Evidence of Images: History and Aesthetics

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Peter Geimer; Professor Dr. Klaus Krüger
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2011 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 201172763

The Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG) continues to work on the premise that the generation of pictorial evidence as a fundamental aesthetic category encompasses processes of representation of reality as well as it generates a genuine visual presence that is not identifiable outside the realms of images. The terminological and systematic foundation within the first phase of funding substantiated the claim that the central meaning and function of images can only be described adequately in a dialectical mediation of these two modalities. Concurrently, this modulative profile of pictorial evidence in the sense of a phenomenon of interference, in which the reference to reality is superimposed and interlaced with its designation and exhibition, was investigated in distinct historic occurrences of this mediation and analysed in the context of exemplary and materially specific case studies. Thereby the terminological category of 'Evidenz' initially proposed heuristically, gained a workable conciseness, a theoretical foundation, as well as an historical differentiation. Within the second funding phase the KFG aims to continue this research that will lead to broadly conceived and theoretically foundational monographs. Liminal aesthetic phenomena that at first site appear to stand in categorical alterity to pictorial evidence are also of central interest for the future research program: specifically forms of abstraction; ornament; the 'non-representational' as well as intermedial configurations of photography and film; of image and sound or painting and image; and in conjunction, the aesthetic complexities of an evidence of the non-pictorial and non-ostensible, and even the per se nonevident. As such, the a priori unrepresentability inherent to music by virtue of its invisibility, immateriality, and temporal transience presents a paradoxical phenomenon of evidence par excellence. How can the relation between the medial foundation of pictorial evidence and the purely material constitution of the image and its textural, morphological qualities be defined and differentiated? To put it another way: the categories of 'mediality' and 'materiality' are often under-deliberated and used synonymously in contemporary research. What contribution does the investigation of Bildevidenz promise for their systematic determination and differentiation?

• DFG Programme: Advanced Studies Centres in SSH
• Subproject of: FOR 1627: Evidence of Images: History and Aesthetics