This seminar will study a series of works from Manet, Eugene Carriere, Picasso, Boccioni, and Duchamp. In these paintings and sculptures, the spectator is not "somebody" or a "painter-beholder", but a concrete (albeit paradoxically fictive) person. The artist is focusing on identity, on "himself", as if he were somebody else (Lacan: "Moi c'est un autre"). Manet's detachment, a seemingly uninterested sort of involvement, prepares for more schizophrenic forms of estrangement. We will try to find out whether there is a systematic link between art works implying a de-/reconstructing of the self, the concrete personality of the "author", and attempts at dissolving and inventing artistic languages. Thus, we will also focus on strategies for alienating art from the security of a dominant cultural viewpoint by introducing multi- or a-perspective languages. The link between the two topics is an interest in procedures aiming in an active way at making things appear strange (in Russian: ostranenje, in German: Verfremdung). An introduction will focus on the myth of the artist in and around symbolism between primitivism and decadence, genius and madness, in context with the discovery of children's art and art of the insane.

Hour: M. ZIMMERMANN