Wearing Images = Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, vol. 6, ed. Diane Bodart, Madrid: Facultad de Geografía e Historia, UNED, 2018
This essay charts the role of armor in Renaissance practices of knowledge. Since the advent of gu... more This essay charts the role of armor in Renaissance practices of knowledge. Since the advent of gunpowder warfare, armor was largely unfit for combat, yet still became a centerpiece of princely representation and was prominently displayed in early collection spaces. Rather than illustrating chivalric virtues or antiquarian taste, such suits in my reading signal a shift towards a physiological fashioning of learning. Through juxtaposing two key sets of armor – one ‘gothic’ suit situated in the studiolo, the other a ‘grotesque’ garniture for a chamber of curiosities –, my paper traces how these embodied settings conflated epistemological with political sensibilities. While the earlier ensemble acted as a mnemonic ‘prosthesis’ that enhanced the mind of the wearer, the latter evoked natural history imagery to remap the order of things around personal authority. Objects of armor thus spotlight the interplay of material and political culture in engineering the early modern subject.
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Books by Felix Jäger
Die deutschsprachige Bildwissenschaft hat in Japan große Resonanz gefunden, die allerdings weitestgehend auf das heimische Publikum beschränkt geblieben ist. Fragestellungen um die bildliche Gestaltung von "Natur", "Kunst" und "Wissen" haben dabei eine eigene kulturelle Note erhalten, die durch den japanischen Verständnishorizont geprägt ist. Hinzu kommt eine unbefangene Einbeziehung der Neurologie, wie sie sich in Deutschland bisher nicht durchsetzen konnte. "Bilder als Denkformen" versammelt erstmals übersetzte Textbeiträge zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte und empirischen Ästhetik, die ausgewählten deutschen Positionen gegenübergestellt sind. Die Bildwissenschaft wird hierbei als gemeinsamer methodischer Rahmen diskutiert, der kulturelle Perspektiven sichtbar machen soll, ohne experimentelle Erkenntnisse auszuschließen.
Papers by Felix Jäger
specific aesthetic sensibilities and political strategies laid out by contemporary thought. They transcend the pure logics of legal reasoning and pinpoint the irrational infrastructure of law. The grotesque does not elicit rational judgment, but, on
the contrary, imposes on the beholder physically. Framing the law, the iconology of the grotesque thus sheds a different light on the visual culture of law and the constitution of normativity in the sixteenth century.
Talks by Felix Jäger
Die deutschsprachige Bildwissenschaft hat in Japan große Resonanz gefunden, die allerdings weitestgehend auf das heimische Publikum beschränkt geblieben ist. Fragestellungen um die bildliche Gestaltung von "Natur", "Kunst" und "Wissen" haben dabei eine eigene kulturelle Note erhalten, die durch den japanischen Verständnishorizont geprägt ist. Hinzu kommt eine unbefangene Einbeziehung der Neurologie, wie sie sich in Deutschland bisher nicht durchsetzen konnte. "Bilder als Denkformen" versammelt erstmals übersetzte Textbeiträge zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte und empirischen Ästhetik, die ausgewählten deutschen Positionen gegenübergestellt sind. Die Bildwissenschaft wird hierbei als gemeinsamer methodischer Rahmen diskutiert, der kulturelle Perspektiven sichtbar machen soll, ohne experimentelle Erkenntnisse auszuschließen.
specific aesthetic sensibilities and political strategies laid out by contemporary thought. They transcend the pure logics of legal reasoning and pinpoint the irrational infrastructure of law. The grotesque does not elicit rational judgment, but, on
the contrary, imposes on the beholder physically. Framing the law, the iconology of the grotesque thus sheds a different light on the visual culture of law and the constitution of normativity in the sixteenth century.
This conference explores the relationship between contentious materials and anxious historians from two angles: on the one hand, speakers center the term’s nineteenth-century legacies and moral politics; on the other, they examine the term’s stakes within current methodological and critical debates. Diachronic and interdisciplinary in nature, the conference traces the apotropaic from its scholarly “invention” to its prehistoric origins and classic motifs, through medieval and early modern magic and back to its impact on contemporary art, as well as on museum practices today.
Born within a decade of each other, pioneering art historian Aby Warburg and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome had bold visions for the material and visual study of culture and science. While Warburg was exploring alternatives to stylistic accounts of art through his “laboratory” of a growing library and photo archive inclusive of histories of science, Wellcome was amassing one of the most diverse collections devoted to the history of health. Today, their research communities continue to care for these legacies with a critical eye to their conceptual premises and contested histories.
This two-day workshop juxtaposes Warburg’s anthropological thought and his theories on tools or devices ("Gerät") developed against the backdrop of the First World War, with Wellcome’s simultaneous collecting of medieval and early modern technologies of disability. Ranging from surgical tools to clappers owned by sufferers of leprosy, from "materia medica" manuscripts to experiments in metal prosthesis, Wellcome conceived of these objects as part of a "universal" history of the human being. We are interested in the roles played by such items in framing disabled persons in the past, as well as their use in recovering marginalized histories for the present. Through considering instruments of medical practice, visual means of social exclusion, and technologies of mobility, we hope to challenge conventional accounts of the history of science and art. Workshop participants are encouraged to explore the intellectual potential alongside the affective and inclusive concerns of the material histories of disability. By engaging hands-on with collection and archive materials, we will ask among other questions: Who had the knowledge to produce instruments or tools of disability? How much did makers, health practitioners, and users collaborate in devising them? How practical were these technologies? Whose aesthetic sensibilities did they serve? In what ways did these objects participate in the cultural construction of disability? What are the ethical stakes of terminology in histories of art and science, as well as in our archiving of historical disability? In what ways are our inquiries today shaped by Warburg and Wellcome's turn-of-the-century scholarly enterprises?
Our three distinguished speakers will elucidate historical understandings of the body and disability from a variety of perspectives that invite a more inclusive conversation. We hope to encourage a broader discussion about exciting materials that speak to the methodological and ethical stakes, as well as global perspectives of disability studies.
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