Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Contested Histories in German Visual Culture 1871–1990
Convenors:
Debbie Lewer, University of Glasgow d.lewer@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk
Christian Weikop, University of Sussex c.weikop@sussex.ac.uk
German visual culture has produced many different representations of and engagements with history, the past and the remains of the past. In terms of form, content, programme and ideology, this has been – and still is – a ‘contested’ field. This session will examine relations between the material traces of the past, narratives of German history and the critical and conceptual frameworks for a range of objects and aesthetic practices in Germany since the late nineteenth century.
How have aesthetic appropriations of the past in German visual culture affirmed or critiqued dominant political culture? What is the significance of the presence or absence of particular histories of, or in, art? To what extent is the envisioned past indexed to the social and political imperatives of the present and stakes for the future? How has art practice negotiated the dialectic between history and experience? Methodologically, should we be ‘contesting’ the way histories of histories in recent German art and culture are established? Addressing such questions, the session aims to encourage debate on the ‘contested’ nature of the (German) past.
Speakers:
Paul Fox (University College London)
Visual Narratives of Conflict in Wilhelmine Culture
Deborah Ascher Barnstone (Technical University, Delft)
Modernism' Reconsidered in the work of Hans Scharoun
Joerg Niehoegen (University of Birmingham)
The painter Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938) – The visual expression of a regional Bavarian identity?
Debbie Lewer (University of Glasgow)
A Revolutionary Prototype: The German Peasants’ War of 1525 in the Art and Theory of the Weimar Left
Charles W. Haxthausen (Williams College)
The Cathedral of Metropolis
Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen and Katrin Blum (Deutscher Kunstverlag)
Photographs of Adolf Hitler in German Historiography after 1945
Veronica Davies (Open University)
“Closing the Wounds”? The Role of Exhibitions in Post-War Germany
Jennie Hawksley (De Montford University)
Lidice: One History – Two Views
Arnold Bartetzky (University of Leipzig)
Buildings as Narratives of History: Architectural Reconstruction Projects in Germany from 1945 to the Present
Sabine Kriebel (University College Cork)
Trockel’s Beuys: A Troubled Inheritance
Christian Weikop (University of Sussex)
The Birth and Rebirth of ‘New German Painting’
Additional speakers to be confirmed.