Organized by Dr. Jakub Stejskal (POINT Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center)

28. April 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, 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 different papers.

Program:

11 am
Welcome and Introduction
Jakub Stejskal (Freie Universität Berlin)

11:30 am
What Would a Post-Culturalist Art History Look Like? + discussion
Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley)

12:30 pm
LUNCH BREAK

2:30 pm
Art History, Visual Culture, Material Culture + discussion
Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz)

3:30 pm
Speculative Origins, or: Why Art History Needs Prehistory + discussion
Hans Christian Hönes (Warburg Institute, London)

4:30pm
COFFEE BREAK

5:30 pm
Unusual Visibility: What Would a Post-culturalist Aesthetics Look Like? + discussion
Jakub Stejskal (Freie Universität Berlin)

6:20 pm
Final discussion