Nouvelle parution / Recently published
EDUARDO RALICKAS
“From the Gestell to the Reprogestell: Notes on the Technological Continuum”
History of Photography
The Slide Lecture
ed. Tal-Or Ben-Choreen and Karla McManus
Abstract. In this article, I cast a retrospective glance at the technological continuum from which the art history slide lecture springs. I focus specifically on the copy apparatuses widely used to make transparencies for art-historical consumption, circa 1930 to the early 2000s. The ways in which these once prevalent technologies developed to frame and disseminate visual materials by means of light was instrumental in shaping the widespread illusion of epistemological transparency in the world’s art history classrooms. In reference to the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on technological determinism, I provide an illustrated chronology of slide reproduction technologies in which artworks ultimately appear as self-luminous technological “images,” or simulated entities that speak as if beyond history.
Keywords: copy stand technologies (genesis and evolution); slide projection; technological determinism; phenomenology; grey literature (photography); Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“Since the days of the great Heinrich Wölfflin, art-historians have tended to identify the object of their enquiry with those properties of a painting which a good slide preserves.”
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987), p. 11.
Figure 2. A nineteenth-century reproduction camera and operator pictured in ‘La Photographie’, Le Magasin Pittoresque, ed. Édouard Charton, 32e année (1864), 92. Wood engraving by Dupré after a drawing by Jules Gagniet, 12.5 x 15.1 cm. Digital copy-stand photograph. Author’s collection. Notice how, in this early stage, the specialised operator is also a worldly portrait artist. By reinforcing the division of labour, the next generation of technological offerings further estranges the hand, eye, and mind, as technology takes further command over ‘average everyday’ dealings with the work of art by making the operator forgetful of the work’s worldly (and wordly) contexts.
This work is supported by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada