LFU:online

Developing a basic understanding and specific advanced knowledge of the lecture’s topic

In 1968, the American artist Richard Serra produced a series of works in which he hurled molten lead into the corner of a room, removed the metal from this found mold once it had cooled, placed it on the floor next to it and repeated the process several times. He called these works "slow information pieces". Such works, which thematize the material and the production process, were made for a specific location and physically integrated their viewers, are considered the beginning of postmodernism. The dominant interpretative paradigm of this art sees it as a quasi-phenomenological investigation of physically bound perception. The lecture will present works by artists such as Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow and Nancy Holt and discuss their dominant phenomenological interpretation. On the other hand, alternative interpretative approaches will be developed that combine artistic reflection on perception with a critique of mass media. Against the background of the visual culture of the time, which was determined by the technical imagery of the mass media and the new information technologies, Serra's term "slow information pieces" appears quite ambiguous: not only as a designation of the slow formation of the lead, but also as a reference to the time-intensive reception of his art in contrast to the rapid flow of information in the mass media. Analysis of his works, discussion of the current state of research and reflections on the interactions between art and technically informed imagery form equal focal points of the lecture.

Lecture

Oral exam

Auslander, Philipp: Liveness. Performances in an mediatized culture, London u.a. 1999.

Benjamin, Walter: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit und weitere Dokumente, Frankfurt a.M. 2015.

Dreamlands. Immersive Cinema and Art 1905–2016, Ausst.-Kat. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016 Joselit, David: Feedback. Television against Democracy, Cambridge, MA 2007Kastner, Jens: Akzelerationismus: Mit Warp-Geschwindigkeit ins Nichts. Was ist und was will die theoretische Strömung? (2016), http://www.jenspetzkastner.de/artikel/diskurs/archivdiskurs/akzelerationismus

Kaizen, William: Against Immediacy. Video Art and Media Populism, Darmouth 2016Lee, Pamela M.: Chronophobia. On time in the art of the 1960s, Cambridge, Mass. 2004.

McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, New York 1964.

Paulsen, Chris: Here/There. Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface, Cambridge, Mass. 2017 Speed. Visions of an Accelerated Age, hg. v. Jeremy Miller und Michiel Schwarz, Ausst.-Kat. London: Whitchapel Gallery, 1998.

Thalmair, Franz: Postdigital 1. Allgegenwart und Unsichtbarkeit eines Phänomens, in: Kunstforum International, Bd. 242, Sept.-Okt. 2016: postdigital 1, S. 38-53.

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