Negotiations of the Everyday:

Dialogue Cultures (in) Genre Painting and the Emergence of the Social-analytical Gaze (1560-1800)

Dr. Dominik Brabant

Genre paintings, that is, depictions of everyday scenes with anonymous and typified figures, thrive in many ways on cultures of dialogue (both visual and discursive) that span from the early modern period to the present. Since the 16th century, artists in paintings and graphic works have been working on a social-analytical gaze with which figures were increasingly placed in the paintings as subjects whose habitus, physique, performances, and even biographical fate are shaped by those forces of the social that only university sociology formulated in theoretical terms and concepts from the 19th century onward. While, on the one hand, representations emerged in a multitude of genre scenes in which the protagonists as well as the ambience within which they act were marked as socially determined and thus exposed to a moral-judgmental gaze, on the other hand, artists such as Caravaggio searched for pictorial strategies through which such visual regimes could be questioned, subverted, or even deconstructed.

Cultures of dialogue, as they are investigated in the Forschungskolleg, can be traced in different levels and facets of my research project: Thus, genre works from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to modern art repeatedly depict successful scenes of interpersonal dialogue - or its refusal, failure, or postponement.

But the works also dialogue with each other in an interpictural sense, insofar as numerous motifs, topoi, and pictorial strategies circulated in a tight web of reciprocal quotations, appropriations, and transformative adaptations, between works, oeuvres, and entire geographical and epochal visual cultures. Moreover, as recent scholarship has increasingly noted, the genre of genre painting, because of its inherent semantic openness, is particularly predisposed to provoke diverting and even conflictual dialogues in front of the works or in the context of scholarly discourse about the respective meanings of the works, their analysis, interpretation, and (art historical) classification. Moreover, the emergence and gradual differentiation of genre painting, as well as its moments of crisis and the art historical narratives that the preoccupation with this genre has produced, can be understood in terms of a dialogue between visual and textual arts, between visuality and textuality, between artistic and art theoretical, art critical and art historical discourse.

The overarching questions of the research project are: When and through which pictorial strategies did a conception of subjects as social beings become established in European visual arts, i.e., as actors in a world of the social in which other norms, structures, and processes are decisive than, for example, in the world of the sacred or the world of the mythical - i.e., those spheres that are represented in history painting? In what way were forms of individualization, subjectivation, or socialization (each of these theoretically overdetermined terms that must be specifically historicized in the context of my investigation) represented, staged, or subverted with the means of art in genre painting? And finally: How were such scenarios of subjectification and de-subjectification transferred and negotiated in an art-theoretical, art-critical, and art-historical dialogue, even if such terms and the theoretical concepts that accompanied them were not yet available?