Project Head

Prof. Dr. Tobias Wendl

Research Fellows

Dr. Georg Vasold

Pauline Bachmann, M.A.

Tomoko Mamine, M.A.

Project Description

Research unit C2 investigates transcultural dynamics in the context of international processes of exchange in the 19th and 20th century on the basis of concepts and terms that were developed to describe paradigms of modern art in the German-speaking sphere between ca. 1860 and 1930 (Subproject 1) and in Japan and Brazil after 1945 (Subproject 2). The central focus of inquiry for the research group is hereby the role assumed by the objects in the processes of communication, mediation and translation. In order to study the transcultural processes triggered by the mobility and impact of works, discourse and concepts, it is necessary to analyse in detail the places of presentation of art (e.g. exhibitions and journals), in particular with regard to questions of discursive power of definition. The aim is to situate and comprehend the works, narratives and strategies of the actors in their respective historical contexts. The transcultural dynamics under investigation are to be illuminated from different angles, by restating the perspectives of actors from Europe, Japan, Brazil and the USA and pointing up the tensions between them. The exoticisation of physical and corporeal modes of perception of art by historians of Western modern art, for example, is one particularly problematic case we shall be discussing. While European art historians after the First World War sought new ways to describe ‘world art’ at a terminological and conceptual level, artists in Brazil and Japan, in particular after the Second World War, placed art-historical narratives fundamentally in doubt. The aim of this research unit is to look at historical formations of debates of this kind and their (geo)political, ideological and social framework conditions.