Guided Tour:  Angry Girls. Vulnerable and Furious

We have a different reflex reaction when we encounter an aggressive boy with a knife than when it's a girl. It is simply a different feeling that arises and one that is probably not culturally limited. The boy spontaneously signals danger, whereas the girl is seen as more defensive. In Nara's world of drawings, the girl remains a cute manga character - sweet, innocent and pure. But with the knife in her hand, her vulnerability and fury come to the fore. It is felt in the face of many things and is directed against many people and many things in the world that Yoshitomo Nara deals with. We feel directly affected and addressed by the expressive power of Nara's Angry Girls. What and who the anger is directed against and how it expresses itself is something we have to find out together in the exhibition.

Fig.: Shallow Puddles, 2006, Acrylic on cotton, mounted on glass fibre reinforced plastic, Ø 95 cm, property of the artist. Photo: M. Sauer

In past decades, the subject atmosphere and mood has gone beyond the physio-meteorological and psychological scopes and become a new direction of aesthetics which concerns two sides of the same phenomenon. As the primary sensuous reality constructed by both the perceiving subject and the perceived object, atmosphere and mood are neither a purely subjective state nor an objective thing. Atmosphere is essentially a quasi-object pervaded by a specific affective quality and a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our outer life experiences, while mood is a quasi-subject pervaded by specific objective quality and thus a ubiquitous phenomenon forming the foundation of our inner life experiences. A practical dimension is thereby, from the outset, embedded in the consideration of both concepts. This is mainly characterized by actions and, correspondingly, ethical aspects, which concern the design and creation of atmosphere and thus the triggering of mood through works of art. Here, on the one hand, the process of artistic formation, long neglected in the European tradition, is given prominence as an aesthetic practice, and on the other hand, an interactive dialogue is effectively established between the artist, the work and the viewer. Due to the fact that atmosphere and mood, both as in-between, emphasize the interaction of the perceiver and the perceived from two sides, here the decisive question is: in what kind of environment do we live or participate and in what way do we experience it? The focus of aesthetics is now not on the conventional issue whether the environment is beautiful or gives us a sense of beauty, but on how the environment influences our feeling of being there (Befinden) through our own sensuality. Such an approach would contribute to a critical transformation in aesthetic methodology, namely from the ontological and/or epistemological what to the phenomenological and anthropological how.

The tension between atmosphere and mood, as revealed here, opens up a large space for exploring a new understanding of aesthetics. On this basis the special issue pursued to diversify this discussion on an international level.

Atmosphere and Mood: Two Sides of the Same Phenomenon, edited by Martina Sauer & Zhuofei Wang, New York & São Paulo [Special Issue, Art Style 11, 2023]

With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular attention was paid to contributions that clarify how the structural features - the modes - of the arts, their perception, and their signifying potential in terms of content are interrelated and how they are to be understood in communicative and thus socioculturally relevant terms. Thus, in addition to neuroscientific contributions, those from cultural anthropology, art history, image and art studies, and literary studies were included.



Multimodality. The Sensually Organized Potential of Artistic Works, edited by Martina Sauer & Christiane Wagner, New York & São Paulo [Special Issue, Art Style 10, 01, 2022

2021 instead of 2020, the 16th international congress of the German Society for Semiotics took place on the topic of transformations. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was finally not held in presence at the TU Chemnitz, but took place online: http://www.semiotik.eu/transformationen-2020. 11 sections with different foci from archaeology, architecture, design, digital humanities, on the body, from the field of literature & youth and subcultures, media, fashion, environment and carto/atlas semiotics and sign philosophy had each published their own call for papers.

The Image & Cultural Studies sections addressed the research community with a German/English call on images as agents of cultural transformation processes. The focus of the call was to understand images as agents - in the words of art and cultural studies scholar Aby M. Warburg - and to recognize and understand not only their potential for cognition, but also their potential for action. As an active part of culture, they not only convey it, but at the same time stimulate action. In this respect, images can be understood not only as documents and testimonies of collective history, but also assume an active role as carriers and repositories of affectively effective elements of communication. As agents of cultural transformation processes, images take on a status of their own within the human capacity for expression and action. The essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this.

Images as Agents of Cultural Transformation Processes, edited by Martina Sauer & Jacobus Bracker, New York & São Paulo: Special Issue, IMAGE 36, 08, 2022

This special issue on affordances bases on the thesis, that all natural and artificial things inhere affordances that appeal to our cognitive system, and thus invite us to look at them, perceive them, think about them, interpret them, and use them.The concept roots in the studies of the American psychologist James J. Gibson from the 1960s. According to him, "things" offer a certain range of possible activities depending on their form, time patterns, and material qualities, thus becoming part of human-thing-interactions. However, affordances can also be culturally trained. This aspect has been intensively discussed subsequently within different disciplines (e.g., Social Sciences, Design Studies). But only recently has the concept received attention in the field of Visual Culture Studies particularly through archaeological scholarship.

As the articles of this special issue show, this approach is now gaining momentum in a broad range of image- and object-related disciplines. It may not surprise that the authors’ perspectives on images and objects vary widely within the issue. However, thanks to the use of affordances as a theoretical and/or methodological tool, they all contribute to fundamental questions of perceiving, receiving, understanding, as well as interpreting, and acting with sensuously present culture.

On The Material Image. Affordances as a New Approach to Visual Culture Studies, ed. by Elisabeth Günther & Martina Sauer, New York & São Paulo: Special Issue, Art Style, 7, 2021

We live in the age of postmodernism. What does that mean? With a call for essays, we asked for proposals for a better understanding. At the same time, we were looking for posts that show how the arts have processed and are still processing the change from the modern to the postmodern selfconception of man, which has been described by philosophy since the 1950s to today. This special issue thus demonstrates how architects, designers and artists have reacted to the new socio-politically relevant concepts of postmodernism.

With contributions of Simone Kraft on architecture, Arianna Fantuzzi on self-portraits, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen on visual arts in the 1980s, Anna Kristensson on design, Iris Laner on postmodern theory and the work of Jeff Wall, Christiane Wagner on postmodern avatars and finally, I expressed myself on the deconstruction of the familiar in postmodern theory and the work of Karin Kneffel.



On the Postmodern Age, edited by Martina Sauer, New York & São Paulo: Special Issue, Art Style 6, 2020

This first coherent monograph presented here on the life and work of the important Bauhaus master pursues the goal of rediscovering Josef Albers as an artist and educator.

Forty years after his death, the award is intended to honour an artist who had previously received too little attention in the ranks of the Bauhaus masters, especially in Germany.  To present him alone as a teacher and provider of ideas for the preliminary course at the Bauhaus is not enough. After emigrating to the USA, he made his international breakthrough as an artist personality and subsequently revolutionized the art world both through his work and his work as a teacher.



Vgl. Review on Amazon

Martina Sauer, Josef Albers, "So ist Kunst ... Erlebnis," with a foreword by Ulrike Growe, Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop and illustrated city tour in Weimar und Dessau [Bauhaus Personenreihe, edited by Elke Beilfuß, Wiesbaden: Weimarer Verlagsgesellschaft, 2018, 16,90 €

How do we perceive world, how do we perceive images? The book is based on the assumption that we access the world like pictures, first of all through our sensations, and that there is a direct connection between the two. In the discussion of fascination and horror that Anselm Kiefer's pictures of Germany can evoke, the author discusses the consequences and conclusions of this for our cultural self-image. Based on this, the author develops a new image and cultural theory within research, which also explains the special status of fine arts.

Hans and Lea Grundig Award 2015 of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, special appreciation to the first edition [Berlin, 26.11.2015]

Martina Sauer, Faszination - Schrecken.

Zur Handlungsrelevanz ästhetischer Erfahrung anhand Anselm KiefersDeutschlandbilder, 2. edn, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2018, Gebundenes Buch 36,90 €, Taschenbuch 26,90 €

The congress of the German Society for Semiotics in Passau in September 2017 set itself the task of exploring and describing "boundaries". A total of 12 sections of the society issued a call for papers specifically for this purpose. The aim of this anthology is to make clear how concretely the boundaries of one's own, other and foreign can be negotiated, particularly through images.



Ikonische Grenzverläufe. Szenarien des Eigenen, Anderen und Fremden im Bild, edited by Martina Sauer: special issue, IMAGE 28, 01, 2018

Do abstract pictures still convey meaning at all, and if so, which one? With the reduction of the pictorial arrangement to simple flecks in Cézanne, to strokes in van Gogh and smearing traces of colour in Monet, their significance is fundamentally questioned. If, on the other hand, these are understood as effective forces or impulse forces, a completely new, different sense opens up. Landscape is no longer imagined, but realized" in the aesthetic experience. Aesthetics or aisthetics (perception) therefore proves to be a concept of experience and knowledge. Thus the term "new" can also be used to describe the image: it can be described as an "energetic system".

Martina Sauer, Cézanne - van Gogh - Monet. Genese der Abstraktion, PhD Basel 1998, 2nd edn., Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg: ART-Dok, 2014,

19,90 € form the auther