Today, the term lecture performance is used inflationary in the visual arts for lectures by artists who deal with a certain topic or question and thus recall a classic scientific lecture. What lecture performances have in common is that they are designed and staged as a performance, as an ephemeral event, in front of an audience and they address themselves to a public. The address to the public is immediate but cannot be viewed as more relevant per se compared to the performative elements. In the lecture performance, process meets the moment of a performance, a (targeted) action that is connected to a lecture; both can merge in a joint sequence, or clearly be delimited from each other.

The attempt to classify and thus also to differentiate the lecture performance from other types of lecture (e.g. spoken word performance), as an independent genre in the visual arts, is the concern of my doctoral project, which is based on the three leads - the act of speaking, the performance at the moment of its staging and the cultural-historical context of the format. The doctoral project is intended as a framework analysis that does not want to look at lecture performances in isolation but wants to critically question the contexts in which they are discussed and performed. What relevance and role do lecture performances have in the visual arts? How are ideas for the production and transfer of knowledge and evidence negotiated in lecture performances, how are rhetorical means used? Can the act of speaking be understood as a political act? Lecture performances can not only be described as a variety of visual arts, but also renegotiate the relationships between art and science or teaching and show interfaces between different disciplines, including applied theater studies.

Tutor

• Prof. Dr. Christian Janecke