Matthew Vollgraff
Biographic Data
| ID | 1595021 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Vollgraff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Vollgraff |
| SIGNATURE | VOLLGRAFF M |
| AFFILIATIONS | NOMIS Fellow eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image University of Basel |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2013-2097 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Why Grey Room
Photo falling—Word falling—Break through in grey room—Towers, open fireWhen Branden Joseph, Reinhold Martin, and Felicity Scott founded Grey Room twenty-five years ago, they borrowed its title from a passage in William S. Burroughs's novel The Ticket That Exploded (1962). As a new editorial group takes the helm, we revisit this foundational part of the journal's identity to think about what it means to “break through in grey room” today.Burroughs…
Techniques of the Nation
A little more than ten years ago, Marcel Fournier and Jean Terrier, two scholars with long experience of Marcel Mauss's work, completed an annotated edition of La Nation, a book Mauss left unpublished and even unfinished during his lifetime.1 The present Grey Room dossier starts with the translation, by Jasmine C. Pisapia and Nicholas Elliott, of two excerpts of this volume, until now unavailable in English. Mauss's impact on the history of the h…
Ethnopsychology in the Bismarck Archipelago
Between 1906 and 1909, the Austrian-born German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald undertook an expedition to Germany's Pacific colonies on behalf of the Berlin Museum for Ethnology. There he carried out a series of experimental psychological tests to investigate the mentalities and intelligence of Melanesian subjects. Due to the limitations on verbal communication, Thurnwald privileged non-verbal experiments, especially involving drawings made by …
Before Mnemosyne
Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne , left unfinished in 1929, has attracted significant interest in recent decades. This essay offers a new interpretation of Warburg's “picture atlas,” not in relation to modernist collage and photomontage, but as an heir to scientific pedagogical exhibitions of the late Wilhelmine period. It deals in particular with two “public enlightenment” shows curated by the Leipzig medical historian Karl Sudhoff, whose wor…
Biotechnics and politics
This article presents a new perspective on the intersection of technology, biology, and politics in modern Germany by examining the history of biotechnics, a nonanthropocentric concept of technology that was developed in German-speaking Europe from the 1870s to the 1930s. Biotechnics challenged the traditional view of technology as exclusively a human creation, arguing that nature itself could also be a source of technical innovations. Our study …
The Reflex Republic
In the immediate wake of the Russian Revolution, Pavlovian reflex conditioning was rapidly elevated to a universal materialist model for understanding and manipulating human behavior, including the production and reception of art. This article explores the little-known history of the "reflexology of art," a movement that applied physiological concepts and techniques to drama, cinema, and literature with the aim of molding atomized individual subj…
The origins of art around 1900
Seductio ad Absurdum
Seductio ad Absurdum Matthew Rampley, The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 189 pp., ISBN: 9780271061580, $34.95. Matthew Vollgraff Matthew Vollgraff [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 43, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 152–155, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcz030 Published…
Vegetal Gestures
September 01 2018 Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany Matthew Vollgraff Matthew Vollgraff Matthew Vollgraff is a doctoral candidate in the Department of German at Princeton University. He is currently completing a dissertation on Ausdruckskunde, the early-twentieth-century “science of expression” that explored gesture as a medium of aesthetic, biological, and psychological knowledge. Search for other works by this…
Postscript. Intersecting lines
The Archive and the Labyrinth
The indexicality of photography has by now become a theoretical common-place: The photographic image presents us with the punctual index of a given "scene" at a specific moment. That scene is situated in an irretrievable past, its referents irrevocably displaced in time and space; indeed, the indexical image points ineluctably to something no longer extant
Afterword
In 1970, the jurist, ex-Nazi, and perennial cause célèbre Carl Schmitt was interviewed about his relationship to Hugo Ball. "Hugo Ball," he reflected, "encountered a kind of brother in me. We both came from very Catholic families; and then we were dragged into the Wilhelmine age and had to see how we'd find our place. Each of us achieved this in our own way. This is how I explain the otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm of his essay." The essay in q…
Biotechnics and politics
This article presents a new perspective on the intersection of technology, biology, and politics in modern Germany by examining the history of biotechnics, a nonanthropocentric concept of technology that was developed in German-speaking Europe from the 1870s to the 1930s. Biotechnics challenged the traditional view of technology as exclusively a human creation, arguing that nature itself could also be a source of technical innovations. Our study …
Ethnopsychology in the Bismarck Archipelago
Between 1906 and 1909, the Austrian-born German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald undertook an expedition to Germany's Pacific colonies on behalf of the Berlin Museum for Ethnology. There he carried out a series of experimental psychological tests to investigate the mentalities and intelligence of Melanesian subjects. Due to the limitations on verbal communication, Thurnwald privileged non-verbal experiments, especially involving drawings made by …
The Archive and the Labyrinth
The indexicality of photography has by now become a theoretical common-place: The photographic image presents us with the punctual index of a given "scene" at a specific moment. That scene is situated in an irretrievable past, its referents irrevocably displaced in time and space; indeed, the indexical image points ineluctably to something no longer extant
Afterword
In 1970, the jurist, ex-Nazi, and perennial cause célèbre Carl Schmitt was interviewed about his relationship to Hugo Ball. "Hugo Ball," he reflected, "encountered a kind of brother in me. We both came from very Catholic families; and then we were dragged into the Wilhelmine age and had to see how we'd find our place. Each of us achieved this in our own way. This is how I explain the otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm of his essay." The essay in q…
The Archive and the Labyrinth
The indexicality of photography has by now become a theoretical common-place: The photographic image presents us with the punctual index of a given "scene" at a specific moment. That scene is situated in an irretrievable past, its referents irrevocably displaced in time and space; indeed, the indexical image points ineluctably to something no longer extant
Postscript. Intersecting lines
Vegetal Gestures
September 01 2018 Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany Matthew Vollgraff Matthew Vollgraff Matthew Vollgraff is a doctoral candidate in the Department of German at Princeton University. He is currently completing a dissertation on Ausdruckskunde, the early-twentieth-century “science of expression” that explored gesture as a medium of aesthetic, biological, and psychological knowledge. Search for other works by this…
Seductio ad Absurdum
Seductio ad Absurdum Matthew Rampley, The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 189 pp., ISBN: 9780271061580, $34.95. Matthew Vollgraff Matthew Vollgraff [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 43, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 152–155, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcz030 Published…
The origins of art around 1900
Ethnopsychology in the Bismarck Archipelago
Between 1906 and 1909, the Austrian-born German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald undertook an expedition to Germany's Pacific colonies on behalf of the Berlin Museum for Ethnology. There he carried out a series of experimental psychological tests to investigate the mentalities and intelligence of Melanesian subjects. Due to the limitations on verbal communication, Thurnwald privileged non-verbal experiments, especially involving drawings made by …
Before Mnemosyne
Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne , left unfinished in 1929, has attracted significant interest in recent decades. This essay offers a new interpretation of Warburg's “picture atlas,” not in relation to modernist collage and photomontage, but as an heir to scientific pedagogical exhibitions of the late Wilhelmine period. It deals in particular with two “public enlightenment” shows curated by the Leipzig medical historian Karl Sudhoff, whose wor…
Biotechnics and politics
This article presents a new perspective on the intersection of technology, biology, and politics in modern Germany by examining the history of biotechnics, a nonanthropocentric concept of technology that was developed in German-speaking Europe from the 1870s to the 1930s. Biotechnics challenged the traditional view of technology as exclusively a human creation, arguing that nature itself could also be a source of technical innovations. Our study …
The Reflex Republic
In the immediate wake of the Russian Revolution, Pavlovian reflex conditioning was rapidly elevated to a universal materialist model for understanding and manipulating human behavior, including the production and reception of art. This article explores the little-known history of the "reflexology of art," a movement that applied physiological concepts and techniques to drama, cinema, and literature with the aim of molding atomized individual subj…
Why Grey Room
Photo falling—Word falling—Break through in grey room—Towers, open fireWhen Branden Joseph, Reinhold Martin, and Felicity Scott founded Grey Room twenty-five years ago, they borrowed its title from a passage in William S. Burroughs's novel The Ticket That Exploded (1962). As a new editorial group takes the helm, we revisit this foundational part of the journal's identity to think about what it means to “break through in grey room” today.Burroughs…
Techniques of the Nation
A little more than ten years ago, Marcel Fournier and Jean Terrier, two scholars with long experience of Marcel Mauss's work, completed an annotated edition of La Nation, a book Mauss left unpublished and even unfinished during his lifetime.1 The present Grey Room dossier starts with the translation, by Jasmine C. Pisapia and Nicholas Elliott, of two excerpts of this volume, until now unavailable in English. Mauss's impact on the history of the h…
Art (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · German (3 works) · History (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Library science (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works)