Brigid Doherty (Princeton): Rosemarie Trockel's Art of Interpretation

Across a body of work recognized since the mid-1980s for its cultural significance as well as its critical reflections on the situation of artworks and their conventions, genres, and media after modernism, Rosemarie Trockel’s art has presented itself as an art of interpretation. In insisting on interpretation (over and against, say, repetition or negation) as a defining term for the operations of Trockel’s art, Doherty argues for the distinctiveness of her work’s engagement with models in past artistic practices, and aims to explain what is at stake, for example, in the forms of language that play an important part in her production: from titles crafted out of phrases variously borrowed from everyday sayings and literary and philosophical texts to projects that take up the work of writers including Duras, Klossowski, Brinkmann, and Houellebecq.

Brigid Doherty holds a joint appointment in the Departments of German and Art and Archaeology and is an associated faculty member in the School of Architecture. She currently serves as director of the Program in European Cultural Studies and as a member of the executive committees of the Program in Media + Modernity and the Council on International Teaching and Research. Professor Doherty came to Princeton in 2003 from her previous position as associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University.

Professor Doherty’s research and teaching focus on the interdisciplinary study of 20th-century art and literature, with special emphasis on relationships among the visual arts, literature, and aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories in German modernism. In 2005, she held the inaugural Research Forum Visiting Professorship in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In 2006–2007, she was the David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and an affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. In 2008, she was a participant in Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, for which she created the exhibition project »Learning Things« as a contribution to the group of »mini-museums« curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg in Trento, Italy. In 2011, she was a Fellow at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin.

Selected Recent Publications

• »Rilke's Magic Lantern: Figural Language and the Projection of ›Interior Action‹ in the Rodin Lecture,« in Bildprojektionen. Filmisch-fotografische Dispositive in Kunst und Architektur, ed. Lilian Haberer and Annette Urban (Transcript, forthcoming November 2014).
• »Titles and Compositions: On Rosemarie Trockel at Gladstone Gallery, New York,« Texte zur Kunst (June 2014).
• »Less sauvages than others: On Rosemarie Trockel’s A Cosmos,« Afterall (Spring 2014).
• »Interior Motives,« Cahiers d’Art Revue 1–2 (2013).
• »Rilke's Magic Lantern,« in The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Congress Proceedings of the CIHA 2012, ed. G. Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013).
• »Monster, Medusa, Vera icon: Gesichter und deren Verlegung in Rosemarie Trockels Kunst,« in Gesichter: Kulturgeschichtliche Szenen aus der Arbeit am Bildnis des Menschen, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Wilhelm Fink, 2013).
• »The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada« (2003), reprinted in Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, ed. Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kristin McGuire (Berghahn Books, 2010).
• »Between the Artwork and Its ›Actualization‹: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s ›Work of Art‹ Essay,« Paragraph 32.3 (2009).
• »László Moholy-Nagy: Constructions in Enamel, 1923,« in Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (Museum of Modern Art, 2009).
• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, coedited with Michael W. Jennings and Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard University Press, 2008).