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Modern life and art have been inextricably bound up
with experiences of speed, motion, and mobility. In the visual arts,
we have come to think of the modern observer as a mobile viewing
subject collecting disparate views and fusing them within the frame
of one and the same representation. Literary modernism embraced
various strategies to encode the peculiarly modern acceleration
of life, while photography and film have often been hailed as media
ideally suited to record the passing of time and further promote
the dynamization of space in urban modernity. What has made modernism
modern, it has therefore been argued, was its active engagement
with the emergence of highly mobile viewing positions in modern
life, with experiences of contingency, perceptual instability, and
ongoing flux and motion. This seminar explores this peculiar relation
of motion, speed, sensory perception, and aesthetic representation
in both theoretical, historical, and analytical terms. While we
read various seminal aesthetic, philosophical, and physiological
texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will also focus
on a number of exemplary paintings, literary works, films, and photographic
practices in which we can locate a paradigmatic modernization of
human sensory perception. One of the central tasks will not only
be to better understand the nexus between various art forms and
experiences of mobility in modernity, but to rethink aesthetic modernism
as a series of interventions acutely aware of how modern technologies
(the train, the film projector, the record player, the light weight
camera, etc.) changed the perceptual senses of the subject and unsettled
people’s location in space and time. All readings and discussions
in English.
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