středa 9. 11. 2022, aula č. 537

přednáška bude probíhat v anglickém jazyce

Whoever Knows the Truth Lies: After October 1977, West Germany, in “Germany in Autumn” and “October 18, 1977”

This talk centers on a chapter of Rachel Weiss’ recent book Now What? Quandaries of Art and the Radical Past, which explores artworks and films which have returned to radical histories and, in particular, to ones that have been subject to erasure or which have been otherwise lost or occluded over time. The author focuses on questions about how, through the poetics of art and film, we can better understand and live within the condition of aftermath that trails from traumatic historical moments. 

The cascading reactions in post-war West Germany—the denial of the Nazi past, and the ways that came to shape, and deform, ideas of justice in the succeeding generation—are the infernal tangle at the heart of this chapter, considered through the film “Germany in Autumn” and Gerhard Richter’s “October 18, 1977” suite of paintings. Work on the film was begun almost immediately after the deaths of the Red Army Faction prisoners, and of the businessman who had been their prisoner: it was an urgent shot across the bow, meant to keep the door from closing on what that time might have meant for a country so afraid of itself and of what it had been capable of; a country that had treated its own past as a drastically unsafe truth. Richter’s paintings, coming years later, provide a sense of how difficult it had continued to be to address head on the conflicting strands of political idealism, reaction against the erasure of the Nazi past, and descent into violence by activists. The chapter focuses on the extreme ambivalence in these works, and their refusal to ascribe a final meaning to the escalating cycles of action and reaction that the period sustained.

Rachel Weiss is a writer, educator, and lapsed curator, and Professor Emerita at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Weiss has published extensively on contemporary art in journals, magazines and newspapers in the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Major publications include Making Art Global: The Third Havana Biennial (Afterall Books), To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (University of Minnesota Press), Por América: la obra de Juan Francisco Elso (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: co-author and editor) and On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias by Luis Camnitzer (University of Texas Press: editor). Now What? Quandaries of Art and the Radical Past, is her most recent book, released in 2021 by Fordham University Press.

Major curatorial projects include Global Conceptualism 1950s-1980s: Points of Origin (Queens Museum of Art, NYC: co-director with Luis Camnitzer and Jane Farver), Ante América (Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, and traveled in South, North and Central America: co-curator, with Gerardo Mosquera and Carolina Ponce de León), The Nearest Edge of the World: Art and Cuba Now (traveled throughout the US: co-curator with Gerardo Mosquera) and Imagining Antarctica (traveled throughout the US: funded by the National Science Foundation).

Záznam přednášky bude zveřejněn na YouTube kanálu Čelem k umění na tomto odkazu.

Čelem k umění je přednáškovým cyklem Fakulty umění a designu Univerzity J. E. Purkyně konajícím se každou středu od 16:30.

Kurátor přednáškového cyklu / prof. Mgr. Michal Koleček, Ph.D.