HfG Karlsruhe Jahresbericht Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung ...

KW MT
AR MT
Vorträge und Tagungen/
Lectures and Conferences
Méta-textile: Identité et
histoire d’un médium
artistique contemporain,
Internationales Kolloquium
/ International
Colloquium, Leitung der
Sektion / Section
moderator, Musée des
Beaux-Arts, Lausanne,
13. Februar /13 February
2009.
Towards an Iconology
of the Textile: Clothes
and Cloths, Leitung der
Sektion / Section
moderator, Annual
Meeting der Renaissance
Society of America, Los
Angeles, 21. März / 21
March, 2009.
Forme esthétique –
norme sociale. Le corps
ornemental de la grâce
aristocratique, Vortrag /
Lecture, Symposium
»Watteau au confluent
des arts: esthétiques de
la grâce«, Musée des
Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes,
3. April 2009.
Künstlerische
Wendungen gegen das
Bild?, Vortrag / Lecture,
Hubert Burda-Workshop
Iconic Turn,
Menzenschwand,
27. September 2008.
90 Vertretungsprofessor / Professor ad interim
Dr. Julia Gelshorn
91
The second focus of my teaching was on the art of the neo-avantgardes and two current tendencies
in the observation of art: on the one hand, the debate on “artistic research,” which is
particularly heated in the area of university politics; and on the other hand, the increased interest
in more recent research in the arts and humanities in media, materials, and cultural
techniques. One of these trends was pursued in the seminar “Traveling, Researching, Writing;
Artists as ‘Ethnographs’,” in which we discussed and analyzed artistic investigation of
topographic, historical and discoursive “sites” under the umbrella term of “ethnography” --
that is, to which extent artists like Allan Sekula, Ursula Biemann, Fred Wilson, or Renée Green
actually use “scientific and academic” methods of research and documentation, or rather fictionally
undermine them.
Thanks partly to the experience gained in this seminar, I decided to pursue a different tendency
in the following semester and thus focus on a fundamental question of artistic and artresearch
work: How do objects actually generate meaning? Based on the introduction of the
Readymade by Duchamp, and the radical negation of Minimal Art, the seminar “Tactile Objects
– On the Semantization of Form and Material in Post-Minimalistic Art” examined the different
layers of meaning in objects. We gave special emphasis to works by artists like Eva
Hesse, Robert Morris, Rachel Whiterhead, or Mona Hatoum, that, according to George Batailles,
could be considered “formless” -- and as such, put standardized, ideological, or materialistic
ways of reading form and material up for debate.
While we discussed established artistic positions in the seminars and lectures, the field trip
we took together with Wolfgang Ullrich to the Art Basel and the shows surrounding it was
dedicated to the question of how established and less-established positions are able to maintain
their hold on the market in the face of the economic crisis. During the excursion, we discussed
our impressions of forms of presentation, sales strategies, or current artistic trends.
With the help of documentation material, we then further explored them in a block seminar.
One of our results was the conclusion that the art presented not only satisfies a taste in art
suitable for art shows, but that “taste” as a production-aesthetic criterion also seems to have
gained in importance.
█ plasmaporträt (Orlan)
Zu: Künstler im / als Bild
Aus: Orlan. Carnal Art,
Paris 2003 / On: The
artist in the / as image
From: Orlan. Carnal Art,
Paris, 2003