PhD abstract
 post-doctoral research
 Jan van Eyck Academie
 conferences
 publications
 curriculum vitae

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Introduction

The principal theme of my research is how drawing mediates knowledge. This study is necessarily interdisciplinary, because art is not the only practice to have claimed drawing as fundamental. Although my 'home territory' is the interpretation of art works, I also find my topics in the fields of architecture, astronomy, mathematics, cartography and engineering.

My historical focus is the twentieth century. My PhD study Structural Constellations, on the drawings of Josef Albers (1888–1976), examined key aspects of modernism, its prehistory and its legacy — in particular, the historical entanglement of art and geometry — for a reasssesment of the European avant-gardes of the interwar years and of the 'late modernist' period in the United States after 1945. My topics include: The teaching and application of technical drawing in the nineteenth century and its legacy in modernist discourse, The early reception of Cubism, Lissitzky's Constructor, van Doesburg's Nouvelle Dimension, Albers's Structural Constellations.

My methodologies have been elaborated in close connection with concrete studies. I traced the modalities of the term Konstellation in the historical-philosophical work and personal writings of Benjamin and Adorno and its role in their epistemologies. I use the notion of constellation reflexively in my work. In my study 'The Semiotics of Star Maps', I advanced an interpretation of Peirce’s semiotics (specifically, reconciling ‘reagents’ and ‘designators’ in Peirce’s notion of ‘indexical’ signs and resolving indexical functions and processes).This study provided valuable tools for analysing 'mapping figures' such as projection and the grid when they appear in art works.

Please use the links on the left to view a synopsis of my PhD dissertation, an outline of my current research, conferences and publications. You can also download my dissertation (not including the catalogue of drawings by Albers) or extracts from it. My CV is also available.

Anthony Auerbach

Anthony Auerbach is currently Researcher in the Theory Department of Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands.