Statement
„Untangling the lines of an apparatus means, in each case, preparing a map, a cartography, a survey of unexplored lands – this is what [Foucault] calls ‚field work‘.“ Gilles Deleuze, What Is a Dispositif?, in: Timothy J. Armstrong (ed.), Michel Foucault Philosopher, New York 1992, p. 159.
As a follow-up to the conference Exploring dispositifs, today., organized by Birte Kleine-Benne for the Institute of Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in June 2019, we would like to summarise the main ideas that emerged from our debate.
In light of the challenges faced by inclusive social systems due to hostilities against plurality, differences/differenciations and deconstructions, a renewed reflection on the responsibilites of art, art history and art theory appears necessary.
From a retrospective view on the history of established artistic, art-historical and art-theoretical narratives, new research approaches emerge which should also be questioned regarding their function within the field of science policy and the social context in which they are situated.
This is why we advocate for a practice that does not consist solely of already existing knowledge, but challenges it by renegotiating established normative knowledge practices, structures of argumentation and visual rhetorics. We subsume this project into two working hypotheses: