Arts in the Technical Age, II
Concept: Birgit Recki, Benjamin Fellmann
With the establishment of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg and the development of a set of instruments that takes art and images seriously as bearers of social, cultural and political significance across times and spaces, the scholars around Aby Warburg in Hamburg established art history as a modern science of cultural studies. For Warburg, as a technophile, the view of cultural forms of expression was always also one of the relationship between art, media and technical knowledge, up to the present. This interdisciplinary interest provides the occasion for the two-year focus topic at the Warburg-Haus to investigate the topicality of Warburg’s methodological heritage and, focusing on the relationship between art and technology, to take up innovative impulses and methodological reflections that continue to inspire to this day.
In the first half of 2020, the Warburg-Haus lectures will focus on Hans Blumenberg’s work on technology and art, on the occasion of the great philosopher’s centenary this year; on the architectural design of subway stations in Europe in the second half of the 20th century as a central feature of the infrastructural appearance of modern metropolises; in the lecture of this-year’s holder of the Warburg professorship, on pictorial worlds of visual experiences in Hamburg and German painting as well as Italian art of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento; and on the technical history of the opera (Birgit Recki, Frank Schmitz, Christopher Wood, Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach). The lectures are framed by a program of cooperation events. In April, in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Hamburg, the exhibition Ah humanity! of filmmakers Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab shall provide the occasion for a curator’s guided tour of the exhibition followed by a panel discussion. In May, thanks to a cooperation with Flexibles Flimmern – The mobile cinema, a film screening of Paravel/Castaing-Taylor’s major work Leviathan (2012) is planned in the reading room, and in June, in cooperation with the Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung and publishing house Klett-Cotta, an evening with Ernst Kantorowicz is to take place on the occasion of the publication of the German edition of Robert E. Lerner’s biography of the internationally influential historian and medievalist, with translator Thomas Gruber, Villa I Tatti Florence, Barbara Picht, ZfL Berlin, and Christopher Wood, New York University.
Note on the Corona-related closure of the Warburg-Haus since March 2020:
No events can take place during the period of the Corona-induced closure of the house to the public. We regret this very much. Nevertheless, together with lecturers and cooperation partners, we are looking for possibilities to realize digital alternatives or reschedule events. We cordially invite you to regularly check our website under Announcements and the calendar. In particular, in reaction to Corona we offer all friends of the Warburg-Haus on our website the opportunity to follow an online lecture on the Philosophy of Culture given by Birgit Recki (in German), recorded weekly from April through July in the reading room of the Warburg-Haus and made available online as a podcast. Those events in the reading room that could not take place due to the Corona epidemic are not cancelled, but postponed in agreement with our cooperation partners to later dates when it will be possible to hold them in suitable forms.
In the second half of 2020, the lecture to commemorate the 91st anniversary of Aby Warburg’s death will focus on digital processes of contemporary visual culture and Warburg’s approach to critical image research for the digital age; in November, the fifth lecture in the series will examine techniques of image and knowledge production in European natural history around 1800, and the lecture by the 2020 laureate of the Aby Warburg Foundation’s scholar’s prize, the Wissenschaftspreis, and sixth recipient of the Martin Warnke Medal, will focus on Diego Velázquez’ famous painting Las Hilanderas (Ursula Frohne, Dominik Hünniger, Victor I. Stoichita).