Schlagwort-Archive: GCSC

publication, research

Popularisation & Populism in the Visual Arts

Popularisation and Populism in the Visual Arts, Ed: Anna Schober, London: Routledge, 2019.

Including a text of mine: „Facing Everybody? Composite Portraiture as Representation of a Common Face“ (Raul Gschrey)

This book investigates the pictorial figurations, aesthetic styles and visual tactics through which visual art and popular culture attempt to appeal to “all of us”. Scholars from several European countries discuss a key figure these practices bring into play—the “everybody”—in an interdisciplinary way. The contributions focus on the operation and genealogies of popularisation and communication practices, which can assume populist forms, in contemporary democracies. They also address the ambivalences of attraction, i.e. the ways in which visual creations evoke for example desire as well as hatred, invite identification or produce rejection and trigger mimicry as well as conversion processes.

conference, lecture

Addressing each and every one

Workshop: Addressing each and every one: Popularisation/populism through the visual arts

April 21 and 22 2016, Justus Liebig University Gießen, Main Building (Ludwigstrasse 23), 3th floor, Seminar-Raum

The workshop brings together scholars from art history, film studies, theatre studies, political theory, sociology and philosophy of religion from several European countries. It discusses the ways (iconic figurations, aesthetic styles, rhetoric figures etc.) through which visual culture addresses its audience and gets involved in the constitution of a public sphere. It is in particular interested in how the visual arts – understood as both visual popular culture as well as fine arts – becomes involved in popularisation practices and populist criticism.

The workshop approaches this subject by focusing on the central iconic figure that these practices bring into play: the “everybody” (which stands for “all of us”, but is at the same time also a “nobody”, a “common man”, a “common woman” and sometimes even a “new man” or a “new woman”). It presents spotlights of a genealogy and an iconography of the everybody and discusses political and philosophical theories about how the mediating force of this iconic figuration can be understood and valuated. In doing so, the workshop pays particular attention to the ambivalent role this figure plays, especially in most recent history, in triggering both desire and enthusiasm as well as resentment and hate.

Programme below Addressing each and every one weiterlesen →

lecture

Visualizing “Law’s Pluralities”: Artistic Practice and Legal Culture

Interactive lecture by Raul Gschrey (Frankfurt and Giessen, GCSC, artist and curator) in the context of Prof. Greta Olson’s lecture series „Cultural Approaches to Law and US American Legal Culture”

15.06.2015 16.00 ct  – Liebig University Giessen, Phil I, A4

The interactive lecture series “Cultural Approaches to Law and US American Legal Culture” invites its participants to understand law not as an independent body of rules but as inseparable from culture, narrative, images, and political economy. The particular focus of the individual lectures will be on US American legal culture(s). Guest lectures by scholars in cultural legal studies, political science, anthropology, and US American history will enable participants to examine law from several perspectives.

conference, exhibition

Law’s Pluralities

Law’s Pluralities ׀ Conference & Exhibition 06.05. – 09.05.2015

In May 2015 the conference “Law’s Pluralities” will take place at Justus Liebig University Giessen/Germany. In a series of keynote presentations by experts and in panel sessions and discussions, as well as in an exhibition it will explore cultural constructions of law.

06.05. – 24.05.2015 exhibition at „Neuer Kunstverein Giessen“ & during the conference „Law’s Pluralities“ at Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Artists: Il-Jin Choi ׀ Raul Gschrey ׀ Mi You ׀ Manu Luksch

The interrogation of the cultural construction and negotiation of legal practices in the conference „Law’s Pluralities“ offers an interesting occasion for the presentation of an exhibition of artistic works dealing with the topic. The international artistic positions reflect on the social and legal frameworks and find means to visualise phenomena that often remain abstract. Furthermore here the artistic interventions themselves contribute to the differentiation and development of “legal writing”. Through their explorations, contestations and subversions, they participate in an alternative production of knowledge and function as mediators of and shape legal practices. The exhibition will be located at the conference venue and in the close-by “Neuer Giessner Kunstverein”, a local art association. This will expand the exhibition’s and conference’s reception towards a non-academic public open the discourse on the politically and socially relevant topic to a larger public.

The conference and exhibition is organized at Justus Liebig University Giessen by the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in cooperation with the  Department of English, the Rudolf-von-Jhering Institute, and in cooperation with the Neuer Kunstverein Giessen.

publication

Experiencing Space – Spacing Experience

The publication Experiencing Space – Spacing Experience: Concepts, Practices, and Materialities of the GCSC conference at  Ruhrtriennale 2013 was finally released. The book is available at WVT Verlag. My article is on art and surveillance and also refers to artistic strategies of subverting face recognition:

Raul Gschrey: “Opening the Closed Circuit: Artistic Practices in Spaces under Surveillance.” In: Experiencing Space – Spacing Experience: Concepts, Practices, and Materialities.Berning, Nora; Schulte, Philipp; Schwanecke, Christine (eds.) Trier: WVT, 2014, 259-273.

Table of Contents

Interdisciplinary approaches to the intersection of space and experience, which comprise an emerging research topic in the study of culture, are few and far between. This conceptual volume maps the rapidly developing international field of research related to the presentation and representation of spatial experience as well as the experiential interfaces of space and experience – particularly in light of new directions in research, which include the exploration of space as a ‘cultural-theoretical’ or ‘psychogeographical’ category. Experiencing Space – Spacing Experience weiterlesen →

lecture

Identifying Identity?

“Identifying Identity? Identification and Typification in 19th Century and the Formation of 21st Century Identities.”

Presentation at the conference “W(h)ither Identity – Positioning the Self and Transforming the Social” at the GCSC, Giessen University.

19th century endeavours of identification and typification, among others by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, have provided the basis for today’s intricate and interconnected collections of data on individuals – their body and face. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of their work widely influenced today’s means and practices of biometric identification as well as contemporary identity formation.

Taking portraits from the early days of photography as a starting point, the paper will examine the genesis of the practices and modes of visual representation and provide an outlook on contemporary digital archives of personal visual data. Here the ambivalent role of the portrait becomes obvious: on the one hand as a sign of voluntary and confident self-representation of for the first time large parts of society in the 19th century, on the other hand as a means of forced external ascription in practices of identification through the mug shot in police work. This technique of recording the criminal face is eventually extended to cover the whole population in IDs and administrative archives. These processes of visual development have gained new momentum through techniques of computerisation and automation in biometric identification that have just in recent years changed the pictures on our passports from smiling half-lateral portrait to frontal expressionless mug shot.