On the reproduction of religious artefacts. Opportunities and limits of digitalization: The tapestry of Bayeux and the altarpiece of Haldern

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Abstract

In the 1920s and 30s, the debate about the social function of the aesthetic intensified. It was politicised under the impact of the First World War and the loss of trust in previous classical bourgeois ideals such as the autonomy of the artwork. The practice of individual, private contemplation became public in favour of opening up the art market through reproduction. Cultural and social theorists such as Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1960) took this development as an opportunity to reflect on the connection between technical-instrumental reason, mass culture and aesthetics (Ulshöfer, 133f). While Kracauer criticised the transcendental homelessness of the 1920s and 1930s - especially that of mass society, which was represented by the body parts of chorus girls, athletes and stadium visitors - Benjamin advocated a socio-critical use of cultural mass objects in order - based on the medium of film - to irritate the "asocial" behaviour of bourgeois society with its contemplation, but above all to criticise it (Prinz, 108 f). The reproduction of artefacts in the age of digitalisation makes it possible to use things, objects and works of art in teaching and learning. Using various examples (including the Bayeux Tapestry with its depiction of the conquest of what is now Great Britain by the Normans in 1066, and the Haldern Altarpiece, which depicts the stages of the Passion of Jesus and is now in the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster after a long odyssey), we will examine the functions that digital reproductions fulfil today. Based on the question of whether in the culture of digitality (Stalder) the distinction between individual and social or public and private can be made (Merle, 60ff), the opportunities and limits of the use of digitalised material in the didactic public sphere of higher education will be discussed.

Speakers from the University of Münster

Roggenkamp, Antje

Professorship of Practical Theology and Religious Education (Prof. Roggenkamp-Kaufmann)