Back to the Marshes
Description
Back to the Marshes: Myth, Method, Matter is the final volume in Barbara Baert's tripartite study on the cultural impact of weather and environment, on the artistic symptoms of fertility and anxiety, and on the study of matter and medium. The series includes About Sieves and Sieving (2019) and Looking into the Rain (2022). In this essay Baert explores the cosmological imagination, prehistoric graphemes, and the sensory experiences of marshes and wetlands, including their artistic significance for raw and biological materials such as clay, mud and fungi.
Back to the Marshes develops into a fluid voyage of discovery that charts the role of material topologies and their artistic properties in human hands, and reflects on the obstacles accompanying the writing process and the epistemological crises it precipitated during the author's residency at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg. It leads Baert to reconsider the contemporary challenges of Bildwissenschaft in the Geological Turn.
- A multidisciplinary and cross-sectional analysis of the swamp
- Interdisciplinary approaches from art, culture and the history of ideas
Reviews / Votes
Barbara Baert's texts situate themselves right on the threshold of image theory. They avoid the temptation of systematization. Instead, they focus on the specific 'dynamic of potentiality between the not-quite-yet but already-becoming' of images. Any theory of the image, as Barbara Baert's texts show, should do justice to this oscillation between emergence and dissolution - as unpredictable as the wind. Barbara Baert shows that writing about art should itself have an affinity to art.
Frank Fehrenbach, Laudatio on Barbara Baert's accession to the Aby Warburg Professorship on 9 May 2023
More details
Person
Barbara Baert is Professor in Medieval Art, Iconology and Historiography at the KU Leuven. Her work links knowledge and questions from the history of ideas, cultural anthropology and philosophy, and is deeply sensitive to cultural archetypes and their symptoms in the visual arts. Baert is the recipient of several international fellowships and awards, including the prestigious Belgian Francqui Prize for Human Sciences in 2016.