ILLNESSES: THE ANTITYPES OF HEALTH
Graduate Student Workshop

The fascination with representations of physical illness as a source of disgust, pleasure, and fear of contagion has been a constant theme in the history of art, as well as a major focus of interdisciplinary academic research. Illness has appeared as an artistic motif in every epoch and has shaped the way artists have understood themselves and their work. Moreover, it has served as a category for evaluating art and artists alike. Thinkers as different as Paul Julius Möbius (1898), Karl Jaspers (1926), and, more recently, Paul Barolsky (1993) have linked disease patterns with art using neuropathological, linguistic and social history. Likewise, efforts to diagnose illness – El Greco’s eye disease, the ailments of Hölderlin, Van Gogh and Nietzsche – or to designate outsider art have shown how instances of purported malady can generate surprising levels of creativity.

Symptoms of disease, whether personal or pandemic, also figure in the larger field of tension between the visible and the invisible and between scientific explanation and superstition.

The talks and discussions at the graduate student workshop will examine the antitypes of health in all their variety, from the ancient epidemics and pests in the Middle Ages to the disfigurements of syphilis, cholera outbreaks, the diagnosis of mental illnesses in the 19th century, and postmodern theories of illness.

We kindly ask for registration via eMail: antitypesofhealthgmx.de

This workshop is promoted by the German Academic Exchange Service and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It is also supported by the Ulmer Verein - Verband für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften e.V..

PROGRAM

FRIDAY, 14TH OF JUNE
9.00 - 11.30 OPENING

KEYNOTE
Dr. Ekaterini Kepetzis (University of Cologne) | "[I]nspired by a depraved energy, a morbid power" - Constructions of El Greco between Madness and Illness in fin-de-siècle Art Criticism and Popular Art History

Jenny Lehrl (Philipps University Marburg) | "Man schaut eben genau in die Augen des Malers" Ophthamological Examination of Paintings

12.00 - 13.00 EARLY MODERN PERIOD / DISABILITY
Elena Babich (Charles University, Prague) | The Fascination with a Person Affected by Hirsutism. Portrait of Helena Antonia from the Velké Losiny Castle Collections
Lucas Vanhevel (Ghent University) | The Art of Malingering: Feigned Illness in 16th Century Netherlandish Culture

14.30 - 15.30 EARLY MODERN PERIOD / ILLNESSES
Giulia Longo (Strasbourg University) | "Marks of weakness". The Syphilitic Body through Visual Arts: 17th - 19th Century
Marek Kwaśny (University of Wrocław) | Imaging the Illness. Silesian painter Johann Jacob Eybelwieser (1666-1744) and his Drawings to Matthias Gottfried Purmann's Chirurgia Curiosa (1699)

16.45 - 18.30 WORLD CAFÉ (Get Together and Discussion)

19.00 - 20.00 EVENING LECTURE
Dr. Irina Metzler (Swansea University) - Disability in J.R.R. Tolkien's World: Between Modern Theory and Medieval Theology

SATURDAY, 15TH JUNE

9.00 - 10.15 OPENING
KEYNOTE
Dr. Véronique Sina (University of Cologne) | Popular Graphic Illness Narratives – Representations of Illness and Dis/Ability in Sequential Art

Iris Haist (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne) | Marvel's THOR – Divine Power and Deadly Cancer in Comic Books

10.30 - 12.30 MODERN PERIOD / FIN DE SIÈCLE
Lisa Hecht (Philipps University of Marburg) | The Death of Pierrot, or the Personification of Tuberculosis in the Work of Aubrey Beardsley
Felix Hüttemann (Ruhr-University Bochum) | Blurring into the Surroundings – Aesthetic Psychasthenia of Dandyism
Johanna Johnen (University of Cologne) | Dorian Gray and the "leprosies of sin": Immorality as a Disease

14.00 - 16.00 MODERN PERIOD / 20TH CENTURY
Lisa Warring (University of Cologne) | The Photographer Miroslav Tichý - Outsider as Marketing Argument
Estzer Őze (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) | Representing Illness and Biopolitics. A Case Study on Modernism, Hygiene and the Exhibitionary Complex
Nina Christine Dusartz de Vigneulle (University of Bonn) | Illness and Its Percetion in Transition: The Representation of HIV and AIDS in Photography since the 1980s

16.30 - 17.00 FINAL DISCUSSION