June 5, 2014, 6 p.m. (German)
A lecture by Dietmar Rübel

The lecture focuses on different conceptions of materiality in art and everyday life. At Ulrike Grossarth’s request, it also addresses the exhibition Les Immatériaux Jean-François Lyotard curated at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1985. The essayistic show examined the influence of the new materiality of digital media and communication technologies on traditional ideas about language, art, and post-material labor. Inspired by the recent trend toward a new attention to things as condensates of technical as well as symbolic knowledge and their role as sometimes recalcitrant actors in art, it will place Lyotard’s curatorial experiment in its historic context and subject it to critical scrutiny.

Dietmar Rübel is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, where he teaches the history of art from the nineteenth century to the present. His research focuses on the relation between art theory and artistic praxis, questions of materiality, and interactions between pop culture, film, design, and contemporary art. He also works as an exhibition organizer and has been a visiting curator at the Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art (MAK), Vienna, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and the Berlin Academy of Arts, among other institutions. Dietmar Rübel lives in Dresden and London; his most recent book is Plastizität: Eine Kunstgeschichte des Veränderlichen (Munich: Silke Schreiber, 2012).