The Art of Being Social. Figurations an...

The project THE ART OF BEING SOCIAL will investigate ›the social‹ as a specific object of visual representation and ›being social‹ as an asserted aesthetic quality of art and design objects. A corpus analysis and detailed exemplary case studies from modern and contemporary works of art and design, will be conducted with the goal of identifying iconographic types and formal characteristics that are used to depict ›sociality‹ or promote a specific ›social‹ behaviour. The study will be based on an original theoretical approach that relates classical sociological notions of the ›figuration‹ of ›the social‹1 to art historian analysis. The project will thus assume a reverse perspective to existing social theories of the image by instead formulating a pictorial theory of the social. In doing so, the proposed research will also provide insights within the field of artistic epistemology by exploring how, with their very specific means, objects of visual art and design create knowledge about ›the social‹.