JUNIOR DIRECTOR
Prof. Dr. Barbara Wittmann
Cranachstraße 47, ground floor, room 006
Tel.: +49 (0) 3643 – 58 40 28
Email: barbara.wittmann [at] uni-weimar.de
Email: barbara.wittmann [at] uni-weimar.de
Barbara Wittmann is an art historian focusing mainly on the theory and practice of (scientific) drawing, on the epistemic history of children’s drawings and on 19th-century art. She studied Art History in Vienna and Berlin and earned her PhD in 1999 at the Freie Universität Berlin (with a thesis on Édouard Manet’s portraiture). Between 1999 and 2003 she worked as a research scholar at the University of Trier. In spring 2003 she was a visiting lecturer at the Technical University of Istanbul (ITÜ), and between fall 2003 and winter 2005 a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In winter/spring 2006 she spent a term as postdoctoral research fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy (Max Planck Institute). During that time, she initiated and authored a research proposal for the inter-institutional research group »Knowledge in the Making. Drawing and Writing as Research Techniques« together with Christoph Hoffmann and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Between September 2006 and June 2010 she held a research position in the context of this project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Since June 2010, Barbara Wittmann has been assistant professor for »Media of Design« at the Faculty of Media at the Bauhaus University Weimar. At the IKKM she directs a Research Fellow Program on »Tools of Drafting«. Her current book project explores the discovery of children’s drawings as research objects and instruments in the human sciences and humanities between 1880 and 1950 (working title: »Meaningful Scribbles. Children’s Drawings as Instruments, 1880-1950«).
Research projects at the IKKM
What’s Left of Drawing. Case Studies on Graphic Drafting in the PresentBased on the example of case studies from the fields of architecture, design, the visual arts, archaeology and biology, this project will investigate the persistence of the supposedly obsolete medium of drawing. For although graphic drafting in the above mentioned fields has undergone considerable changes to its method, it continues to function as a tool of excursion into unknown territory. Since the mid-19th century the recording and analysis of phenomena, indeed, even the development of new shapes, certainly has been taken over by mechanical and digital media to a growing extent. The – at least partial – survival of graphic drafting is explained by its flexibility and the comparatively modest material cost of drawing. However, competition with technical apparatus has clearly modified and restricted the use of pencil and paper: manual drawing has entered into a wide variety of forms of media assemblages with the digital camera, CAD and image editing software, whereby the development of hybrids like the drawing pad points to a characteristic logic of combining old and new media.
At the center of the project is thus the change in the internal logic of drawing through the collaboration with modern imaging techniques. Even in cases where a great continuity of graphic conventions can be observed, as, for instance, in explorative drawing at the microscope, the equipment of laboratories, the preparation of specimens and the objects of knowledge have changed so radically in the past 150 years that we must proceed from the assumption of not the mere survival of manual drawing, but rather of a veritable »rediscovery« of the medium. Beyond taking stock of graphic drafting, the project aspires to determine the apparatus of drawing as a heterogeneous ensemble of materials, practices, devices, institutions and finally discourses, which control what is shown and what can be thought.
Meaningful Scribbles. Children’s Drawings as Psychological Instruments, 1880-1950
The institutionalization of child psychology around 1900 was accompanied by techniques of observation and experiment that separated scientific attention from the education and everyday care of children. The experimental application and interpretation of children’s drawings became one of those techniques. Whereas before 1880 children’s drawings were seen as mere scribbles, and considered to be of no aesthetic or heuristic value, psychologists such as James Mark Baldwin, William Stern, Florence Goodenough, Melanie Klein and Jean Piaget soon after came to consider drawings to be a major experimental and diagnostic device in the investigation of children. Like children’s play and their stories, the »artistic production« was (and still is) believed to reveal sensomotoric functions and perception of space, to give proof of children’s intelligence and social development, and to document their psychoanalytic dispositions and symptoms.
In this example of scientific practice the question as to the contours of the paper tool concept becomes particularly acute: First, because the »psychographic« instrument of children’s drawings cannot be reduced to the logic of process of drawing – even though the graphic self-will of the child is visibly manifested in the experiment or test. In this case the paper instrument is constituted by the interplay or conflict of the child’s activity, the media conditions of the drawing and external factors like the experimental setting, the test’s rules of the game, accompanying measures like statistical evaluation or even modeling the drawing hand according to the logic of other apparatus – such as, for instance, the curve plotters of the méthode graphique. Second, this special case makes it possible to develop a concept of the instrumentality of drawing that sacrifices neither the process to the product nor the result to the procedure, for essential to the specific procedural logic of the drawing experiments, tests and therapies is that drawing obtains significance both as a gesture and as a datum – and especially in the interpretation of the one through the other; indeed, this is where the central epistemological relevance of »psychographisms« should be sought.
Further information on the project