Max Imdahl and His ‘Ikonik’

Abstract

Max Imdahl is situated on the border between the theory and practice of visual arts. His life is an experience of combining academic art history with cutting-edge art criticism. His ‘ikonik’ was intended as a continuation and completion of the methodological development of art history from iconography to iconology. Instead of the hermeneutics of the immanent meaning of an artwork, the semantics of an act of vision becomes the object of his interpretation, and criticism of cognitive capacities of language as a means of articulating artistic experience becomes his purpose. Imdahl juxtaposes his ‘ikonik’ as a theologised variant of receptive aesthetics with Hans Sedlmayr’s structural analysis. For Imdahl, Sedlmayr falls under suspicion for his all too static picture of the semantic element of an artwork, which, according to Sedlmayr, is divided into layers of meaning, unified by a single irrational (“endothymic”) basis. By contrast, ‘ikonik’ refers to the semantics emerging as simultaneous affects of the act of vision, which embraces dynamic oppositions of meaning, having a scenographic and choreographic character. Thus, the interaction with an artwork is equated to a performative act, which ensures the apophatic growth of meaning and the approach to the Revelation. The tropological decomposition of the structures of the contemplative mind (Sedlmayr) is continued by the eschatological deconstruction of the verbal discourse in the form of art history (Imdahl).