"L'Instauration du tableau" as Exhibition
June 26 – July 7, 2024
Display cabinet by Quirin Babl, Leo Hasslinger, Richard Klippfeld, Luise Knecht, Maya Calladine Lempelius, Luka Matuella, Clara Rotermund, Sára Röth, Felix Schwentner, Jesaja Trummer, Valentin Unger, Yiqi Wang, and Janina Weißengruber with some supplements by/on, amongst others, Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Vika Prokopaviciute, and Victor Stoichita
The book L'Instauration du tableau - metapeinture a l'aube des temps modernes (1993) uses the term instauration to refer to the establishment of the "metapictorial" tableau in the modern sense. Taking as point of departure Pieter Aertsen's painting Vanitas Still Life (1552), also known as Christ with Martha and Mary and now in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Victor Stoichita describes the meaning-generating effects of wall openings, niches, windows or doors in relation to the picture that surrounds them or is surrounded by them – and this with a view to a historical moment characterised by the multiplication of painterly genres and the development of different value systems.
Stoichita draws attention to the mechanisms of text-image or image-image relations, i.e. the intertextual dynamization conditioned by the mutual transfer of information between adjacent or nested signs, and postulates a "gliding" between metonymic and metaphoric meanings. In the multiple transitions between contexts and "texts" - in other words, paintings - that increasingly absorb their own context, the author observes the emergence of a self-reflexive, polysemic visual code, whose genesis he dates between 1522 and 1675. This new imaginary of "post-sacred" images emerges, among other things, from the dialectic of the "white" wall and pictorial representation, or, for example, from the juxtaposition of the "bouquets" of Flemish cabinets d'amateurs (or later: gallery paintings) with the methodically specified "construction of meaning" of Dutch painting.
The visual analyses and syntheses corresponding with the tableau a l'aube des temps modernes were driven not only by the ways of thinking associated with scientific innovations, but also by the political and religious debates at the time of the Reformation and the determined appeal to the viewer. Stoichita sees in the development of this dispositive the rise of a (self-)presentation of representation, the symbolization of the "being" and the "nothingness" of painting, in short: the "birth of art as a problem".
Images (Jorit Aust):
Images (TMAS):
