Imaginations of Matter – Gaston Bachelard and the Arts of His Time
In the last phase of his life, the French epistemologist and poetologist Gaston Bachelard has maintained intensive contacts with contemporary artists, and has accompanied many of their works with shorter or longer reflections, which found their place in various art books and exhibition catalogs. The project is concerned with these texts. It is separated into two parts. The first part consists of an essay that tries to determine the characteristic style of these texts. Being neither of an art historical nor of an art critical nature, the texts instead establish a third genre of writing about art. Thematically, they revolve around the materiality and mediality of the tools and the hand that directs them; the intrinsic value of color and of other artistic materials; and the presence of the working process in the work, its execution.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger studied philosophy, linguistics and biology at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin. Following stations as a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and as a historian of science at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science in Lübeck as well as the University of Salzburg, he served as a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1996 to 2014. His areas of expertise comprise the history and epistemology of the life sciences, the history and epistemology of experimentation, and the relations between the sciences and the arts. He is a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Germany as well as the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. He holds an honorary professorship in history of science at the TU Berlin as well as an honorary doctorate at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He lives and works in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
Spalt und Fuge. Eine Phänomenologie des Experiments, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2021 / Split and Splice, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2023.
mit Staffan Müller-Wille, Vererbung. Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2009 / A Cultural History of Heredity, The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Historische Epistemologie zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius Verlag 2007 / On Historicizing Epistemology. An Essay, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2010.
Epistemologie des Konkreten. Studien zur Geschichte der modernen Biologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2006 / An Epistemology of the Concrete, Durham and London: Duke University Press 2010.
Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997 / Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge, Göttingen: Wallstein 2001.
In seinem Projekt befasst sich Hans-Jörg Rheinberger mit den Texten, die Gaston Bachelard in seiner Pariser Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zu Werken von Künstlerinnen und Künstlern geschrieben hat.