Uwe Fleckner

Der Künstler als Seismograph (The Artist as Seismograph)
Zur Gegenwart der Kunst und zur Kunst der Gegenwart (On the Presentness of Art and the Art of the Present)
VOLUME 198

What Lies between Art’s Past and Present?

In Der Künstler als Seismograph, Uwe Fleckner addresses a series of fundamental methodological questions in art from the twentieth century to the present. Starting with works by Brancusi, Duchamp, Miró, Picabia, Picasso, and Schwitters, Fleckner traces the histories of their genres and reception, shining a spotlight on a not quite “classical” classical modernism. In his explorations, he critically examines contemporary art’s underlying strategies: the topicality of mnemic processes in the visual arts, contemporary artistic methods for working with spatial concepts, and an archaeology of sites and spaces. He discusses the issues of an abstract, yet politically understood art in democratic contexts where the binding iconographies of the past have been replaced by principles of aesthetic experience.

In the mosaic of essays and work analyses presented here, Fleckner puts the topicality of works from the early twentieth century to the test, as well as the historical relevance of contemporary art, analyzing, among others, the work of Gerhard Richter and Franz Erhard Walther.

Uwe Fleckner (b. 1961) served as deputy director of the German Center for Art History (DFK Paris) from 1997 to 2002. Since 2004 he has been Professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg and director of the Warburg Haus there. Since 2023, he is also a professor of art history at the China Academy of Art and director of the Advanced School of Art and Humanities, Hangzhou. He is the author of numerous books and essays on art and art theory from the eighteenth century to the present, as well as co-editor of the collected works of Carl Einstein and Aby Warburg.