080050 VO Limits of Representation: Ideas of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art (2021W)

Through a series of art-historical case studies, the lecture addresses the structure and limits of the modern conception of nature, which is considered to be one of the causes of the current ecological crisis. Starting from the 17th century, in which a mechanistic conception of nature (esp. in Galileo Galilei and René Descartes) became established and in which at the same time European capitalism and its colonial economic system emerged, the lecture leads via the energetic conception of nature of the 19th century to the emergence of a system-ecological thinking in the 20th century. The focus is on the analysis of artistic positions that refer to nature in different ways - as landscape, as economic space and resource, as 'univocal' ground of existence, as ecosystem or as heritage. The history of science, economics and philosophy form the background for detailed analyses of art works. Examples will include etchings by Hercules Segers, landscape paintings by William Turner, the late figurative work of Kasimir Malevič, and a range of ecologically oriented works from the 1970s to the present (Helen and Newton Harrison, Agnes Denes, Amy Balkin, and others). A guiding thesis of the lecture is that the limits of the modernist conception of nature thus pursued in its transformation are articulated in the visual arts as problems of representation and the production of form, as limits of representation. The lecture assumes that in art the inadequacy - the reverse side or the negative imprint - of the mechanistic understanding of nature, which has co-determined the progress in scientific knowledge, technical mastery and economic exploitation of nature over the last centuries, becomes apparent at an early stage.