Venue:Online via webex: https://hgb-leipzig.webex.com/hgb-leipzig/j.php?MTID=mce189274c624c91a826b0d2e8097abb1
In modernity, art must be as true as it is present. No work and no practice can seriously claim to be art without satisfying such demands. But how could truth and presence become the decisive, non-aesthetic criteria of art? In his book, published in October, art historian, art theorist and curator Helmut Draxler attempts to answer this question. To do so, his study looks behind the dominant justification myths of modernity and contemporary art in the sense of heroic overcoming of everything old in the name of something new. In this way, a tradition of art's reference to truth and the present becomes visible that is deeply rooted in that history when painting began to struggle for its status as art. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the historical Netherlands represent the exemplary setting for this struggle. Due to the loss of predetermined truths and functions, painting developed special strategies of self-assertion as art in the field of tension between economic, political, and religious crises. On the basis of speculative pictorial ideas - the image as threshold, the antagonistic, the analytical and the synthetic image - the effectiveness of these strategies in the sense of a specific use of truth is traced and thus the afterlife of Dutch painting as contemporary art is grasped.
Helmut Draxler is professor of art theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
From 1992 to 1995 he was director of the Kunstverein Munich and realized, partly in collaboration with Hedwig Saxenhuber, exhibitions by Andrea Fraser, Imi Giese, Christian Philipp Müller, Adrian Piper and Christopher Williams, among others, as well as numerous thematic exhibitions. From 1999 to 2012 he was Professor of Aesthetic Theory at the Merz Akademie, University of Design, Art and Media in Stuttgart. Between 2004 and 2006, he collaborated with Sabeth Buchmann and Stephan Geene on the research project "Film and Biopolitics" at the Ian van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. From 2005 to 2008, he served as a member of the acquisitions advisory board of the Hamburger Bahnhof National Gallery in Berlin. From 2013 to 2014 he held the professorship for art theory and art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. Together with Christoph Gurk, he curated the series of talks Phantasma and Politics, which took place from 2013 to 2015 in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU).
Lecture of the Institute for Theory of the HGB Leipzig.
