070216 SE Research Seminar Applied Global History - History of food (2021S)

Objectives
In this double-length seminar, students are supposed to develop a research question and deliver a profound paper that fulfils the same criteria as required for the master thesis. Therefore it is, in a sense, the trial run for the master thesis. Consequently, we strongly advise against bringing this course forward to the first or second semester. It would be best not to enrol in another seminar course parallel to this extensive research seminar. The weekly workload would exceed the curricular expectations for one semester.

Content
By looking back, food has always also played a role in art. Stone Age cave painters used vegetable juice and animal fats as binding ingredients in their paints. The Egyptians carved pictographs of crops and bread on hieroglyphic tablets. During the Renaissance, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a painter for the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, for the Royal Court in Prague, painted whimsical puzzle-like portraits of facial features composed of fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

Especially in European baroque times the art of “staging” foods became more and more spectacular (and “exotic”) leading to different forms of performances in the field of contemporary art where food plays an essential role. The “Wiener Aktionismus”, and most of all the “Orgienmysterientheater” of Hermann Nitsch marks a worldwide discussed artistic position in this context. But we have to look also at the representation of food in the applied arts, for example the visual language of menus and posters or advertising campaigns (only to quote “Mac Donalds”), involving also perspectives on food representation in films.

(Many more examples continue to our days.)

However, how much does the representation of food and organic matters for painting involve global history? What would be a peculiar global historical perspective on food history and art? These are only the initial objectives to explore, but yet they will accompany us in our investigations.