modernity's self-conception. Buddensieg's interpretation of trade unions as the heroic protagonists of Neues Bauen came at a time when, with the demise of the Neue Heimat housing cooperative, the trade unions had forfeited all claim to modernity in urban studies (1985/86). Stanislaus von Moos arrived at the conclusion that the anti-modernist Roberto Venturi was 'more modern' than the contemporary representatives of the Charte d'Athene.
In the early 1990s, the heightened interest in imagery led to additional revisions. When Monika Steinhauser (1989/90) undertook her study of iconology, which focused on the collages that Max Ernst created to parody classification, she attempted to salvage a method that had generally been dispensed with. For his part, Wolfgang Kemp's (1993/94) attempt to establish topophilia as a concept of intensified spatial research long before space became a much-discussed term in historical research. Hans Belting's anthropological spin on art history (1994/95), as well as John Onian's attempt to establish a biological link between seeing and recognizing within the context of a new perception of prehistoric art, also marked a new beginning that year. At that time, not even the broad outlines of the recent research on individuality-pursued by Christopher Henshilwood, among others-were yet discernible.
Finally, methodological impetus was generated by the reacquisition of the art landscape of Central and Eastern Europe, which literally meant burrowing under real borders and border fortifications. With his history of Gothic art in Eastern Central Europe, Adam Labuda (1991/92) was one of the first scholars to succeed in tracing the entire historiography back to the period before National Socialism. Using the late medieval statue of St. George in Prague, Ernö Marosi (1992/93) also set out to redefine the concept of Central Europe, and Jaroslaw Jarzewicz (2000/01) undertook a comparable project, focusing on Jagiellonian architecture of the late Gothic period. Thanks to this pioneering work, the geography of art took on a new dimension that will possibly remain a distant goal in other fields or will require great effort to be achieved. The ongoing debate on the Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen (Center Against Expulsions) continues to demonstrate this today.
Genius loci: the city and its museums
The Wissenschaftskolleg is an institute for advanced study where the city itself, in addition to its museums, makes a large contribution to the Fellows' range of experience. Virtually all the reports written by Fellows discuss, as striking experiential potential, history as it is legible in the urban landscape.
Warnke was the first to organize tours of Berlin for Kolleg guests and staff that tapped into this special urban energy. These city walking tours and exhibition visits have since become recurring activities in the life of each year's group of Fellows. On one unforgettable outing, led by Monika Wagner in February 2006, a group of bundled-up Fellows made their way down former Stalinallee, whipped by sleet as they discussed the relationship between architecture and ornament.
The perception that no other large city, not even London or Paris, has been as strongly influenced by its museums led to one of the most inspired events at the Kolleg. During the first academic year in which art historians were present, Lothar Ledderose took advantage of Berlin's museum landscape and used an object at the Dahlem Ethnology Museum to demonstrate how eighteen-century Chinese visual propaganda had appropriated a European style to satisfy viewer expectations. The dialectic of non-European art and culture thus established was repeatedly addressed and explored in a variety of disciplines: Ludger Derenthal (1996/97) approached this problem in a reciprocal manner by reconstructing the Indian motifs of the surrealists (first and foremost Max Ernst), and it was also a theme in the 'Modernity and Islam' and 'Cultural Mobility' working groups.
As a committed outsider in the world of Berlin museums, Hans Belting (1994/95) exhibited an unparalleled lucidity in his reflections on the transformations of these institutions as an intercultural issue. Together with Fatema Mernissi, he explored the Islamic concept of images in a new way without presuppositions, and in cooperation with Mamadou Diawara he undertook an investigation of the African complex of art aesthetics and the magic of form.
The study group 'Art Museum and Ethnology,' co-founded by Belting, gave rise to the Kolleg's Museum Forum, which sought to redefine and break down the boundaries between art and ethnology museums in discussions with experts from various institutions, including those from outside Berlin. This group left its mark on the discussions revolving around the Humboldt Forum.
Probably the most tragic interaction of research and history ever to be witnessed at the Kolleg contrasted sinisterly with these efforts both to reconstruct the internal incorporation of foreign or even hostile influences and to show their dangers and benefits. On February 26, 2001, just when Deborah Klimburg-Salter was working on her book on the Kingdom of Bamiyan and its artworks, the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley as a prelude to subsequent battles over images and symbols. Between Ledderose's historical reconstruction and Klimburg-Salter's experiences, life at the Kolleg was shown in its most endangered form. The attempt to recognize cultural antipodes as potential parameters of cross-pollination was accompanied by lightning bolts of failure.
The heightened interest in imagery
Events like these made one question more pressing: why is it that, since the 1990s, the function, potential and dangers of imagery have been investigated with a previously unknown intensity beyond the borders of archeology and art history? The intense attention paid to the special features of imagery does not have its roots in religion, as in earlier centuries. Rather, it is grounded in the experience that, due to the mass media, digital image production and, in particular, the Internet, images have gathered a ubiquitous force that at times takes on a hyperreal quality. Either consciously or unconsciously, the belief seems to prevail that people or facts only exist to the extent that they are represented as images; herein lies an effect that refers back to the traditional problems of pictorial theology. The intensification of intercultural conflicts has its origins here, as can be seen by the recent dispute over cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed.
In the academic world, it is primarily the natural sciences that for some time have demonstrated a high level of aesthetic innovation when it comes to grasping and communicating their mostly invisible subjects. The emergence of PowerPoint presentations as the conditio sine qua non of academic speech is a rather problematic sign of this change, which brings together research work and aesthetic brilliance in fields such as medical imaging, molecular biology and nanotechnology. In a special way, these changes prove that talk of 'illustrations' understates the issue.
But even prior to these processes, Wissenschaftskolleg scholars were sensitized to the issues raised by imagery. The first visuality group was set up in 1992/93, and in 1996/97 a study group under the supervision of Sahotra Sakar examined how the concept of style could be applied to art and the history of science. Intense discussions among Hans Belting, Luca Giuliani and Dieter Grimm ultimately led to the idea of establishing a permanent forum for image issues at the Kolleg. This idea became reality when Dieter Grimm took up his post in 2001.
Focusing on a science of images
These discussions were heavily influenced by two Fellows who attempted both to utilize and transcend Richard Rorty's linguistic turn by coining two turns of their own. Turns are a fashionable means of acquiring intellectual terrain, yet it seems that both the pictorial turn proposed by W. J. T. Mitchell in 1992 and the iconic turn developed by Gottfried Boehm in the German-speaking world two years later, which functions at a level lower of image theory, as it were, fulfilled their mission of presenting, as intellectual challenges, the fundamental changes in the modes of communication and representation in high-tech societies. During their stay as Fellows, Boehm (2001/02) and Mitchell (2004/05) succeeded in presenting visual hermeneutics as a great opportunity. Whereas Boehm used his fellowship to forge ahead with work defining images, Mitchell formulated the law of image preservation, which states that, rather than being tied to a particular medium, images draw their constructive power by incorporating their own history: their key characteristic is that they always return.
The Pictures Boys were the first image science group at the Kolleg, and it was Mitchell who came up with their motto: "Augen auf und durch!" ("Open your eyes and go for it!", a play on the phrase "Augen zu und durch," meaning "close your eyes and go for it."). The group addressed the virtually insoluble problem of how mental visions bond to form semantically chargeable impressions. The generation of images in our minds, the formation of visual memory, the ways in which relations emerge between visual impressions and actions-these questions have become ever more pressing for image research for the very reason that the field remains arcane despite the sensational successes of brain research. The symposium 'ImageScience in Progress,' organized in March 2005 by Karl Clausberg and W. J. T. Mitchell, not only attracted neurobiologists such as Ingo Rentschler, Andreas Engel and Andreas Bartels, but also drew philosophers like Simone Mahrenholz and Günter Abel. It revealed the very different ways in which the natural sciences and liberal arts view the problem, and made clear how desirable it is to first define these differences in order to recognize strengths and weaknesses.
It was a fortunate coincidence that the group included two natural scientists-the neurobiologist Eberhard Fetz and the quantum researcher Eric Heller-who saw themselves as artists due to their powerful affinity for the visual arts. After this, scholars reflected on image issues in new ways at the Wissenschaftskolleg, without their being any plan or agreement to do so. This trend was reinforced by David Poeppel (Fellow in 2003/04, Fellow of the American Academy in fall 2004), a psycholinguist and neurobiologist who repeatedly joined the discussions and was profoundly skeptical about the value of visual representations of firing neurons.
This internal criticism inspired two counter-movements. Relieved of the pressure to recognize and criticize ever-changing variants of elementary reduction in the methodology of the natural sciences, scholars from the humanities, faced with the new prospects, arguably showed a greater willingness to grapple with this complex of problems than the natural scientists. A second movement supported by all members of the group took an opposite tack: it viewed images as something more than visual, tactile reflections of the outer world or neuronally imagined mental representations.
Hence, the skepticism that quantum mechanics, neurobiology and psycholinguistics harbored toward the one-sided conception of neurobiological imaging resulted in a dual movement that took the subject under criticism seriously, if from a distance, and simultaneously researched it in the form of externalized products linked to the concept of embodiment.
Embodiment
The sphere of embodiment encompasses physical movements generated by thought, such as writing or drawing, as well as disembodied works that can take the form of our entire designed environment. In contrast to the automatic processes in the brain, the domain of a direct phenomenological neurology lies in the theater of things and, in particular, of images.
So Wolfram Hogrebe's mantics, which take the undetermined, the barely suspected and the unknowable as a foundation for defining what is philosophically secure, attempts to radically redefine the cognitive power of the zones in which images operate. As a member of the Picture Boys, former Fellow John Michael Krois (1991/92) contributed to fundamentally reorienting semiotics from a similar perspective. This was important, not as a grammar of defined codes (in other words, as a decoding of linguistically equivalent motifs), but as an explanation of why images can provoke tears. The concept of embodiment was linked to a fundamental revaluation of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics and Edgar Wind's concept of Verkörperung (representation). The reevaluation was strengthened by Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus's admonishment, which was a keynote of the debates, that images should not be perceived as aseptic entities, but combined with voice and sound as tactile, spatial effects.
The second image science group was formed this year (2005/06), and its makeup shows that the topic has struck a nerve of the zeitgeist. It is seemingly more conservative, drawing on disciplines that traditionally study images, including archeology, art history and anthropology. Its members include Barbara Stafford-yet another Wissenschaftskolleg researcher to have played a central role in the debate on a new hermeneutics of images since the late 1980s. The group, called 'Sense and Style', was also sensitized to the issues of embodiment by Susanne Küchler's anthropological semantics, Charlotte Klonk's history of museum objects, and Monika Wagner's material iconology. By once again reading such thinkers as Johann Gottfried Herders, August Schmarsow, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, its members sought to redefine both the presence of the optical, tactile body in space and the interrelationship between touch and sight. As if new mineshafts have been opened, in light of the discussion on embodiment, these texts reveal new elements that can be combined to build a theory of embodied thought in space.
This study group has also lived by the principle that unplanned insights are an especially precious asset. Even so, if the question of embodied sight has created a link to the first year's Fellows-a link that was neither planned nor proposed-this shows all the more that a nerve has been struck in the current layering of a culture that is coming down to earth, as it were, from high-flying hopes for dematerialized simulations; a culture that, upon impact, will have sensory experiences of great epistemological and political relevance. The ongoing struggles over images bring this home in a very painful way.
This focus on the problem of mental embodiment, which was not imposed, but came about naturally, transformed the image science groups into a center of image questioning. The books that were then published in rapid succession, including Karl Clausberg's ‚Zwischen den Sternen: Lichtbildarchive. Was Einstein und Uexküll, Benjamin und das Kino der Astronomie des 19. Jahrhunderts verdanken' (Berlin, 2006) and Wolfgang Hogrebe's opus 'Echo des Nichtwissens' (2006), capture the uniquely inspiring atmosphere of this approach. For my part, I was motivated by the discussions to complete my trilogy of books on the visual influences on Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Galileo Galilei, and to distill a theory of the image act that perceives images in the category of physical, structural impressions of the world rather than as, say, illustrations: images as the living counterpart to the physically thinking mind. The image science groups were the only framework that could possibly have supplied this clarifying stimulus.
Molehills
Similar to other disciplines, the presence of art history at the Wissenschaftskolleg reflects the alternating 'boom and bust' cycle of subjects and methodologies. Even without the mildness that comes when considering things past, we can be certain that the discipline of art history would have played a very different role if illustrious representatives of the field had not repeatedly had the chance at the Kolleg to leave behind their unacknowledged norms and customary disciplinary boundaries and to emphasize the relevance of their methodologies to all fields in which serious attempts are made to determine the dynamism and formative power of images instead of perceiving them illustratively as mere documents. Only a procedure like this, drawing on the empiricism of images, can entitle us to speak of a science of images.
What the art historians have in common is that they used the Wissenschaftskolleg as a place to undertake methodological revisions. These scholars were indeed representatives of the zeitgeist, not in that they chased after it, but in that they tunneled in front it-creating a riot of Hegelian molehills in the gardens of our villa on Wallotstraße.
Translated by Adam Blauhut