An/Iconism. Iconography, Style and the Aesthetics of Law

The juridical and bureaucratic regimes of law counter the prevailing wealth of images with an underlying commitment to the writ and symbols as their predominant frame of reference. An entire gamut of media studies theories and approaches has sought to starkly juxtapose this (seemingly an-iconic) self-perception with the unique presence of the audio-visual technology inside and outside the legal sphere (cf. i.a. Vismann, Steinhauer, Goodrich). In line with that shift, the workshop attempts to outline the significance of aesthetics in an expanded theoretical and art historical framework for the legal system and the system of jurisdiction, in order to ascertain to what extent jurisdictions on matters concerning descriptions and assessments depend on the forms and frequency of publications with iconographic underpinnings to the extent that they represent themselves along the axes of style and of visual history.   

Dr Matthias Bruhn has been working as research associate at the Institute for Art and Visual History at Humboldt University, Berlin, since 2005, and is currently the project leader for "Das technische Bild" at the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Technology. Before that, he was an associate at the Art History Seminar of the University of Hamburg for a research project at the Warburg-Haus, entitled "Political Iconography". He is also the co-founder and a member of the advisory board to ArtHist, an art history network on H-Net. His research interests include history of the scientific image, mass media, political representation, and image management. Currently, he is principal investigator at Berlin's Humboldt University excellence-cluster dedicated to "Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory."