Claudia Slanar
1. „What to do with emotions?“ would be an alternative title to this seminar pointing to a problem in writing and talking about works of art: How to express or deal with an artwork that immediately affects us with a specific feeling, be it joy, anger, sadness or confusion? How can this affect be described without playing off the academic against the lyrical?
2. Ekphrasis (Greek, „to speak out“) is a „verbal representation of a visual representation“ (James A. W. Heffernan) and the oldest type of writing about art. The goal of this poetic form was to make the reader experience the thing described as if it were physically present. Today it is more and more regarded as a rhetoric form that includes any type of writing about images. Due to this status ekphrasis seems to be at the center of a debate about the word/image dialectic in contemporary discourses about art history and literature alike.
To tie 1 and 2 together we could take a detour: What about a visual representation about a visual representation or a conflation of the verbal and the visual? We will expand the focus and look at artworks and at texts about artworks, at artworks about artworks, at artists writing about artworks, and we will try to make/write our own ekphrastic pieces. A preliminary list of artists and authors includes: Louise Bourgeois, John Berger, Dick Hebdige, Mary Kelly, Chris Kraus, Sharon Lockhart, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, Gus van Sant.
DATES
15.03.2016, 10:00:00 – 13:00:00
19.04.2016, 10:00:00 – 13:00:00
03.05.2016, 10:00:00 – 13:00:00
24.05.2016, 10:00:00 – 13:00:00
07.06.2016, 10:00:00 – 13:00:00
21.06.2016, 10:00:00 – 13:00:00