21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual

Board-er Games

Sasha Rossman — 2025-04-24

This paper analyzes a seventeenth-century geographic board game designed by the geographer Pierre Duval (1618–1683) to celebrate the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1660. The game takes its players through the events of twenty-five years of war between France and Spain, staged largely along the perimeters of France. Contextualizing the game’s visual structure within the historical and semantic French discourse of borders allows us, I argue, to understand Duval’s object as an agent in border-building practices. These practices were neither located physically on France’s borders, nor were they top-down. Instead, Duval’s game suggests that a border imaginary could be constructed in the capital through collaborative operations in the form, for instance, of play. This border imaginary figured French state boundaries in the mid-seventeenth century as “frontiers” and, I suggest, this involved a gendered as well as a spatial dimension. When seeking to understand state formation and its mediation through visual culture, this paper implies, moreover, that seemingly trivial objects such as games which generally lie outside of the art historical cannon reveal themselves as a rich investigatory terrain.

Johann Moritz Rugendas’ “Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil”

Miguel Gaete — 2025-04-24

Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858) is widely regarded as one of the most significant Romantic European painters in nineteenth-century Latin America. His extensive body of work, which includes thousands of drawings, lithographic albums, and hundreds of paintings, establishes him as one of the most prolific artists to explore and portray the continent. In 1822, Rugendas embarked on an almost three-year journey across Brazil, depicting its people and landscapes. The primary outcome of this journey was his celebrated Picturesque Voyage in Brazil, published between 1826 and 1835 in French and German. Hitherto, Voyage pittoresque has been viewed as a critique of the slave trade, positioning Rugendas as an advocate for racial equality. However, this article argues that Rugendas’ portrayal of slavery reveals an ambiguous and inconsistent stance on racial issues, complicating the narrative of a fierce denouncer of slavery built around his figure. Through detailed analysis of the album’s texts and images and foregrounding overlooked evidence, this essay challenges the notion of the volume as an antislavery manifesto, highlighting its racialist undertones and the complex interplay of pain, pleasure, the picturesque, and the sublime.

Perspectives on Institutional Capture and the Artification of Climate Activism

Marlene Militz — 2025-04-24

The wave of staged art vandalism by climate activist groups in 2022 confronted museums with a dilemma: in their role as guardians of objects, they must prevent such actions, but in their function as forums for social discourse, they must be receptive to climate activism entering their spaces. To navigate this challenge, some museums have adopted a strategy of “institutional capture”, incorporating activism through “artification”. This article analyzes four examples from museums in the German-speaking realm that sought to legitimize activist interventions by recasting them as art-like – an on-demand aesthetic experience of protest or performative reenactment of direct action. However, the aim of this accommodation is twofold: to pacify activism and discourage similar incidents, while primarily reasserting the museum’s institutional legitimacy at a time of increasing erosion.

All Things Foreign, All Things Strange

Kacper Radny — 2025-04-24

Daniel Seelbach, Der Herrscher im Massenmedium. Fränkische Bildpolitik auf Münzen und Siegeln im Kulturvergleich

Simon Coupland — 2025-04-24

Maria Schröder, Die Beinsättel des 13. bis 17. Jahrhunderts. Reitzeuge als Sinnbilder ritterlich-höfischer Ideale

Renate Prochno-Schinkel — 2025-04-24

Prita Meier, The Surface of Things. A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast

Jürg Schneider — 2025-04-24

Burcu Dogramaci and Marta Smolińska, Grenze/Granica. Art on the German-Polish Border after 1990

Vera Faber — 2025-04-24

Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention. How We Look at Art and Performance Today

Eva Kernbauer — 2025-04-24