Donnerstag, 30. November 2017, 18:00 - 19:30 iCal
Crowds, Power, and the Rape of the Masses
Prof. Sarah Wilson
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Wien, Universitätscampus Hof 9, Seminarraum 1
Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien
Vortrag
Within the art world orgy of Frieze-week London, two shows spoke to me most powerfully about art and
crisis: Marcin Dudek’s Steps and Marches, (Edel Assanti gallery) and Melancholia, a Seebald story, (Kings’
College, Inigo Rooms).
Dudek’s video, Interpersonal stress crowd turbulence, evoked the long story of crowds, ephemeral violence,
political uprising and change; Melancholia, the dreadful contemplation of aftermath, the impossible
dialectic of reconstruction and mourning.
With our democracies at the mercy of the ‘black box algorithms’ the rise of jingoism and racism reveal
atavistic, animal fears. It seems timely to look back to the theoreticians of crowds and power from Jules
Romains, and Georges Sorel, to Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti or George-Didi-Huberman’s Uprisings.
Above all Serge Chakotin’s Rape of the Masses. The Psychology of Totalitarian propaganda, first published
in 1939 and its reappearance in England and Russia today speaks to the present. ‘In the description of the
disaster lies the possibility of overcoming it’. Are W. G. Seebald’s words too optimistic for our times?
Sarah Wilson is a specialist on the School of Paris and postwar European art, extending to Franco-Soviet relations,
Narrative Figuration and global conceptualisms. She supervises research on contemporary Russian, Eastern European
and also Chinese art. In 2015 she was co-curator of ‘Asia Time: Ist Asian Biennale / 5th Guangzhou Triennale’ (Guangzhou,
China).
Veranstalter
Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät
Kontakt
Marion Meyer
Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät
Institut für Klassische Archäologie
+43-1-4277-40601
marion.meyer@univie.ac.at
Erstellt am Donnerstag, 16. November 2017, 10:13
Letzte Änderung am Dienstag, 21. November 2017, 10:42