Viewing • Positions

An easel painting was created for the purposes of a presentation that prevents looking at its other side. An object that is not supposed to be visible from all sides makes its own status as an object dubious. In the modern era, artists began to recognize this as a problem of art's self-definition and its place in history and culture. They felt bound to create situations intended to benefit an understanding of this problem. This led to an expansion of the themes of artists' awareness of the problem in the wake of which the institutional framework of art and the cultural and political self-understanding of its viewers could be addressed. The present book presents this historical process in selected stages of its evolutionary dynamic.

Gregor Stemmrich studied art, philosophy, and art history. After a professorship at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (from 1999), he accepted a professorship at the Free University of Berlin in 2007 and has been Professor of Art and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi since 2015. He published widely on modern and contemporary art. His book Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) - Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism was published by Hatje Cantz in 2023.