23. 4. 2025 seminar of accidental wisdom: Joseph Imorde
seminar of accidental wisdom: Joseph Imorde
23. 4. 2025
Joseph Imorde: The Epistemological Impact.
Popular Reproductions in Art History and Anthropology
With the exhilarating increase of photographic reproductions in popular books, journals and newspapers around and after 1900, new epistemologies unfolded – epistemologies of de-contextualization, comparability and re-information. Art history and anthropology lost – so to speak – their objects to gain a new mediated objectivity. The access to huge quantities of black and white reproductions privileged – to adapt a formulation by Andrew Zimmerman – »an atemporal mode of knowledge«. At the same time, it favored an inclusion and aestheticization of
new and unknown artifacts. The lecture will try to analyze the relationship between the reproduction industry and the consumer culture that developed in the early twentieth century. It will use the Querschnitt – a Zeitgeist-journal in the Weimar republic as a starting point – to analyse the dissemination of »world art« into the realm of art history and popular culture alike.
Joseph Imorde studied Art History, Philosophy and Musicology in Bochum, Rome and Berlin. He was editor of the architectural magazine »Daidalos«. In 1996 he founded the publishing house Edition Imorde. After his PhD on ephemeral architecture in the Roman Baroque he became assistant professor at the Institute of History and Theory of Architecture at the Federal Technical University (ETH) in Zurich. 2001 he joined the research group »Kultbild« at the University of Muenster. He finished his habilitation »Michelangelo Deutsch!« at the Technical University
Dresden in 2008 and got a full professorship for art history at the University of Siegen in the same year. From 2009–2011 he was Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow at the University of Michigan, 2012 and 2017 Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. In 2021 he was appointed professor for art history at the weissensee kunsthochschule berlin.