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Im Sommersemester 2023 bot die Professur für Theorien der Künste und Medien  zwei Lehrveranstaltungen an:
BA-Seminar, Sprache: Englisch

Contemporary Art and the (Post-)Socialist Condition: Practices, Theories and Contexts in Central and Eastern Europe (1960s – present)

Compared to the rather solidified and relatively stable narratives, institutions, international networks of exchange, marketplaces and canons of Western contemporary art since the 1960s in Europe and North America, research into simultaneous developments on the other side of the proverbial “iron curtain” marking the geopolitical divide of the postwar period for the longest time had been dealing, even struggling, with the absence of an overarching referential system that would allow to address, compare and evaluate artists, artworks, artifacts and events in shared terms and common frameworks. Until the early 2000s, art histories of the then only recently dissolved so-called Eastern Bloc were predominantly organized both according to local mythologies adapted to the conditions of individual nation-states and, by the same token, to the opposition between official socialist art programs and ideologies on the one hand and the only sporadically and slightly documented activities of dissident underground avant-gardes on the other hand. Against this (art-)historiographical backdrop, this course pursues the aim of investigating artistic (and partly activist) practices, theories and contexts in Central and Eastern (as well South-Eastern) Europe starting in the 1960s, leading up to the events of 1989 and gauging their respective political, social, economic, aesthetic and discursive aftermaths in the present.
The English-language seminar consists of selected readings from the by now vast critically advanced and theoretically minded literature on the subject of (post-)socialist or (post-)soviet poetics and cultural politics by internationally renowned scholars such as Svetlana Boym, Susan Buck-Morss, Boris Groys, Piotr Piotrowski and Klara Kemp-Welch. Concomitantly, the emphasis will be laid on the rise of conceptual, performance, installation and expanded media art in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, in the GDR and USSR, with case studies on artists such as Alina Szapocznikow, Ilya Kabakov, Jiří Kovanda, Endre Tót, Milan Knízák, Ion Grigorescu, Július Koller, Edward Krasiński, Dóra Maurer, Sanja Iveković, Marina Abramović, Braco Dimitrijevíc, Geta Brătescu as well as artist groups such as Clara Mosch, the OHO Group, Collective Actions Group, IRWIN, and Nove Tendencije. Analyzing the specificity of these diverse approaches in relation to the Cold War system of an „actually existing socialism,“ this course will not only attend to questions of artistic form, procedure and dissemination. Rather it will need to also contextualize and reflect on the stance – be it with articulations of reticence, humor and doubt or with activities of overt critique, opposition and dissent – these practices took toward notions of gender, the public sphere, museum culture, labor, the media apparatus, propaganda and commemoration, collectivity and production, ecology and the bureaucracy of everyday life in the former East. Finally and with regard to works by artists who only gained prominence in the last two decades – like the Lithuanian filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius, Polish painter Paulina Olowska, Slovak conceptual artist Roman Ondák, Polish sculptors Joanna Rajkowska and Monika Sosnowska, Croatian media artist David Maljković, the Russian Chto Delat group and the cosmopolitan collective Slavs and Tatars, among others – the cultural effects of the restructuring of the socio-economic order in Central and Eastern Europe during the post-1989 era will offer a genealogical vanishing point for such an unfinished art history of a vanished world.

MA-Seminar, Sprache: Deutsch

Klima, Künste und Krise: Positionen zur Ökologie der Gegenwart

Nicht erst seitdem das Erdzeitalter des Anthropozäns (von dem Chemiker Paul J. Crutzen und dem Biologen Eugene F. Stoermer) im Jahr 2000 als „Geologie der Menschheit“ auf den geochronologischen Begriff gebracht wurde, scheint evident, dass sich „der Mensch“ spätestens mit dem Beginn der industriellen Moderne selbst, etwa durch exzessive Formen der Extraktion und intensiven Konsum von Energie, die materiellen Grundlagen des Fortbestehens der eigenen Gattung entzieht. Im Zeichen einer sich verschärfenden Klimakrise können die Ressourcen, Spezies, Atmosphären und Milieus des Planeten nicht länger als gegeben vorausgesetzt werden. Natur erweist sich vielmehr als zunehmend fragiler systemischer Zusammenhang einer Umwelt, die durch eine Vielzahl von beispielsweise biologischen, chemischen und physikalischen, aber auch technologischen Faktoren und Prozessen fortwährend produziert, modifiziert und schlimmstenfalls bedroht oder sogar zerstört wird. Entsprechend hat sich das Konzept der Ökologie seit seiner ersten Formulierung durch den Biologen Ernst Haeckel in der zweiten Hälfte des 19.Jahrhunderts signifikant erweitert, bezeichnet es nun doch nicht mehr nur die Wechselbeziehungen von Lebewesen untereinander bzw. mit ihren jeweiligen Umgebungen, sondern die (scheinbar) autopoietischen Verflechtungen von menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen, biotischen und abiotischen, biologischen und (medien-)technischen Akteuren im Allgemeinen und Alltäglichen. Anders als es der Anthropozän-Begriff suggerieren mag, ist dieser potentiell destruktiven und desaströsen Entwicklung zudem eine (post-)koloniale Signatur eigen, verdankt sie sich doch nicht zuletzt einer anhaltenden Asymmetrie im globalen Machtgefüge der Moderne und Gegenwart.
Das Seminar widmet sich der Geschichte und Gegenwart der Ökologie aus zweifacher Perspektive: Zum einen ist es der gemeinsamen Lektüre einschlägiger kulturwissenschaftlicher Texte von Autor*innen wie Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Félix Guattari, Erich Hörl, Caroline A. Jones, Eva Horn, Philippe Descola, Deborah Danowski/Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, T. J. Demos, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Morton und Malcom Ferdinand aus den Feldern der Anthropologie, Medientheorie, Wissenssoziologie, (Technik-)philosophie, postkolonialen Theorie, Literatur- und Geschichtswissenschaften, feministischer Theorie und Kunstgeschichte gewidmet. Zum anderen sollen in der Lehrveranstaltung ausgewählte Werke von zeitgenössischen Künstler*innen wie Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, Olafur Eliasson, Hito Steyerl, Sarah Sze, Forensic Architecture, Allora & Calzadillla und Pierre Huyghe analysiert und diskutiert werden; aus der Verbindung von unter anderem natürlichen Materialien oder sogar Lebewesen und technologischen Apparaten kreieren sie ästhetische Öko-Systeme, welche die zunehmend krisenhaften Bedingungen von geteilten Lebensräumen explizieren, aber auch alternative Szenarien der Koexistenz und Kohabitation entwerfen.
Im Lichte des „ecological turn“ in den Künsten und prominenter Theorien unserer sich fortwährend transformierenden Umwelten wird für die Seminardiskussionen die grundlegende Frage danach leitend sein, auf welchen ökologischen Grundlagen die Kultur der Gegenwart existenziell fußt.

Im Wintersemester 2022/23 fand an der Professur für Theorien der Künste und Medien folgende Lehrveranstaltung statt:

BA-Seminar, Sprache: Englisch

Introduction to Contemporary Art

What exactly is contemporary art? Despite its wide popularity and ever-increasing prominence in museums, galleries, biennials and fairs around the globe (as well as in the humanities), it has proven challenging to ultimately define and periodize the main procedures and preoccupations of aesthetic production since the later part of the twentieth century. Facing a panoply, abundance and diversity of practices emerging in vastly different geo-political contexts and areas, this English-language course sets out to offer an introduction to the history and theory of global contemporary art from the 1960s to the present. With a focus on developments in Western, Central and Eastern Europe as well as in North and South America, it presents a survey of salient artworks and concomitant critical discourses. Other than modern (or even modernist) art that until mid-century had based its claims for autonomy and disinterestedness (in political and social issues, for instance) on the notion of medium-specificity, i.e. the explicit engagement of each single with nothing but the material support and conditions of its genre (most notably in painting and sculpture), manifestations of contemporary art for the most part could be said to share an impulse toward both a programmatic fraying of the boundaries between traditional media and an expansion of the aesthetic object into spatial, architectural, social and discursive contexts. Contemporary art for these reasons, among others, tends to confronts viewers with experimental forms and engages with a rich array of ideas concerning spectatorship, medium, site and object, but also politics, economics and sociality.
The seminar will discuss the aesthetic repercussions and theoretical implications of this historical shift, covering a wide range of topics and strands in contemporary art history such as Neo-Dada, Minimalism and Pop Art, Conceptual Art, site-specificity and Institutional Critique, performance art, installation art, Appropriation Art, film, video and moving images, photography in art, feminist practices, queer aesthetics and identity politics, participatory and community-based art, relational aesthetics and Post-Internet art. At the same time the course will consist of close readings in art theory and history, featuring essays by preeminent scholars and writers, that will allow to further unlock and debate the complexities and potentials of contemporary art.