Hidden Paintings: Approaches to a Pre-Socratic Understanding of Pictoriality
This research project aims to develop an alternative model of pictoriality based on the historical and cultural analysis of Etruscan and Lucan tomb paintings. The pre-Socratic concept of pictoriality understands images as disposed toward letting (something) appear and as an immanent opening of space. It therefore differs significantly from Plato’s concept, formulated as a critique of the power of images based on resemblance, representation, and recollection. Concepts of images are therefore of vital relevance for research on pictoriality, and especially on the anthropology of images, in which the relation between image and death has become increasing central. Thus far, Etruscan and Lucan tomb paintings have remained largely unstudied, although they have an important function: they show a different mode of thinking, in which space, life, being, and cognition are closely connected.
Julia Meer studied German philology and philosophy at the Universities of Graz, Vienna, and the University of Vincennes in St.-Denis (Paris VIII). She was a researcher on two projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund, Artist Philosophers: Philosophy as Arts-Based Research and Bodytime: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry on Regular Body Rhythm and Its Dysfunctions. Her doctoral dissertation, “Expeausition:” A Corporal Philosophy of Images, dealt with the corporal dimension of images, especially in painting. Since 2017 she has been an external lecturer at the University of Graz, and since 2019 she has worked at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. She was a guest researcher at the Academia Kantiana, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad (Russian Federation), in 2019. Her research areas include aesthetics, the philosophy of images, theories of difference, the philosophy of the body, and perception theory.
„Entzug und Exposition. Zeichen(setzung) bei Jacques Derrida und Jean-Luc Nancy“, in: Monika Leisch-Kiesl (Hg.), Zeichensetzung_Zeichen Zeichnen, Bielefeld 2020, S. 259–280; „Berühren – Zur Temporalisation des Leibes“, in: gem. mit Reinhold Esterbauer und Andrea Paletta (Hg.), Der Leib und seine Zeit. Temporale Prozesse des Körpers und deren Dysregulationen, Freiburg/München 2019, S. 149–166; „Der vulnerable Leibkörper und der Wirbel der Zeit. Zum Menschenbild im Kontext von Philosophie, Kunst und Medizin“, in: Andrea B. Del Guercio, Isabella Guanzini, Hans-Walter Ruckenbauer, Ida Terracciano (Hg.), Kunst heilt Medizin. Interdisziplinäre Untersuchungen zu vulnerabler Körperlichkeit, Innsbruck 2019, S. 92–115.
Der von Platon entwickelte Bildbegriff ist bis heute wirkmächtig und wurde in der philosophischen Bildforschung intensiv diskutiert. Formuliert hat ihn Platon als Kritik an einem vorsokratischen Bildverständnis. Julia Meer fragt in ihrem Vortrag anhand der etruskischen und lukanischen Grabmalereien nach diesem Bildverständnis und seiner Aktualität.