Kybernetic Understandings of Kunstwissenschaft. A concept of Marxist Art History in GDR
dr. Katja Bernhardt
The lecture examines the role of art history in the German Democratic Republic during the 1960s, focusing on tensions between scholarly practice and cultural-political expectations. In 1962, a group of artists published an open letter in the SED party newspaper calling for a new conception of art history. Art historians were urged to contribute directly to the development of socialist realism and align research with the social tasks of contemporary art. Rather than remaining interpretative, art history was expected to become a “guiding science” that would analyse and intervene in artistic production and reception in order to strengthen the social impact of art within the socialist cultural revolution. In that time, cybernetics was politically promoted as a general approach across sciences and humanities. Starting in literary studies, cybernetic models were discussed as tools capable of facilitating the conceptualisation and analysis of the relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the audience. It was hypothesised that the humanities with cybernatic would be able to develop a means of understanding and influencing these processes, thereby fulfilling their role in the cultural revolution. The lecture explores how these expectations were debated within art history, how scholars and artists responded, and how the concept of *Kunstwissenschaft* was negotiated between adaptation, institutional reform and critical assertions of artistic autonomy.
Dr. Katja Bernhardt is an art historian specialised in the history of art in Eastern Europe from the 18th to the 20th century. Within that she focuses on architecture, urban development and the manner how it is represented in the media. Moreover she is undertaking research in the field of art historiography whit a particular emphasis on the subject's development in the former GDR. She is based in Berlin.
Date: 13 May 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 18:00 CET
Format: Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8483078653?pwd=PCaRmb7pMb9yXup7fCu7ezRtoHxKeF…
The seminar Art after 1945: New Research, New Methodologies forms part of the research activities of the Department of 20th and 21st-Century Visual Art Documentation at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, and is led by Dr Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus.