Organized
by the Department of Art History in cooperation with the Department of Site-Specific Art, University of Applied Arts
Vienna. Please register beforehand at:
sarah.lauss@uni-ak.ac.at.
Monumental Cares (Manchester University Press, 2023) considers
the monument debates of the past decade together in light of phenomena that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such
as climate crisis, migration, and local and global political tensions. How can a date or event be made to stand for, much
less represent, such processes? We have to start from the ground up, Widrich argues, paying attention to how sites, as well
as artifacts and the audiences that inhabit them operate on multiple, overlapping levels of mediation. A multidirectional
theory of site brings together objects, their photographic reproduction, and a geographically informed sense of audience(s)
– local, regional, global. Attending to history and practice in this site-directed way, helps us see the significance of history
to the fashioning of a working, democratic public sphere.
Mechtild Widrich is Professor
in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently Faculty Fellow at the University
of Notre Dame’s Center for Advanced Study. She was a Guest Professor at the University of Applied Arts in 2022, and part of
the expert committee for the competition to recontextualize the Karl Lueger statue in Vienna. Widrich researches and writes
on art in public space, in particular monuments and monument activism, performative and participatory practices, the theory
of the public sphere, as well as aesthetic theory. Widrich has won numerous awards and fellowships, e.g. from the Fulbright
Foundation, the Max-Planck-Institute Berlin, the National Gallery in Washington DC, the Newcombe Fellowship, Schlossman Prize,
and the Swiss National Science Foundation and is member of AgorAkademi (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris),
the Performance and Public Space research center (London Metropolitan University), as well as a member of the grant part committee
on art, monuments and markers in Chicago.
Widrich is the author of Performative Monuments
(2014) and Monumental Cares (2023), both with Manchester University Press. She is the (co)editor of Future Anterior,
special issue Ex Situ: On Moving Monuments (2020); Participation in Art and Architecture (2015, paperback
2022); Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (2013, paperback 2015), Krzysztof Wodiczko, A 9/11 Memorial
(2009); and translator (with Andrei Pop) of Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen [1853; Aesthetics of Ugliness]
(2015, paperback 2017).
Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst,
ArtMargins, Log, TDR, JSAH, and numerous books and catalogues in Europe and the US, most recently in Street Life
(Wilhelm Hack Museum, 2022) and Public Matters (Austrian Gallery Belvedere, 2023).
