Prof. Sarah Wilson (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

Crowds, Power, and the Rape of the Masses

Donnerstag, 30. November 2017 um 18 Uhr, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Campus, Hof 9, Seminarraum 1

Within the art world orgy of Frieze-week London, two shows spoke to me most powerfully about art and crisis: Marcin Dudek’s Steps and Marches, (Edel Assanti gallery) and Melancholia, a Seebald story, (Kings’ College, Inigo Rooms).
Dudek’s video, Interpersonal stress crowd turbulence, evoked the long story of crowds, ephemeral violence, political uprising and change; Melancholia, the dreadful contemplation of aftermath, the impossible dialectic of reconstruction and mourning.
With our democracies at the mercy of the ‘black box algorhithms’ the rise of jingoism and racism reveal atavistic, animal fears. It seems timely to look back to the theoreticians of crowds and power  from Jules Romains, and Georges Sorel, to Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti or George-Didi-Huberman’s Uprisings. Above all Serge Chakotin’s Rape of the Masses. The Psychology of Totalitarian propaganda, first published in 1939 and its reappearance in England and Russia today speaks to the present. ‘In the description of the disaster lies the possibility of overcoming it’. Are W. G. Seebald’s  words too optimistic for our times?


Sarah Wilson is a specialist on the School of Paris and postwar European art, extending to Franco-Soviet relations, Narrative Figuration and global conceptualisms. She supervises research on contemporary Russian, Eastern European and also Chinese art.In 2015 she was  co-curator of  ‘Asia Time: Ist Asian Biennale / 5th Guangzhou Triennale’ (Guangzhou, China).