080024 PS Case Study II/III: Constructed Past(s) and Staged Eyewitnessing (2022S)

The course focuses on the forms and limits of the representability of "history" and visualization strategies of the past in the context of 19th century history painting. Throughout the semester, we will be accompanied by images that were created with the claim of confronting their recipients with the "truth" -- teaching us, enlightening us, emancipating us, appealing to us, and wanting to affectively take hold of us - while trying to disguise their own "madeness" and transfiguration processes.

We will deal with effects and conventions of a (primarily non-allegorical, realistic) history painting and with its formal-medial constructedness. With different emphases and the inclusion of various methodological approaches, we will repeatedly address the question of how the interplay of factuality and fictionality in the images studied can be conceptualized. In addition to the possible didactic-propagandistic claim, we will be interested above all in the formal procedures of narrative modeling, the strategies of staging and fictionalization, but also in forms of documentary interest. In short, the rhetoric and the "seductive power" of images.

Another central question will be devoted to the role of the treated images in the construction and affirmation of "imagined communities" (Benedict Anderson) - such as a nation. Overall, we will be concerned to see in the images, which are of course always already embedded in a system of medial instances of mediation, not only transparent windows that should be read towards a referential reality (such as an event), but to examine them as constructions of meaning interwoven with fictional threads, politically motivated, ideologically underpinned. In doing so, we will also repeatedly pay attention to how the respective image attempts to disguise its own constructedness and/or ideological motivation.

Essential to questioning the construction and motivation of the images discussed in the course is also a differentiated understanding of political myths. With the help of our image and text readings, we will attempt to grasp more precisely the ideological complicity of myth and panel image. Methodologically, the course will employ broad social and media historical readings in addition to classical iconographic ones. Questions that will concern us include: how, for what purposes was "history" or a political event of the day instrumentalized by the particular image? What was "history" used for, transfigured or even naturalized? To what extent are the works discussed capable of collectively guiding action and/or acting as projection surfaces for collective desires/fantasies?

The central objectives of the course include: Sharpening of (self-reflexive) observation skills - acquisition of methodological foundations for the description and critical contextualization of works of art, deepening and differentiation of skills in image description, analysis and interpretation; an independent and critical examination of texts, with the aim of grasping their argumentative structure.