Английская Википедия:Bildwissenschaft
Шаблон:Italictitle Bildwissenschaft is an academic discipline in the German-speaking world. Similar to visual studies, and defined in relation to art history, Bildwissenschaft (approximately, "image-science") refers to a number of different approaches to images, their interpretation and their social significance.
Originating in the early 20th century, the field has become more prominent since the 1990s. In the contemporary period, significant theorists and practitioners of Bildwissenschaft have included Шаблон:Ill, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp and Шаблон:Ill, each of whom have developed distinct orientations toward their subject matter.
Etymology
Wissenschaft (from Wissen, meaning "knowledge") is similar in meaning to "science", but is used differently and with different connotations.Шаблон:Sfn Whereas "science" typically refers specifically to empirical investigations in the natural sciences and social sciences, Wissenschaft does not carry the same methodological implications.Шаблон:Sfn Nevertheless, Wissenschaft is more restrictive than the English "studies", as it indicates the systematic ordering of knowledge, that attention be paid to questions of method, and that a discipline aspire to a comprehensive treatment of its subject.Шаблон:Sfn
Similarly, Bild is close in meaning to "image", but refers to pictures of all kinds, both representational and abstract, including paintings, drawings, photographs, computer-generated images, film and sculpture; illustrations, figures, maps and diagrams; and mental images and metaphors.Шаблон:Sfn
Overview
Bildwissenschaft expands the parameters of art history to encompass, and to take seriously, images of all kinds.Шаблон:Sfn The polysemic character of the term Bild has been embraced by proponents of Bildwissenschaft as a means of encouraging interdisciplinarity and collaboration.Шаблон:Sfn This characteristic also facilitates the avoidance of any distinction between high culture and low culture.Шаблон:Sfn Accordingly, Bildwissenschaft incorporates not only the study of "low culture" images but also of scientific, architectural and cartographic images and diagrams.Шаблон:Sfn
Bildwissenschaft occupies a more central role in the liberal arts and humanities in German-speaking nations than that afforded to art history or visual studies in the United States and United Kingdom.Шаблон:Sfn The tendency in the English-speaking world to see art history and visual studies as entirely distinct disciplines has carried over into the German and Austrian context to an extent, and efforts to define Bildwissenschaft in opposition to art history have been pursued.Шаблон:Sfn
Significant differences between Bildwissenschaft and Anglophone cultural and visual studies include the former's examination of images dating from the early modern period, and its emphasis on continuities over breaks with the past.Шаблон:Sfn Whereas Anglo-American visual studies can be seen as a continuation of critical theory in its attempt to reveal power relations, Bildwissenschaft is not explicitly political.Шаблон:Sfn
Charlotte Klonk has argued that Bildwissenschaft is ontological rather than historical, concerned with fundamental questions "of what images are able to achieve in general and what distinguishes them from other vehicles of knowledge."Шаблон:Sfn Matthew Rampley describes Bildwissenschaft as "a heterogeneous and disunified field that encompasses widely divergent and often competing interests and approaches."Шаблон:Sfn
History
The major elements of Bildwissenschaft were developed in Germany and Austria in the period from 1900 to 1933.Шаблон:Sfn Art historians including Herman Grimm, Wilhelm Lübke, Anton Heinrich Springer, Jacob Burckhardt, Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky, all of whom saw value in photographs and slides, contributed to the development of Bildwissenschaft.Шаблон:Sfn After 1970 it saw a revival and began to incorporate the study of advertising, photography, film and video, political symbolism, digital art and Internet art.Шаблон:Sfn The development of Bildwissenschaft to an extent paralleled that of the field of visual culture in the United Kingdom and United States.Шаблон:Sfn Rampley suggests that while the discipline's development can be situated as part of a wider process in Anglophone scholarship, as well as in France, Spain and Italy, such an account is accurate "only in the most general sense of a shift away from art history as the master discourse governing interpretation and analysis of the image."Шаблон:Sfn
Bildwissenschaft subsequently influenced the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the habitus theory of Pierre Bourdieu, as well as developments in art history.Шаблон:Sfn
Klonk argues that the re-emergence of Bildwissenschaft within art history after 1998 was the result of, first, the contention that the circulation of images in mass media had the effect of reconfiguring previously text-based societies as image-based societies; second, that the methodologies of the discipline of art history were well-suited to apprehending this new conjuncture; and, third, that art history's focus would of necessity expand to encompass (for example) scientific imagery, advertisements and popular culture.Шаблон:Sfn Work in Bildwissenschaft in the 2000s and 2010s has tended to argue that linguistic theories of meaning and interpretation cannot be applied to the visual realm, which has sui generis characteristics, and that prevalent approaches to art history unjustifiably prioritise the linguistic over the visual.Шаблон:Sfn
Gilles Deleuze, Aby Warburg, Carl Justi, Carl Schmitt, Pierre Bourdieu and Paul Feyerabend have been identified as precursors of modern Bildwissenschaft.Шаблон:Sfn
In 2012, Rampley wrote that Bildwissenschaft "is increasingly gaining currency as the denominator of a new set of theoretical discourses" in the German-speaking world, and had been the subject of several books offering introductions to the field, but emphasised that this was not indicative of "a single unified field".Шаблон:Sfn
Theorists and practitioners
Klaus Sachs-Hombach
In the 1990s and 2000s, Шаблон:Ill used the concept in his discussion of the semantics and psychology of images, and the possibility in semiotics of an analogy between images and texts, an analogy he called into question.Шаблон:Sfn Sachs-Hombach's conception of Bildwissenschaft frames the concept in terms of theoretical issues of cognition and models of interpretation.Шаблон:Sfn
His edited volume Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (2005) draws together work by experts across 28 disciplines (including art history) to argue for the possibility of a universal and interdisciplinary Bildwissenschaft that would function not as a wholly new discipline, but rather as a "common theoretical framework that could provide an integrative research programme for the various disciplines".Шаблон:Sfn Understood in this way, Sachs-Hombach argued that Bildwissenschaft should integrate and systematise insights from these various bodies of knowledge, analyse and define a set of common basic concepts, and develop strategies for interdisciplinary co-operation.Шаблон:Sfn Jason Gaiger has argued that Sachs-Hombach's work is the best representation "of Bildwissenschaft as an interdisciplinary research project".Шаблон:Sfn
Gottfried Boehm
Gottfried Boehm's account of the concept drew on aesthetics and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Arthur Danto, Meyer Schapiro, Kurt Bauch and Max Imdahl.Шаблон:Sfn Boehm addressed questions around the phenomenology of viewing and pictorial representation and the question of medium.Шаблон:Sfn He also sought to understand the cognitive processes involved in the presentation and perception of images, and their differences from linguistic processes.Шаблон:Sfn
Hans Belting
Hans Belting, in 2001, offered another account, which sought to develop an anthropological theory of the image in order to examines its universal functions that span cultural distinctions, and considered the relationship between the image and the body.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn Belting examined images used in religious contexts in order to identify the original non-artistic functions of images today considered art objects, and argued that "art" was a unit of analysis had emerged in the 16th century that obstructed corporeal engagements with images.Шаблон:Sfn
In Likeness and Presence (1990), Belting argued for the necessity of understanding the ways images give meaning to their contexts, rather than gaining meaning from their contexts, in order to understand images as actors with their own agency.Шаблон:Sfn Belting argues that art history as a disciplinary formation is outmoded and potentially obsolete,Шаблон:Sfn and that a universal Bildwissenschaft, the exact scope and methods of which remain uncertain, should be sought.Шаблон:Sfn
Horst Bredekamp
Horst Bredekamp's 21st-century work considered the cognitive functions performed by the image, the question of a stylistic history of scientific imagery, and the role played by visual argumentation during the Scientific Revolution.Шаблон:Sfn Focusing primarily on images that fall outside of art proper, such as those used in the works of the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the scientists Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei, Bredekamp argues that images inculcate a particular kind of understanding that could not be formed in their absence.Шаблон:Sfn
Bredekamp criticises the idea, associated with Sachs-Hombach, that Bildwissenschaft might be constructed by amassing the pre-existing insights of various disciplines, arguing that a new science cannot be straightforwardly established through the adding together of existing disciplines.Шаблон:Sfn Against Sachs-Hombach's argument that art history is one of many disciplines on which Bildwissenschaft should draw, and Belting's argument that art history is outdated or obsolescent, Bredekamp argues that (Austro-German) art history has always contained an incipiently universal orientation and a focus on non-art images.Шаблон:Sfn
Lambert Wiesing
The philosopher Шаблон:Ill shares with Bredekamp the belief that BildwissenschaftШаблон:'s universalism is inherent in art history, but argues that Bildwissenschaft differentiates itself by virtue of its attention to images per se rather than specific images or groups of images.Шаблон:Sfn Wiesing distinguishes between Bildwissenschaft and Шаблон:Ill ("image theory"), arguing that, while the two are complementary, the former is concerned with specific, concrete images, whereas the latter seeks answers to the question of what an image is.Шаблон:Sfn
Notes
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