IKON Studies

This series promotes a wide range of content and themes related to iconographic studies, focusing on the role and function of the image within the period and place of its origin as well as contemporary reception and critical approaches towards it. It takes particular interest in modern iconography/iconology that draws upon a wider range of interpretative and comparative methods than those epitomized by Erwin Panofsky, primarily aiming at the analysis of the content and ‘biography’ of artworks that demonstrate their critical place within art history as well as other disciplines involved in the study of images. This series follows the idea that understanding images means understanding human culture and ideas more broadly. Particular attention is directed to the reformed modern iconology – what we could call poststructuralist, or postmodern – that has opened up to all layers of culture, including the popular, the marginal, the subaltern, and that encompasses various ‘turns’, such as the pictorial, the linguistic, the corporeal, and the cognitive, to mention but a few. In an age when cultural representation is conveyed through multiple media, it is also necessary to re-examine the paradigm of ‘speaking vs. seeing’: if speaking is entirely conventional, does the process of seeing work in the same way or can it be naive, natural, and innocent? By reflecting anew on the iconicity debate that has problematized the above question during the past few decades, IKON aims to re-frame interpretations and open up novel ways of thinking.