Iconographies of Power

The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation. Edited by Ulla Haselstein, Berndt Ostendorf and Peter Schneck.

Today the question of iconography has taken on a new and more general urgency. As a dominant cultural practice, iconography embraces the politics as well as the poetics of visual representation within their specific historical and cultural conditions. In its contemporary significance the question of iconography moreover reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries of conventional definitions and interpretations of the relation between words and images in a demand to critically compare and contrast their different iconographies as cultural practices of power. In their distinct arguments and from different perspectives, the 15 essays collected in this volume are all similarly concerned with the iconographical power and poetics of the image, including a broad range of visual representations: prints and illustrations, painting, sculpture and concept art, documentary and art photography, film comedy and digital imagery. In all these instances, the image is looked at not as an exclusive and isolated phenomenon but, rather emphatically, as a visual and contextual event; as both the source and target of the collision and the collusion of word and image; as instances and symptoms of contemporary iconographic practice alike. - Contents: Winfried Fluck: Aesthetic Experience of the Image. - Mario Klarer: Before Ornament was a Crime. Nineteenth Century Pattern Design. - Mick Gidley: Edward S. Curtis' Photography for "The North American Indian". Texts and Contexts. - Douglas Tallack: Painting the El. Visual Representations of the New York Elevated Railroad, 1890s-1930s. - Heinz Ickstadt: A Literature of the Eye. The Image and the Moving Image in Modern American Literature. - Peter Schneck: The Purity of Poverty. Walker Evans and Iconographic Autonomy. - Maren Stange: »Not What We Seem«. Image and Text in 12 Million Black Voices. - Deniz Göktürk: Strangers in Disguise. Role Play Beyond Identity Politics in Anarchic Film Comedy. - Katja Silverman: The Cury by Love. - Hanjo Beressem: Crash. »... at an indeterminate moment, indeterminate places ...«. - Zsófia Bán: The Translation of Art. Reinterpreting the Work of Joseph Kosuth. - Susanne von Falkenhausen: The Body of Abstraction. The Politics of Visual Representation in Postwar American Art. - Michael Wetzel: American Appropriationists and the Lolita Complex. - Hanne Loreck: Cindy Sherman's Sex Pictures, Pornography, and the Real. - Wendy Steiner: The Necessity of Pornography. - 347 Seiten mit 81 Abb., gebunden (American Studies - A Monograph Series; Vol. 108/Universitätsverlag Winter 2003)