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 (UC Berkeley), 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 three papers by Prof. Gerhard Wolf (KI Florenz), Dr. Hans Christian Hönes (Warburg Institute, London), and Dr. Jakub Stejskal (FU).


PROGRAM

11:00am
Welcome and Introduction
Jakub Stejskal (Freie Universität Berlin)

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

12:30pm
LUNCH BREAK

2:30pm
TBA + Discussion
Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut)

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

4:30pm
COFFEE BREAK

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

6:20 pm
Final discussion

This workshop is organized by Dahlem Humanities Center's POINT Fellow, Dr. Jakub Stejskal. Please register via e-mail by April 21, 2016 at jakub.stejskalfu-berlin.de. Reading material will be provided.

Related event: DHC Lecture with Whitney Davis: 'A Thin Red Line: The Presence of Prehistoric Pictoriality', 27 April, 6:30pm, Freie Universität Berlin, “Rostlaube”, Room JK 32/102, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin. http://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/dhc/programme/termine/DHC-Lecture-mit-Whitney-Davis.html