Here and in the following section, the subject was the German-language tradition known as Bildwissenschaft. Readings included a collection of translated tables of contents, which were intended to give the participants a sense of the breadth of the literature.1 In addition, participants read a number of essays by Horst Bredekamp, Hans Belting, Gottfried Boehm, and others.2 For some of the conversation transcribed here, participants also read texts assigned by Keith Moxey, related to the comparison of Anglo-American and German-language writing. They included essays by Georges Didi-Huberman, Gottfried Boehm, and Tom Mitchell.3 The transcription is excerpted from seminars led by Gustav Frank, James Elkins, and Keith Moxey. The participants also read Moxey’s essay comparing Anglo-American and German-language studies of the visual.4
JAMES ELKINS: This is our last seminar on history. It’s got a somewhat ridiculous burden, because Gustav and I are going to try to present something resembling a précis of a really enormous literature, the German-language writing that is now usually called Bildwissenschaft. It’s an impossible task, but it is only part of what Sunil, Gustav, and I wanted to do, because there are actually more visual studies, in the plural, than just Anglo-American and German-language. We don’t have the faculty here to address that, but our fifteen Fellows are the most international we’ve ever had. In my count, we have people at this table who are either from, or working in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, China, Portugal, Denmark, Japan, the UK, Germany, Israel, Spain, the U.S., and Iceland. And the people who write Assessments for the book can, we hope, broaden that. I think there are at least five differentiable strains of visual studies:
1. Anglo-American visual studies, which has been theorized and practiced mainly in the UK and the U.S., but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and various countries mainly in the north of Europe, including the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Estonia, and Lithuania.
2. German-language Bildwissenschaft, which is our subject this morning, and is practiced in German-speaking countries and also read, to a lesser degree, in Scandinavia.
3. Latin American visual studies, which in my experience is more affiliated with visual communication and semiotics, and less with identity, gender, and politics. It occurs, sporadically, in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico.
4. Scandinavian Bildvetenskap, which began in the 1970s.5
5. The situation is entirely different in China, where a long tradition of art pedagogy has linked art-making to its study. To use the Western terms, “art history,” “aesthetics,” and “studio art” are mingled. Art historians and people interested in visual studies are commonly also painters. Like art history, the strains of visual studies that happen in China are commonly mixed with aesthetics.6
So this session on Bildwissenschaft should ideally be the second in a longer series of seminars.
GUSTAV FRANK: Okay. First, there is a problem of translation both sides: even though people in the Bildwissenschaft area have an acceptable knowledge of English, visual studies tends to be in the first footnote of publications, as if to say, There is a Tom Mitchell out there, and now I have acknowledged that, and I can continue with more pertinent references.
JAMES ELKINS: On the other side, I think it needs to be said that English-language scholars very rarely read the German literature, and that means they are also often unaware of its extent. There’s a conceit in academia that language competence isn’t a barrier, but I think it is.
GUSTAV FRANK: I will begin by naming two general points. First is the difference between visuelle Kultur, which is often cited as a precursor of current practices, and both Bildwissenschaft and visual studies.7 That difference is institutional. Visuelle Kultur originated from people outside academia; some were independent intellectuals in the Weimar Republic. This is quite different from the situation of Bildwissenschaft or visual studies.
A second difference is perspectival. We have been looking at the history of visual studies as seen by insiders: Michael Holly, Lisa Cartwright, Tom Mitchell. Today, Jim and I will be presenting outsiders’ perspectives. I am trained in the German tradition, but not in Bildwissenschaft; Jim is an art historian, but not trained in the German tradition.
Historically, art history has been in the center of developments in Bildwissenschaft. There are conventionally three sorts of practices, identified with three scholars.
Hans Belting followed an art-historical tradition by occupying the chair in art history in Munich in 1983; he was a follower of Heinrich Wölfflin and Hans Sedlmayr. His inaugural lecture was called “The End of Art History.” At the time, the art market and media connections were at the point where they seemed to overtake art history; and at the same time, society at large was demanding information about images that aren’t art, and art history was not responding. Later, Belting developed his answer into an account of “image anthropology,” which has gotten a fierce critique, especially from feminist art historians, because the anthropos in Belting’s account is definitely a middle-aged, middle-class white male.8
A second practice is associated with Gottfried Boehm, who we will consider later. His phenomenological account is predicated on concepts of iconic difference and the inherent properties of images.
Third in this conventional listing is work associated with Horst Bredekamp in Berlin. It is interested in sciences and technical imagery, and it overlaps with subjects in science studies. The Humboldt-Universität has links to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and we have also been asked to read a paper by one of the three current directors there, Lorraine Daston.9
There is a specific sense in which Bildwissenschaft is art history, and vice versa, in Germany. If you look at the job postings, you see calls for people doing picture theory (Bildtheorie) and for people doing the history of visual media (Bildmedien), and at the end of the day it’s always art historians who get those jobs, even if they never participated in one of the three practices I just named. As Michael Holly said in relation to the publishing label “visual studies,” it’s a matter of names: it is accepted that art history should somehow be Bildwissenschaft.10 Of course, not every art historian would like to be called a Bildwissenschaftler.
Around the principal practices of Bildwissenschaft I would constellate philosophy, media studies, semiotics, and other fields. All of them share what I would call an antisemiotic affect. In relation to semiotics, I’ll quote from an interview Horst Bredekamp gave: he says “the Bild is put in preventative detention by the word.”11 That’s strong language, because it puts the word in the role of the Nazi, and the image in the role of the Jew, or the politically unwelcome leftist. Nevertheless, semiotics had, and has, a strong influence on Bildwissenschaft. I was interested in Göran Sonesson’s work for a while, but there are issues with semiotics’ insistence that every image must be decoded, deciphered, read.12 Roland Posner’s position is interesting: he has a kind of code minimalism.13 He says deciphering isn’t what’s interesting: the principles that organize human interaction are of more interest. The theory is about interaction, not code.
In relation to philosophy, there is also a strong antisemiotic interest. Bernhard Waldenfels’s books are examples, and so are Lambert Wiesing’s. He has a book called Artifizielle Präsenz.14 A person like Klaus Sachs-Hombach, for example, whose work is very much in the analytic tradition, feels that he has to incorporate a certain part of semiotics; at one point he says the image is a sign that is “close to perception.”15
So much for semiotics and philosophy. A third element in the constellation around Bildwissenschaft is media studies. It appears as a dangerous supplement, or a potential adversary. This is especially true of the media-hardware orientation of Friedrich Kittler, who argues for a technical a priori that supersedes interest in the contents of a text or image.16 He is interested in structures of agency and perception. Kittler wrote a book in 1981 proposing that there should be an “exorcism” of the spiritual out of the humanities (as in the word Geisteswissenschaften, meaning humanities, but literally “spiritual sciences”): that’s a claim against the Hegelian tradition, against hermeneutics. Boehm’s iconic difference, on the other hand, builds on the hermeneutic tradition, especially as it is developed in his teacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Kittler’s appearance in the 1980s was really shocking, not just for people engaged in what became Bildwissenschaft, but for people in the humanities generally. That’s why I would place media studies as an adversary of Bildwissenschaft.
GUSTAV FRANK: We are running short of time, and I want to be sure to say something about the other authors we set as readings. Regarding Hans Belting, I will be brief and, I hope, provocative. Many of the issues that Boehm and Bredekamp raise could be seen in the light of early twentieth-century approaches to what I called visuelle Kultur: the language problem, the body problem, and so forth.17 When I first read Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie,18 I thought, the book doesn’t even make use of the language and body problems current in the 1920s: it is deeply concerned with nineteenth-century historicist thought. Especially in the passages where he talks about death: that’s how mid-nineteenth-century realism in literature was haunted by what archaeology has unearthed. They were overwhelmed by all the things that history was showing them—the heavy weight of all the dead that historicism revealed. It is a presemiotic way of thinking about the question of replacement, taking the semiotic procedure literally with a lightly animistic undertone. It even opposes Lessing’s division of corporeal and arbitrary signs and therefore is pre-Enlightenment thought.
KEITH MOXEY: It’s certainly a good question as to what sort of anthropology this might be, this Bild-Anthropologie. You’re arguing it’s presemiotic. I would argue it’s antisemiotic. I think that this is the reaction of someone who has been through the semiotic mill and come out the other side. Semiotics doesn’t quite do what Belting thinks semiotics should do. And that’s not surprising: he’s a student of the middle ages—his book Bild und Kult (Likeness and presence) argues that as religious images begin to lose their magic, as their sanctity leaks out of them, it is replaced by aesthetics and the affirmation of the place of the artist and art. I’m being terribly reductive, of course—
JAMES ELKINS: Less than our account of the entirety of Bildwissenschaft!
KEITH MOXEY: Anyway, according to this account, images are more than what they say, they have a kind of magical status. Belting goes back to a presemiotic moment, for antisemiotic purposes.
GUSTAV FRANK: Interestingly, it is also a pre-art interest.
JAMES ELKINS: It matters in our context that Hans’s book is not anthropology in the Anglo-American sense, with its emphasis on interpretation and witness, on the emic and etic, on thick description, and so forth. It is also not the anthropology of the October “Questionnaire on Visual Culture,” which was a largely empty label—a demonized anthropology set against art history.19 Belting’s anthropology is Continental: it is one of the human sciences.
I think of this as one aspect of the general problem of how he positions himself in relation to existing disciplines. In his recent conferences, exhibitions, and books under the title Global Art Museum, he considers contemporary worldwide practices of exhibition and curation, partly as a sociologist might, partly as an anthropologist might, but not as an art historian, an art theorist, or an art critic.20 I am interested in how he proposes to speak outside those and other disciplinary homes: after art history, aside from curation, outside the disciplinary philosophy of art. Where is he when he speaks?
JOANA CUNHA LEAL: I just want to note that there is another tradition in which semiotics and phenomenology are not separate: the French tradition, with Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch, and even Daniel Arasse.21
INGE HINTERWALDNER: In the German-speaking area we could also mention Felix Thürlemann and Steffen Bogen from the University of Konstanz.22
KEITH MOXEY: Yes. It’s a binary opposition, which collapses.
WHITNEY DAVIS: Gustav, I thought you were absolutely right to draw attention to the logic of substitution in Bild-Anthropologie. I think it also pops up in Bredekamp’s book, because much of the typology of Bildakt revolves around there being some pictorial acts that are substitutive. In David Summers’s Real Spaces, there is a long chapter devoted to the meanings of masks and effigies, in terms of the shift from a substitutive functionality to the immediate legibility of their self-referentiality.
It seems Belting’s concern is not unique, but that he is adopting a special or nuanced position within a field that takes that problematic as a general one. After all, Gombrich also begins there, with his ethological account of substitution. It may end up looking like a nineteenth-century epistemology, but it is rooted in engagements that are broadly distributed, in several languages.
LISA CARTWRIGHT: One more question about Belting. He says “recent debates in the journal Imaging Science and elsewhere belatedly abandon... the belief that scientific images are themselves mimetic in the same way in which we want and need images. In fact, they are specifically organized to address our visual naïveté and thus serve our bodies, as images have done forever.”23 I am skeptical of the idea that mimesis is what gets transposed onto the technology; and it’s historically inaccurate that such an abandonment happened in that journal. I wonder if some of us, perhaps you, Jim, who have done work on scientific images could address that.
JAMES ELKINS: For me that sort of assertion is a meter stick, indicating the distance from quantitative, scientifically engaged discourse and humanistic discourse. I just take it as a sign of his distance, and so I don’t try to critique it directly except where it leads to theories that fail to connect to their scientific audiences—theories that only make sense to readers in the humanities.
GUSTAV FRANK: Lisa, I think you’re right about your concerns. The claims are disputable. But I think we have to jump now, to the Bredekamp readings. Sorry! Perhaps Bredekamp’s concerns will help elucidate your question, because he is more deeply engaged with scientific imaging.
JAMES ELKINS: Bredekamp’s research project, Das technische Bild, is the most visible example within Bildwissenschaft to engage with the technical specifics of non-art production, which are significantly absent in Boehm’s and Belting’s writing. I commissioned the essay we have read, because there was nothing in English.24 It is a good summary of their research, and it was done with his approval.
For us the question might be how this appears as a research position. The introduction is very succinct: it goes quickly from form, defined in terms of archaeology and morphology, to historicity. I would suggest that such an introduction would not be sufficient, in an Anglo-American context, to justify the particular technical account that follows.
KEITH MOXEY: I think the essay is an inadequate representation of what Bredekamp thinks he’s up to. In a while we will be considering several of Bredekamp’s texts, and that will give a better idea.
MARÍA LUMBRERAS CORUJO: I especially like a book published in 2007 called Das Technische Bild: Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder.25 It contains a varied ensemble of texts introducing the different facets of the project. An editorial opens the book summarizing its conception, and you also have a couple of texts that explain the theoretical and methodological concerns of the group. But there are also case studies presenting the research of each member, and a long interview with Horst Bredekamp in which he talks about his interest in the description of images. Finally, there are shorter, more didactic texts defining key concepts, methods, and shared themes such as “comparison,” “visualization,” or “objectivity and evidence.” The book is a collection of heterogeneous materials, but I think that, precisely because of that, it gives a sense of the richness of the project. What is particularly interesting about it is its commitment to reflecting on methodologies that allow a precise analysis of the visual.
GUSTAV FRANK: Matthias Bruhn is the author of the second introduction to Bildwissenschaft, called Das Bild: Theorie, Geschichte, Praxis (2008); the first was Martin Schulz’s Ordnungen der Bilder in 2005.26
JAMES ELKINS: And although it’s not our subject at the moment, I have to add that Gustav’s book is the third introduction.27
GUSTAV FRANK: Bruhn’s book was written in connection with Bredekamp, so I think it is a good representation of the Berlin project.
JAMES ELKINS: I agree, and we assigned the essay because it is the only accurate account of what the Berlin project was doing with technical images.
GUSTAV FRANK: If we turn to Bredekamp himself, we could begin with the Galileo book, or the small book Darwins Korallen.28
KEITH MOXEY: What interests me in Darwins Korallen is the methodology. I’ll just briefly summarize it because we have only assigned one chapter. Bredekamp says Darwin found the visual metaphors for temporal change that were in use in his lifetime (more often than not an image of a tree) to be inadequate. In Bredekamp’s narrative, Darwin was impressed by his discovery of different species of branching corals, where the branching goes in all directions, without a single trunk. What strikes Bredekamp is that on the top of one page, Darwin has written, “I think,” and below it, there is a doodle of a coral, which branches in all directions, unlike a family tree. It is clear that Darwin sees in this visual metaphor a way of avoiding the family tree model of evolution. The coral dies as it grows, and what survives supplants what dies. Bredekamp is especially interested in the fact that Darwin seems to be thinking with or through the diagram: “I think [diagram].” This isn’t the same as Boehm’s construction: it isn’t as if the picture has meaning; it does have meaning, it is how Darwin thinks at that moment.
WHITNEY DAVIS: Keith, can you clarify what for you is interesting about Bredekamp’s general approach, as opposed to the specific case? If the larger proposition is that a mental image structured later image-making, that doesn’t seem at all to be a new thesis.
JAMES ELKINS: May I add a question to that one? My interest in Bredekamp’s book is in its reception. It’s a small book, literally. It’s a very concise example of an image as a model, and there would be many other examples. But there is even an English-language review, by Rachael DeLue, so the book is pretty clearly taken to be exemplary and not just an example.29
KEITH MOXEY: What struck me about Bredekamp’s book, and also yours, Jim, Visual Practices Across the University, was the idea of thinking with images.30 Trying to find images that capture the invisible, that attempt to codify that which seems to be beyond perception. Using images as if they were languages.
MARÍA LUMBRERAS CORUJO: Bredekamp says at some point in the book, “the picture is not a derivative or an illustration, but an active bearer [Träger] of the thinking process.”31 I guess he understands the doodle as a medium that guides thought, as something that makes it possible to think in ways words alone can’t.
WHITNEY DAVIS: In Bredekamp’s example, the “I think” followed by the doodle is followed by a very famous and important discursive, algorithmic, and numerical statement by Darwin, which has been the subject of extensive commentary by generations of Darwin scholars. What does Darwin mean by the A, B, C and the 1, 2, 3?—and other examples of explicit codification? So I am not even sure if this is a good example of an image as a model, or image as thinking.
JAMES ELKINS: So, back to my interest in the reception: the book’s reception might be due to a widespread interest in images as thought, as theory, as models. The idea is in Tom Mitchell’s Picture Theory, and it’s already come up several times this week.
KEITH MOXEY: Whitney, I don’t think he is arguing the image replaces language. But the image is embedded in whatever claims Darwin was making.
WHITNEY DAVIS: Okay, so the image is part of the linguistic argument. That is a very different claim than that the image is doing conceptual work tout court.
MICHAEL HOLLY: Why can’t it be? Why can’t we talk about the thought of the visual model?
WHITNEY DAVIS: Kant says human thought requires images. It’s one of the deepest propositions of the Kantian system.32 It may be that we are seeing versions of this brought into the twentieth century through Heideggerian revisions—
MICHAEL HOLLY: But that’s human thought using images, that’s not images determining or embodying or calling forth thought.
GUSTAV FRANK: I’d like to make Bredekamp’s case against Whitney. I think Bredekamp wants not only to show that science progresses with visual models, but to show the moment when visualizations go beyond anything that was later articulated in science textbooks. So Darwin goes beyond anything he later put forward in his theory. It is the surplus that interests him.
But then I would also like to register a criticism against Bredekamp’s approach. I suspect he ends his inquiry too early, as soon as he proves his assumption. In his way of thinking, the scientist is a substitute for the artist. He presents Darwin and Galileo as artists: the books are implicitly about creativity and genius. That is fine, but he should keep going, and ask questions that extract these visualizations from their cultural isolation, which is not, for example, the splendid isolation of a genius. In this case, he might note the tree is a progressive, Enlightenment model and the coral is a nineteenth-century historicist model, with all its underlying dead branches. It entails skepticism about the historical process. I think Darwins Korallen needn’t have been a small book, with a marginal publisher: it could have been a much bigger book.
KEITH MOXEY: I’d like to move on, and say something about Georges Didi-Huberman, who we have also read in preparation for this seminar, even though he does not write in German. For him, there is an unconscious dimension to the work of art, which is something we have hardly touched on. He is often cited for his idea of anachronism, which appears in the essay we read: “we cannot produce a consistent notion of the image,” he writes, “without a thinking about time that includes difference and repetition, symptom and anachronism.”33 We have here an author very different from those we have encountered so far, in the sense that time is the vehicle for the recognition of the presentation of the image. Those are brief and inadequate words for a complicated essay.
JAMES ELKINS: Here’s a thought experiment about Didi-Huberman. Imagine that the only theorist in visual studies was Tom Mitchell, so that we’d be taking all our conceptual and methodological cues from him. I think the world of visual studies, if not Bildwissenschaft, would still be recognizable. Lots would be missing, of course, but I don’t want to press that model. I just want to contrast it to what visual studies, Bildwissenschaft, and art history would look like if Georges Didi-Huberman’s books were the only ones on our library shelves. Our imaginations would be thronged with images of passion, of violence, of resurgent examples of the Pathosformel. Many of the things we have been talking about, such as popular imagery and advertising, would entirely vanish, and representation would be in perpetual crisis. I’m not at all saying this as a way of criticizing him: I’m suggesting that if art historians, in particular, really took him on board, instead of citing him in contained contexts, many of the issues we have been talking about up to now would have to appear fundamentally misguided, poorly formulated, or uninteresting. There is a great distance between his interests and those that can be assigned to disciplines, and perhaps—although now I’ll be sounding like Žižek—perhaps that is why some disciplinary art history is so intensely and fitfully attracted to him.
WHITNEY DAVIS: I was surprised to see readings by Didi-Huberman in a list of visual studies reading. And I agree, Jim, the consequences of taking Didi-Huberman on board would be to eliminate vast swathes of what we have been reading as possible projects. That doesn’t eliminate his work’s interest: it is philosophically clear, but I have the sense that he really is an outlier for this particular set of issues.
MICHAEL HOLLY: Visual studies cannot possibly accommodate someone like Georges Didi-Huberman unless we stretch our concepts beyond recognition. What fascinates me about him, even in translation, is the completely different rhetoric, or style of writing, which puts art history on a different register than it had been before. In that, his work is akin to visual studies. It shocks us into being somewhere else.
ELISABETH FRIEDMAN: Didi-Huberman’s concept of art as symptom might be a shock to both art history and visual studies because the symptom resists historicity and language, which are central concerns of these fields.
JOANA CUNHA LEAL: Didi-Huberman directed, along with Bernd Stiegler, Trivium’s first number precisely on the “Iconic Turn.”34 He presents himself there as feeling “si peu Français en France, si French (donc misunderstood) aux USA et si ‘continental’ dans une Allemagne intellectuelle beaucoup plus en travail et en dialogue que partout ailleurs” (not very French in France, too much French [therefore misunderstood] in the USA, and too “continental” in an intellectual Germany working and dialoging as nowhere else).
WHITNEY DAVIS: Just a footnote. If there is no serious theorist of the visual, visuality, or the image who cannot be included in visual studies, then it seems to me visual studies is in serious trouble. If there aren’t the Didi-Hubermans about whom we could say, “This is discernibly different from what we are doing,” then—
JAMES ELKINS: What about John Onians?
WHITNEY DAVIS: There is a group of such people, and I would be willing to include Didi-Huberman in that group.
KEITH MOXEY: I guess I disagree with you, Whitney, about the marginality of Didi-Huberman’s project.
WHITNEY DAVIS: I’m not suggesting it is marginal at all. It’s just a different kind of project from what we’re considering.
PAUL FROSH: I’m not an art historian, so I don’t understand your comment, Jim. Why is he so out there, so different?
JAMES ELKINS: To use Michael’s word, he is a shock to the system of art history in many ways. If the doctrine of anachronism were to be programmatically installed, it would upset many art history departments. Our interest would be drawn to incandescent moments of failed representation, trauma, and subterranean motifs. Like Whitney, I’m not criticizing his work. I have read a lot of it, from Phasmes to L’image survivante.35 But visual studies might well receive his work as a different kind of shock than art history, and I think we all hope visual studies is still interested in what Michael has called the exciting early days, when all sorts of new theories rubbed up against old art.
MICHAEL HOLLY: I liken the shock Didi-Huberman has given all of us to the effect of Warburg, a hundred years before; and Warburg is, of course, his own intellectual hero.
ANNA SIGRÍDUR ARNAR: He does bring up a number of German and Austrian names; that’s how I saw the connection. There’s a kind of nostalgia for art history as it was before the Second World War—maybe not nostalgia, but he does look back to those sources and ask, as we did in Gustav’s earlier session, “What would art history have become if these people’s work hadn’t been brutally interrupted?” He invites us to think about that which could have been, an alternate trajectory of art history had history taken a different course.
KEITH MOXEY: I think that’s right, and I think he is central to our interests. He poses a direct challenge to certain well-worn paths into which art history has fallen. Whitney, I still don’t see why Didi-Huberman would eliminate “vast swathes” of art history.
WHITNEY DAVIS: No. He would eliminate a number of the projects we have been discussing in visual studies: Nick Mirzoeff’s work; the Journal of Visual Culture; some parts of what is unfolding in Bildwissenschaft. I think his work has a good deal of compatibility with other topics we have discussed, for example the commitment on the part of some art historians to the psychodynamics of the artwork.
MICHAEL HOLLY: Neither visual studies, as it is constituted now, nor even the history of art, can welcome Didi-Huberman into their clubs. Their loss. His book on Fra Angelico, if anything, goes deeply into the visual, as no other study before it had done.36 He goes exhaustively into all the theological meanings that are packed into the San Marco frescoes, but then he says: Wait. There is still something left over, so many veils of meaning that no iconographic manual will be able to rend. Where to now?
FLORA LYSEN: I would say that visual studies should be preeminently equipped to accommodate Didi-Huberman. We need the concept of anachronism as a way to explain the rubbing of new theories or questions against objects from various time periods. Didi-Huberman shows how no one ever bothered to look at Fra Angelico’s red splashes of paint in Madonna of the Shadow.37 He shows how our ways of looking and theorizing are “obscuring” parts of the image. He seems to blame Panofsky for clouding our perception of artworks, especially of formal elements such as paint and color, with an iconographical smoke screen. Regardless of who to blame for our blindness in front of certain images, Didi-Huberman’s thoughts about our presentist looking at images from the past are absolutely central to visual studies, I would say.
JAMES ELKINS: We are running a bit short on time, and I wanted to be sure to include your own essay, Keith, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn.” It is the only one in English—and, I think, the only one in any language—that tries to make parallels and contrasts between Bildwissenschaft and visual studies.38 One of your central terms there is presence and the idea of the encounter with the work—its place, the places between the seer and the seen—and I wonder if we might begin to take stock of our observations today by considering those concepts. Certainly all the talk of the “meaning” of images in these pages will have sounded very strange to Anglo-American readers in visual studies, as if it doesn’t even belong in this book. We have left identity, gender, and social meanings far behind.
GUSTAV: This place in between: how is it constituted? Is it simply there? Is it constituted in virtue of the object?
KEITH MOXEY: We would have to go back to Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. But as you know, it’s about the experience of the world, and not the knowledge of the world. Knowledge is built on the subject-object distinction.
JAMES ELKINS: Heidegger has an apposite concept, which I think would only deepen your skepticism, Gustav: the Zwischen, the place where being is constituted between beings, between things.
MICHAEL HOLLY: This is all so funny, because when I met you, Keith, all those decades ago, you were a dyed-in-the-wool social historian. Any of this talk would have been heresy, not to mention fluff. I can just hear your voice, objecting and dismissing. What happened? Have you had a conversion experience?
[Laughter.]
KEITH MOXEY: I think I grew up.
[Louder laughter.]
INGE HINTERWALDNER: Perhaps we can think of the in-between not so much as a space as as an interaction. In the aesthetics of perception, for example, the idea is that the recipient or beholder is always already foreseen within the artifact. That can be made explicit by several “strategies” like repoussoir figures that direct the viewer’s eyes. Taking this act of examination seriously, Boehm says a Bild can be conceived as an event or a process which enfolds gradually with the beholder’s engagement.
GUSTAV FRANK: But then you are back with the same problem: how do you conceptualize what you understand as the interaction?
INGE HINTERWALDNER: We should of course think about what conceptualization of the beholder we imply. But I would characterize the interaction as a reflected process: visually analyzing the picture or image; registering where it leads the gaze; analyzing which elements play a role and what follows from them. If we can’t adequately express some impressions at first glance, this is normal and does not at all mean that there is something mystical or even mysterious. The reasons might lie in the fact that we have to develop adequate concepts to grasp the given configuration resulting from the image producer’s decisions, which have consequences for the reception process. Please note, I am not saying we should try to reconstruct what the image producer might have intended. It seems more promising to extract the operating iconic logic, the way the image functions or show. (And I mean “showing” as the iconic mode of communicating.)39 Seeing this showing has to be learned and can be taught. In short, the interaction on the most elementary level can be seen as the informed and articulated dialogue between the specific showing of the single image and the tackling of this offer by the beholder.
GUSTAV FRANK: Sure, that’s what I was trained in as the classical and also the formalistically sophisticated interpretation and reception theory of the artwork, whether it’s fine arts, literature, art house film, or photography. Inge, I could just parrot Jim’s remark that this will sound bewildering to Anglo-American ears in visual studies—bewildering because of its obvious lack of critical awareness regarding the fact that all the entities you take for granted are loaded with a lot of well-known theoretical or ideological assumptions. The beholder, the producer, and the image are neither natural nor empirical or neutral entities; they don’t interact in a natural, neutral way. Thus the beholder probably loses sight of the materiality and objecthood that the picture can put on display. On the other side of the spectrum, even the space where the encounter takes place—the marketplace, church, gallery, or museum—is produced by a visible and invisible net of social rules and discourses.40 In this respect one could call Didi-Huberman’s preferred situations of reception a historicist elitism, selecting the socially privileged or affectively most intense positions devant l’image.41
Can we then solve the paradox that haunted Benjamin by seeing the shortcomings of both the vitalists’ adoration of presence and the historicists’ mantra of historicization? Can’t we come to see that they share their core desires and obsessions?
SUNIL MANGHANI: Inge, the point you make from Boehm, that we might conceive the image, or Bild, as an event that gradually enfolds and unfolds with the beholder’s engagement makes me think of Panofsky’s lovely vignette of being greeted by an acquaintance across the street—whereby we gradually come to “read” the “scene” in ever more detail. Tom Mitchell of course makes great play of this in Picture Theory. In fact he describes it as the “primal scene” of iconology.42
JAMES ELKINS: As long as you’ve mentioned Tom, I should say that he has appropriated the word Bildwissenschaft. He presented a paper in 2005 at a conference I held in Ireland, on the “Four Fundamental Principles of Bildwissenschaft,” but when he gave us the text for the book, that was changed to “Image Science.”43 I think he was wanting to respond to Horst Bredekamp’s essay, which he had published two years earlier in Critical Inquiry.44 Tom’s use of Bildwissenschaft is completely adventitious.
MARÍA LUMBRERAS CORUJO: Actually, he did publish an essay keeping the German word, in 2008.45
MERJA SALO: I accept this theory of image as presence, but what are the methods, the analytic tools, that it opens for us?
INGE HINTERWALDNER: For me, the word “presence” is markedly different from “representation.” In German we can use the word Darstellung to emphasize the specifically designed “presentation” rather than the reference.46 This can suggest a focus on how things are depicted. We can apply a variety of established methodological tools to analyze the mode of depiction.47 I personally prefer to examine the formal aspects and composition of images or pictures closely, and then to proceed to integrate a wider context and theoretical framework.
MERJA SALO: It was 1994 when the pictorial turn happened; it’s been fifteen years, so its effects should be visible by now. We should have wonderful results based on the theory of image as presence. As far as I know, in Finland, the projects inspired by the pictorial turn are incomplete.
KEITH MOXEY: Well, there is the mass of publications that Gustav and Jim have been discussing: thirty books to be published by Eikones.
JAMES ELKINS: Two ancillary points, Merja, that bear on the dissemination of this particular concept of presence. Was ist Ein Bild?, the book that has Boehm’s essay proposing the iconic turn, appeared in 1994, but the essay had been scheduled for another publication in 1991, and he says it was written in the late 1980s. Tom Mitchell’s expression “pictorial turn” first appeared in 1994. And then, regarding Eikones: each year, on the site visit, I proposed setting aside some of their considerable funds to produce a book a year in Chinese, Spanish, English, and French. As of this moment, they have one book scheduled to appear in English. It’s a real pity, and it has hugely delayed the reception of Boehm’s ideas. Belting’s work has been translated into Chinese, English, French, and Spanish, but Bredekamp is virtually unknown. Not a single one of his books has even appeared in English.
MICHAEL HOLLY: This ontological turn, as I would call it, is maybe fifteen years old, but it seems to be garnering greater attention. It is growing from within visual studies, challenging it from the inside. As a reaction to the challenge, we turn around and try to fit it into this recently established category of visual studies when we’re talking now about something new, something different. Let’s celebrate it and see how far it takes us.
GUSTAV FRANK: In the run-up to this event, I had a look at the major history of German art, which is now eight volumes long.48 I wondered: after fifteen years of the pictorial and iconic turn, how much visual studies, Bildwissenschaft, new art history, and social history of art have made their way into the heart of the discipline, as it is exemplified by this publication?
WHITNEY DAVIS: Including Barbara Lange—
GUSTAV FRANK: Yes, she was my coauthor for our book Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft, and she’s the author of the final volume, on the twentieth century. I was astonished to find hardly any imprint of the newer work. In Barbara’s volume there is gender, identity, class issues, and the subject of the GDR, media but without any visual studies or bildwissenschaftliche imprint. Volumes 6 and 7, which I frequently use, aren’t even really affected by the social history of art. Is this the same in other countries, as Merja says of Finland?
KEITH MOXEY: Well, if we’re talking about collections that function as handbooks of art history—
JAMES ELKINS: Like Oxford Art Online—
KEITH MOXEY: Then you can count on them to have deep reservations about expanding art history beyond the canon.
MICHAEL HOLLY: This is also where visual studies has failed, as I keep arguing.49 Visual studies might not have ossified if it had paid more attention to the premodern practices that art history continues to study.
WHITNEY DAVIS: Why would it take less than fifteen or twenty years for these concerns to be expressed? Consider Chris Wood and Alexander Nagel’s project to think of an “anachronic Renaissance.”50 I’m not claiming that they are literate in Boehm and Bredekamp at all, but you can see in their project the persistence of pictorial imaging practices through the retemporalization of the Renaissance, that they are taking on board something like echoes of some of the work we are considering. I think it’s pretty exciting: no matter how incomplete its theorizations might be, it does suggest that these models can potentially be put into operation in conventional, empirical terms, by art historians who perceive themselves to be archival, archaeological, and forensic.
JOANA CUNHA LEAL: In Portuguese scholarship, the problem of applying visual studies is not the subjects that visual studies considers, but the issue of methodology and theory. I mean, there is a considerable devotion to the study of artifacts without “major art” status (ceramics, furniture, goldsmith’s work, or ordinary building typologies), but they are unaware of a theoretical framework, or any problematic recognizable as visual studies.
MARÍA LUMBRERAS CORUJO: In Spain, the works of Bredekamp and Boehm haven’t had much diffusion because of the language barrier. Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie, which was translated in 2007, has been widely read, but I don’t think that the ideas he develops in this book have had a great impact on the Spanish scholarship so far. Interestingly, though, in the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the graduate program includes a seminar on Bildwissenschaft taught by Linda Báez Rubí, who was a postdoctoral fellow in the Graduirtenkolleg Bild–Medium–Körper at the Hochschüle für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. I know that some graduate students in Mexico have been discussing these theoretical models and are trying to integrate them in their own work. Many of them, by the way, work with premodern objects such as early modern religious images, and Linda herself is a specialist in late medieval and early modern visual rhetoric and mnemonics. Also, the Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte in Buenos Aires invited Hans Belting to teach a seminar on image anthropology a couple of years ago. I don’t know about other places in Latin America, but it seems that Bildwissenschaft is disseminating through some Spanish-speaking countries.
JAMES ELKINS: Keith, it’s interesting that your essay comparing visual studies and Bildwissenschaft appeared in 2005, so even though it is still unique, it belongs in the second decade of visual studies, which was our subject in Seminar 3. It was an untimely contribution, and as far as I know it has not been discussed in print until now. In this way we contribute, incrementally, to the accumulation of visual studies’ and Bildwissenschaft’s awareness of their links.
1. Tables of contents from the following books were included: Alexander Honold and Ralf Simon, eds., Das erzählende und das erzählte Bild (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Thorsten Bothe and Robert Suter, eds., Prekäre Bilder (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Johannes Grave and Arno Schubbach, eds., Denken mit dem Bild: Philosophische Einsätze des Bildbegriffs von Platon bis Hegel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Inge Hinterwaldner, Das systemische Bild: Ikonizität im Rahmen computerbasierter Echtzeitsimulationen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Lena Bader, Martin Gaier, and Falk Wolf, eds., Vergleichendes Sehen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Gottfried Boehm, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Christian Spies, eds., Zeigen: Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Gottfried Boehm, Birgit Mersmann, and Christian Spies, eds., Movens Bild: Zwischen Evidenz und Affekt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008); Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra Schneider, eds., Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Inge Hinterwaldner and Markus Buschhaus, eds., The Picture’s Image: Wissenschaftliche Visualisierung als Komposit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006); Horst Bredekamp, Bilder Bewegen: Von der Kunstkammer zum Endspiel, edited by Jörg Probst (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2007); Ingeborg Reichle, Steffen Siegel, and Achim Spelten, eds., Verwandte Bilder: Die Fragen der Bildwissenschaft, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007); Claudia Blümle and Armin Schäfer, eds., Struktur, Figur, Kontur: Abstraktion in Kunst und Lebenswissenschaften (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007); Gustav Frank and Barbara Lange, Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft: Bilder in der visuellen Kultur (Darmstadt: WBG, 2010); Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001); Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft (Cologne: Von Halem, 2003); Lambert Wiesing, Artifizielle Präsenz: Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005); Eva Schürmann, Sehen als Praxis: Ethisch-ästhetische Studien zum Verhältnis von Sicht und Einsicht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008); Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens, 3rd ed. (Darmstadt: WBG, 2010); Bildwelten des Wissens: Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik, edited by Horst Bredekamp, Matthias Bruhn, and Gabriele Werner (2003–) (this is the twice-yearly publication of Bredekamp’s project “Das technische Bild”); Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010); Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed., Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005); Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed., Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009); Martin Schulz, Ordnungen der Bilder: Eine Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005); and Matthias Bruhn, Das Bild: Theorie—Geschichte—Praxis (Berlin: Akademie, 2009).
2. Karin Leonhard, “Blut Sehen,” in Hinterwaldner and Buschhaus, Picture’s Image, 104–28; Host Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 418–28; Anders Michelsen, “Nothing Has Meaning Outside of Discourse? On the Creative Dimension of Visuality,” in “Art in the Age of Visual Culture and the Image,” special issue, Leitmotiv 5 (2005–6): 89–114 (Leitmotiv is an e-journal; see ledonline.it/leitmotiv); Matthias Bruhn and Vera Dünkel, “The Image as Cultural Technology,” in Visual Literacy, edited by James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 169–78; Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Pictorial Versus Iconic Turn” (this is an exchange of letters from March 2006, originally published in German in Hans Belting, Bilderfragen: Die Wissenschaften im Aufbruch [Munich; Wilhelm Fink, 2007]; Hans Belting translated Mitchell’s letter into German; the seminars read an unpublished English MS provided by Boehm for the 2008 Stone Summer Theory Institute: see James Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What Is an Image?, Stone Art Theory Institutes 2 [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011]); Boehm, “It Reveals Itself: Gesture—Deixis—Image,” unpublished MS, ca. 2008; Boehm, “Iconic Knowledge: The Image as a Model,” unpublished MS, ca. 2008; and Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 302–19.
3. W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7–46; Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild? (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994), 11–38; Georges Didi-Huberman, “History and Image: Has the ‘Epistemological Transformation’ Taken Place?,” in The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices, edited by Michael F. Zimmerman (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2003), 128–43; Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 302–19; W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Want?,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28–56; Horst Bredekamp, “Das Modell der Koralle,” in Darwins Korallen: Die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2006), 18–28.
4. Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2008): 131–46.
5. See, for example, Nils-Arvid Bringéus, Volkstümliche Bilderkunde (Munich: Callwey, 1982), and especially the work of Lena Johannesson, for example Images in Arts and Sciences, edited by Johannesson et al. (Göteborg: Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, 2007); and Niels Jensen, Billedernes Tid: Teorier og Billeder i den Visuelle Kultur (Copenhagen: Afdelingen for Kunsthistorie, Københavns Universitet, 2001), which is an attempt to bridge cultural studies with semiotics and other fields.
6. See, for example, the ethically and socially attuned program in Beijing, www.aeschina.cn/en/Introduction/1293.html, and Li Xi’s comments in these Seminars.
7. See Seminar 1 for visuelle Kultur.
8. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Amongst his critics are Sigrid Schade, “Vom Wunsch der Kunstgeschichte, Leitwissenschaft zu sein: Pirouetten im sogenannten “ ‘Pictorial Turn,’ ” in Horizonte: Beiträge zu Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 369–78; Hanne Loreck, “Bild-Anthropologie? Kritik einer Theorie des Visuellen,” in Medien der Kunst: Geschlecht, Metapher, Code, edited by Susanne von Falkenhausen, Silke Förschler, Ingeborg Reichle, and Bettina Uppenkamp (Marburg: Jonas, 2004), 12–26; Schade, “Scheinalternative Kunst- oder Bildwissenschaft: Ein kulturwissenschaftlicher Kommentar,” in Visions of a Future: Art and Art History in Changing Contexts, edited by Hans-Jörg Heusser (Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 2004), 87–100.
9. The pertinent readings here are Matthias Bruhn and Vera Dünkel, “The Image as Cultural Technology,” in Elkins, Visual Literacy (Bruhn was in Bredekamp’s group Das technische Bild); and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128.
10. For Michael Holly’s claim about the expression “visual studies” in book titles, see Section 3 of the Seminars.
11. Bredekamp, “ ‘Drehmomente’: Merkmale und Ansprüche des Iconic Turn,” in Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder, edited by Christa Maar and Hubert Burda (Cologne: DuMont 2004), 15.
12. Sonesson, “Die Semiotik des Bildes: Zum Forschungsstand am Anfang der 90er Jahre,” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 15, nos. 1–2 (1993): 127–60; “On Pictoriality: The Impact of the Perceptual Model in the Development of Pictorial Semiotics,” in Advances in Visual Semiotics: The Semiotic Web, 1992–1993, edited by Thomas Sebeok and Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 67. [—J.E.]
13. Posner, “Ebenen der Bildkompetenz,” in Was ist Bildkompetenz? Studien zur Bildwissenschaft, edited by Klaus Sachs-Hombach (Wiesbaden: DUV, 2003), 17–23; Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, edited by Roland Posner, Klaus Robering, and Thomas Sebeok, 3 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 1:1–13, “Das Bild in der Semiotik,” in Wege zur Bildwissenschaft. Interviews, edited by Klaus Sachs-Hombach (Cologne: Halem, 2004), 22–52.
14. Wiesing, Artifizielle Präsenz: Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2005).
15. “Bilder als wahrnehmungsnahe Zeichen,” quoted from Sachs-Hombach, Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft (Cologne: Halem, 2003), 73.
16. Friedrich Kittler, ed., Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststrukturalismus (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980); Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), translated as Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986).
17. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
18. The Seminar participants read a condensed précis of the book: Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 302–19.
19. See Section 2 of the Seminars. The participants discussed selections from the “Questionnaire on Visual Culture,” October 77 (Summer 1996), especially 25, 27–36, 39–44, 52–62, 68–70.
20. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 2009), and Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 2007); for the exhibition see www.globalartmuseum.de/site/act_exhibition.
21. Marin, Sublime Poussin, translated by Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), and On Representation, translated by Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Damisch, Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Seuil, 1984); Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Damisch, The Judgment of Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); see also Damisch, “Eight Theses for (or Against?) a Semiology of Painting,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 2 (2005): 257–67 (this Oxford Art Journal number is entirely dedicated to Damisch’s work and gathers contributions from Stephen Melville, Yves-Alain Bois, Margaret Iversen, Anthony Vidler, John Goodman, Stephen Bann, and Brendan Prendeville); Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1992); Arasse, On n’y voit rien: Descriptions (Paris: Denoël, 2000).
22. Thürlemann, Vom Bild zum Raum: Beiträge zu einer semiotischen Kunstwissenschaft (Cologne: DuMont, 1990); Bogen, “Zwischen Bild und Diagramm: Eine Kunstgeschichte gezeichneter Maschinen” (Habilitation, Konstanz, 2007).
23. Belting, “Image, Medium, Body,” 313. The lacuna is an attempt to clear up the syntax of the translation; the original is “recent debates in the journal Imaging Science and elsewhere belatedly abandon the illusion in the belief....”
24. Matthias Bruhn and Vera Dünkel, “The Image as Cultural Technology,” in Elkins, Visual Literacy, 169–78.
25. Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, and Vera Dünkel, eds., Das Technische Bild: Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder (Berlin: Akademie, 2008).
26. Bruhn, Das Bild; Schulz, Ordnungen der Bilder.
27. Frank and Lange, Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft.
28. The seminar participants read Bredekamp, “Das Modell der Koralle.”
29. DeLue, review of Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen, and three other books, Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (2010): 386–91. DeLue’s interest in the issues we discuss in the seminar is only tangential. She says the book shows “just how much store Darwin put in the ability of an image to communicate a complex constellation of ideas and hypotheses,” and she notes that “Bredekamp is not the first to point out the instrumentality of images and image making within scientific thought.”
30. Visual Practices Across the University (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007). [—J.E.]
31. Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen, 24.
32. See Whitney Davis, “What Is Post-Formalism (or, Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunstgeschichte),” Nonsite, no. 7 (2012), at nonsite.org; and Davis, “Sein und Zeit im Raum: Perspective as Symbolic Form,” in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, edited by Aron Vinegar and Amanda Boetke (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
33. The participants read Didi-Huberman, “History and Image: Has the ‘Epistemological Transformation’ Taken Place?,” 135.
34. Trivium is a French-German online journal committed to the translation of French authors into German and vice versa. See trivium.revues.org/223.
35. Didi-Huberman, Phasmes: Essais sur l’apparition (Paris: Minuit, 1998); Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps de fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit / Paradoxe, 2002).
36. Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, translated by Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
37. Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, edited by Robert Zwijnenberg and Claire Farago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 31–44.
38. Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2005): 131–46.
39. Boehm, Egenhofer, and Spies, Zeigen.
40. Keith’s Seminar 7 on politics elaborates on that tension.
41. Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: Questions posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Minuit, 1990). In terms of characterizing connoisseurship that omits historical time, I find the German title Vor einem Bild (Munich: Hanser, 2000), which replaces the definite by the indefinite article, even more telling.
42. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 25–34.
43. The essay was originally titled “Four Fundamental Principles of Bildwissenschaft”; the English was then changed to “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science,” and it was combined with another text and published as “Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy?,” in Elkins, Visual Literacy.
44. Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition?”
45. Mitchell, “Image Science,” in Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences, edited by Bernd Hüppauf and Peter Weingart (New York: Routledge, 2008), 55–67.
46. Was heißt “Darstellen”?, edited by Christian L. Hart Nibbrig (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1994).
47. See, for example, Max Imdahl, Giotto: Arenafresken. Ikonographie—Ikonologie—Ikonik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1980).
48. Geschichte der Kunst in Deutschland, vol. 8, Vom Expressionismus bis Heute, edited by Barbara Lange (Munich: Prestel, 2006).
49. See Section 4 of the Seminars.
50. Wood and Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010).