Kristine Nielsen
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Associate Professor of Art History, Illinois Wesleyan University
Disobedience in Sámi Artist Marja Helander's Film Birds in the Earth
Art, Technology and Nature: Renaissance to Postmodernity
Routledge, 2015
A book anthology in the series Science and the Arts since 1750, edited by Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Warmberg, based on an International Conference held at the National Gallery of Denmark, focuses on the merging of art, nature, and technology. My chapter, "A Perfectly Nebulous Experiment: C.T.R. Wilson's Cloud Chamber," argues that Wilson's early scientific project was thoroughly mimetic in nature, based on his aesthetic and idiosyncratic worldview.
Periskop 15 (2012)
This issue of the art history journal Periskop, thematizes image wars (billedstrid). My article, in Danish, "Wit as a Political Weapon," considers the ways that wit (satire, parody) serves as a verbal and visual tool at moments of political and aesthetic confrontation.
Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture
Rodopi, 2011
This book anthology, edited by Elaine Kelly and Amy Wlodarski, explores new research on the cultures of the GDR. My own chapter, "Quid pro Quo: Assessing the Value of the Thälmann Monument," argues for a new perspective on the GDR monument, seeing it as a participant in the social exchange of a gift given by the leadership and both accepted and rejected by its citizens.
Passepartout 32 (2011)
An issue of the art history journal Passepartout concerned with the art history of three dimensionality: "3D/monumentskulpturobjektinstallation." My article, "Reframing the Workers' Militia Monument in Post-Unification Berlin," explores the artistic techniques of deconstruction, alienation, and detachment exercised on an unwanted monument, dismantled in Berlin after 1990.
Totalitarian Art and Modernity
Aarhus University Press, 2010
Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg, this book anthology
examines political art of past dictatorships often historically labeled 'totalitarian'. My chapter, “What Ever Happened to Ernst Barlach? East German Political Monuments and the Art of Resistance,” contends that current art historiography is in the process of reframing East German art, often questionably, as an art of resistance. The history of East German art is being rewritten as subversive art.
Visuel Kultur - viden, liv, politik
Multivers, 2009
This major anthology (Visual Culture - Knowledge, Life, Politics), edited by Hans Dam Christensen and Helene Illeris, investigates contemporary visual cultures. My chapter in Danish, "Political Iconoclasm and Idolatry in Contemporary Visual Culture," demonstrates how the two concepts of iconoclasm and idolatry remain thoroughly embedded in our contemporary world.
Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture
Volume 9, no. 1 (2016)
Monumental Attack: The Visual Tools of the German Counter-Monument in Two Works by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, and Horst Hoheisel
Author: Kristine Nielsen
pp.: 122–139
Sehepunkte
Volume 15, no. 6 (2015)
Book Review of Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin by Emily Pugh, Sehepunkte 15 (2015), No. 6. The review also appears in Kunstform 15 (2015), No. 6.
Ekfrase: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture
Volume 1 (2010): 72-73.
Book Review in Danish of Theories of Memory: A Reader edited by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead.
Is Art History Global?
Volume 3: The Art Seminar (2007)
Translation of Hans Dam Christensen's “Which Art History?” in Is Art History Global? Volume 3 of The Art Seminar, edited by James Elkins. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. 298-309.
Teaching
Courses I have taught in recent years:
World Art after 1989
The process of globalization since 1989 has radically shifted the focus away from the eurocentricity of a Western culture defined by North America and western Europe, and toward the so-called margins of culture, Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America. Moreover, the Internet, which emerged with financial support in the 1980s and 1990s, continues to provide new networking technologies and worldwide access to information, fundamentally changing our knowledge foundations. The collapse of the Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War brought about global transformations in institutions of power and finance, as well as greater proximity between the developing world and the West in terms of health and prosperity. These geographical, technological, socio-historical, and economic conditions have thoroughly changed the nature of contemporary art and graphic design.
Thus, this seminar will examine the impact of globalization on the work of contemporary praxis. First and foremost, we will consider the pertinent theories and strategies emerging as part of a globalizing effect through the use of new media, concepts of place, postcolonialism’s impact on art, and the dissemination of images and language. We will look at numerous contemporary artists, active between 1989 and the present, and major world exhibitions and biennales. Our objective is to gain an awareness of the basis on which we conceptualize and appreciate contemporary art today in a global context: Does the art’s location determine our response? Does globalization result in a culture of standardization or does it produce, instead, the fragmentation of multiple local cultures?
Iconoclasm and the Monstrous
This seminar explores the destruction and production of art via the main theoretical issues at stake in the iconoclastic gesture, considering also why these issues might matter for us today. Cases explored will come from a range of historical eras and cultural regions—icons in Byzantium, the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation, colonial idolatry, European notions of African fetishism, Revolutions—French, Mexican, Post-communist—and their storming of pictures, the avant-garde, modern and contemporary art as iconoclasm. We will examine the ideas surrounding the crucial theological as well as secular terms pertinent to any study of iconoclasm and relate these to art and art history. The terms include idolatry, icon/idol, fetishism, censorship, aura, the other, im/materiality, transcendence, transubstantiation, as well as the monstrosity of images. Key questions framing the course material include: What are the psychological and social aspects at stake in breaking an image? Why is the problem of an image’s materiality and immateriality at the heart of iconoclasm? What role does the imagined ‘animate’ object perform? Why is iconoclasm impossible without an idolater? How do politics, ethics and justice play a part in attacks on art? When do critique, deconstruction and judgment become iconoclastic, and why is violence seemingly the preferred way to neutralize the monstrous idol? Students will write a substantial research paper based on individually developed and original research questions.
Visual Literacy
Images are central to our life, but do we know how to critically read them? Being visually literate means understanding how visual content communicates effectively. This colloquium will explore the ways one can decode the underlying ideas of image producers and consider the nature of perception and visuality, our culturally and historically determined ways of seeing. The course will develop skills in writing and articulating the visual academically, including thinking of images as documents, visual evidence, and even as “arguments.” Students will gain knowledge in ascertaining how the visual serves aesthetic, cognitive, perceptual, and ideological purposes, through extensive writing about images and discussion on visual culture.
Cold War Art & Media Cultures
The course explores the ideas and concerns of the cold war era, 1945-1992, through visual and media cultures. We will examine the visual arts of East and West, media theories, and cultural-political events across borders and in an international context. Topics include the politics of abstraction and figuration, television and suburbia, fashion and fear, utopian projects, revolution and protest, the 1955 Family of Man exhibit and the first western German Documenta exhibit of the same year, the Berlin Wall, official and unofficial Soviet art, and Eames’ multimedia architecture. How were cold war ideas, hopes, goals, fears, and concerns mediated into visible form?
Aesthetics and Politics
The graduate seminar explores seminal texts by German social theorists and philosophers writing on art, media, mass culture and politics in the early twentieth century. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and other left-wing intellectuals sought to put theories into practice with the aim of transforming society and liberating it from oppressive political systems. These theorists writing before, during and after the political turmoil of mid-20th century Europe created a significant social role for aesthetics. Their cross-disciplinary research involved all dimensions of culture, including literature, music, the visual arts, and mass media. In the 1920s and 30s, Kracauer and Benjamin examined photography, film, and the role of images in ways that linked the social focus of the Frankfurt School with the cultural focus of the Hamburg School (Warburg Institute). Marxist ideas on the role of art and its relationship to culture diverged into distinct avenues, especially in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. The seminar is primarily a reading course designed to familiarize us with some of the most important early texts. But it will also draw on later European theorists, such as Peter Bürger and Jacques Rancière, only tangentially drawing on the ideas of the Frankfurt School but fundamentally concerned with the politics of aesthetics.
History, Memory and Monuments in 20th Europe
This seminar explores history and cultural memory through a focus on visual documents. Using monuments and memorials in modern Europe—primarily in France and Germany—as our key points of reference, the course investigates recent ideas about collective memory and cultural identity as they relate to cultural history. It will draw its primary examples from visual media (art, film, public statues) as well as politics, place and landscape, and consider also the counter-monument and the post-national, the destruction and preservation of monuments, the commemoration of war victims as well as the cinematic representations of the Holocaust. It will question how current and past memorials and other visual documents relate to the concept of memory, while investigating the stakes involved culturally, politically and ethically in these media in the service of official public remembrance and forgetting.
Global Contemporary Art
Global Contemporary Art takes as its starting point art after World War II, during the era of the Cold War and processes of decolonization. Through critical essays, films, class lectures and discussion, the course will investigate postwar art’s conceptually and spatially expanding and contested arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. The course will focus thematically on the significance of gender, body, and subject positions in the art of the 1970s and 1980s, postmodern art appropriations, the cultural impact of the collapse of communism in 1989-90, institutional critiques in and of the art museum, the effect of transnationalism in a changing art world increasingly centered on the former peripheries of Asia, Africa, and South America and arguably further differentiated from modern art by technical transformations that question what constitutes an artistic medium.
Global Modern Art
The course surveys major developments in global modernisms from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Key topics include the artistic responses to two World Wars, European Imperialism and colonialism, the development of artistic trends and new technologies, the rise of avant-gardism and how postcolonial artists respond to European modernism by creating their own.
Art & Theory
What does it mean to approach a work of art theoretically, and what form might such a theory take? What problems could arise in “speaking on behalf” of an art object? This Writing-Intensive and research-focused seminar introduces students to some of the major methodological approaches to the visual arts in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These frameworks include social, semiotic, feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, which often serve as the conceptual tools of contemporary artists, designers, industry specialists, curators and art historians. Students will write a major research paper and be responsible for short presentations.
Introduction to Art History
Introduction to Art History seeks to develop skills in perception and comprehension when dealing with a variety of visual art forms. Students will explore the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given artwork and examine the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study of art. The course objective is to study select works of art in a global context and examine a chronology of historical eras and events. Through this study, the goal is develop an understanding of art as a visual language and effectively translate that understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written.
Nineteenth Century Art
This course explores European art from 1750 to the turn of the century, focusing on artistic transformations in relation to the intellectual, scientific, industrial, social, and political revolutions of the time—that is, the key events in the formation and history of modern European art. How were ideas about romance, love, nation, nationalism, empire, colonialism, class, family, education, religion, country and city expressed in visual terms and artistic styles such as Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, Realism and Impressionism, Symbolism and Primitivism? How did modernity materialize visually among artists such as David and Géricault, Cassatt and Cézanne, Carpeaux and Rodin? The objectives of the course are to provide an overview of European art from the Enlightenment to the Industrial age and to develop skills in description and interpretation, presentation, argument and writing.
Visual Cultures of 'Totalitarianism'
This undergraduate seminar seeks to investigate "totalitarianism" as a contested term and understand its application in historical texts and current scholarship. Focusing on officially sanctioned visual cultural projects the course will explore theories of propaganda and dictatorship as they pertain to the cultures of the Third Reich and German Democratic Republic. It will stress the ways in which these two regimes, relying on the promise of technology and mass politics, used visual productions, art and media, as tools of seduction. The course takes its primary examples from painting, sculpture, architecture, posters, photography, and film, as well as collective experiences that emphasize presence, such as sports events, inaugural ceremonies for public monuments, speeches, marches, and art exhibitions. Course topics include the role of terror, the importance of a cult leader, the depiction of the male hero in Nazism and Stalinism, and the reception and resistance to these models. Key questions framing the course material concern, then, the idea of governing through images and society in toto: How did the regimes attempt to portray complete subservience to the system? What is the relationship between form and content in transmitting a controlled message? And, finally, how might we reframe the concept of totalitarianism today?
Editorial board member
Ekfrase: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture is a leading scientific journal for studies of visual culture and aesthetic expression in the Nordic countries, presenting interdisciplinary research from visual and intermedial disciplines within the arts and media fields. It publishes articles in Danish, English, Norwegian, and Swedish. The target audience is researchers, teachers, and students within all aesthetic disciplines at Nordic places of study, specialist and research libraries, and other relevant institutions. The journal is owned by the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen and is published with financial support from the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils, the Nordic Publishing Committee for Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Nomadikon Project.
Referee
2009-present
I serve regularly as a referee for journals and book anthologies, most recently for Sehepunkte and the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.
Academic positions
Associate Professor of Art History
2018-present
Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois
Sabbatical, 2018-2019
Assistant Professor of Art History
2012-2018
Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois
Tenure-track appointment in the Joyce Eichhorn Ames School of Art. I teach courses in modern and contemporary art, the senior seminar, introductory-level courses, and seminars in my areas of specialization. I was selected for the IWU Faculty Colloquium Speaker Series, 2015-16, and presented a chapter from my book manuscript, “Division and Unity: Cold War Memorials in East and West Berlin.” Fall 2014, I participated in the interdisciplinary symposium, organized by IWU's International Studies program and sponsored by a Re-Centering the Humanities Mellon grant, "The Freedom to Speak, Create and Dream."
Mellon Humanities Fellow, 2015-1016
Junior Faculty Leave, Spring 2015
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities
2010-2012
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH)
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
The position included an appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the School of Art and Design. During my fellowship, I co-organized together with Dianne Harris and Christine Catanzarite, the interdisciplinary symposium, "Memory and the Visual," sponsored by the IPRH.
In 2011, I received a grant from the Getty Research Institute and was a Fellow in the Stone Summer Theory Institute's workshop on Farewell to Visual Studies. The book is edited by James Elkins, Gustav Frank, and Sunil Manghani and based on the workshop.
