Dr Jenny Nachtigall

Research

Research THEMES

19th and 20th century European art and architecture in its global contexts, German interwar art and visual culture, aesthetics and the historiography of art, theories of form and formalism, feminist and historical materialisms, life-making and the vitalist imagination, ecology, contemporary art

RESEARCH SUMMARY

Jenny’s research has focussed on revisiting Western European narratives of modern art and its histories. This interest has taken her to follow some of the side tracks, detours and sometimes less palatable routes of European art and aesthetics. Her forthcoming book Form as Contradiction (Brill Publishing) takes the presumed failures of the lose group of artists and writers gathered under the label of “Berlin Dada” as a starting point for narrating a dissident history of formalisms in interwar Europe that sits squarely within received accounts of the period.

Jenny’s most recent research is on artists’, architects’ and philosophers’ peculiar obsession with a vitalist aesthetics of organic processes, biological images and ecological models, which in the first decades of the 20th century cut across a broad spectrum of revolutionary as well as right-wing positions. She works towards a critical history of this contradictory and largely misunderstood episode of art history and aesthetics c. 1900-1950, aiming to further historicize current debates on ecology from the perspectives of the arts of modernity. She is especially interested in the wayward vitalisms that proliferated in aesthetic practices at the margins or outside of scientific discourse across the globe – in radical pedagogies, socialist and feminist internationalisms, and transnational networks of solidarity and friendship. 

Further research interests include feminist and materialist methods in art history, aesthetics and contemporary art. Jenny has written on post-war and contemporary artists for various exhibition catalogues, including essays on Rosemary Mayer, Senga Nengudi, Tetsumi Kudo, Jutta Koether and Jacqueline Humphries a.o. Her criticism has appeared in Artforum, art-agenda, frieze and Texte zur Kunst.

Research activities also include her work as curatorial assistant at Tate Modern and as scientific advisor to the exhibition and publication project Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (House of World Cultures Berlin, curated by Anselm Franke and Tom Holert). Together with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Stakemeier and Stephanie Weber, Jenny initiated the exhibition and publication project Class Languages. With Dorothea Walzer she organised art and reproduction. 

Selected Publications

BOOKS & EDITED VOLUMES

Form as Contradiction (Brill Publishing, forthcoming).
Hybrid Ecologies/ Hybride Ökologien, ed. with Marietta Kesting, Maria Muhle, Susanne Witzgall (Berlin/ Zurich: Diaphanes, 2019 ) (German and English)
Discrimination / Diskriminierung: special issue, Texte zur Kunst, vol. 113 (March 2019), Co-editor
Class Languages/ Klassensprachen – Written Praxis, ed. with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Stakemeier and Stephanie Weber (Berlin: Archive Books, 2017).

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES & CHAPTERS

“Get Rid of Your Self: Lu Märten’s Monist Art History”, in Illiberal Arts, ed. Anselm Franke, Kerstin Stakemeier (Berlin: Polypen/b-books, 2021).
“Manieristische Historiographie: Kunstgeschichte und Kritische Theorie“, in Kunst um 1800. Ausstellen als wissenschaftliche Praxis, ed. Petra Lange-Berndt, Isabelle Lindermann, Dietmar Rübel, (forthcoming).
“Art Work as Life Work. On Lu Märten’s Feminist ‘Objectivity’” (with Kerstin Stakemeier), October, vol. 178 (Fall 2021). 
“Lu Märten. An Introduction” (with Kerstin Stakemeier), October, vol. 178 (Fall 2021). 
“Life”, Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, Vol. 21, Special issue: Keywords for Marxist Art History Today, ed. Andrew Hemingway, Larne Abse Gogart (Amsterdam: v&r unipress, 2020).
“Toxic Relations. Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents)”, in Hybrid Ecologies, (Berlin/ Zurich: Diaphanes, 2019).
“The Aesthetics of a Fractured Vitalism”, in Post-Apocalyptic Self-Reflection, ed. Tanja Widmann, Laure Preston (Vienna: Westphalie Verlag 2019).
“Vitalism/ Living Form” in Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930, ed. Anselm Franke, Tom Holert (Berlin/ Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018).
“Formalism”, in Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930, ed. Anselm Franke, Tom Holert (Berlin/ Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018).
 “Totality”, in Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930, ed. Anselm Franke, Tom Holert (Berlin/ Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018).
 “Realism after Fetishism, or What is the Realism that We Need in a Time of Catastrophe? On the Realism Debates of the 1930s and the 2010s”, in Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus, ed. Joseph Vogl, Veronika Thanner, Dorothea Walzer (Munich: Fink Verlag, 2017). 
“’’Psychoanalytic Cinema of Painting’: Notes on Berlin Dada, Psychoanalysis and Technique”, in Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, vol. 16, 2014.

CATALOGUE ESSAYS 

“Feminism without Conceptualism. On Rosemary Mayer’s Ways of Almost not Making Sculpture”, in Rosemary Mayer – Ways of Attaching, ed. Laura McLean-Ferris, Stephanie Weber, Lenbachhaus Munich, Swiss Institute New York, (forthcoming 2022).
“The Lawless Vitality of Sculpture, c. 1960-80. Formalism’s Monsters, Cybernetic Breakdowns and the Joys of Deviation”, in Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s, ed. Patrizia Dander, Museum Brandhorst Munich (Munich: DKV, 2022).
“Convulsively Beautiful Data”, in Jacqueline Humphries, ed. Johanna Burton, Mark Godfrey (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co, 2022).
“Painting as Deotur. Jutta Koether’s Late Work Gambits”, in Jutta Koether – Libertine, ed. Susanne Titz (Cologne: Koenig Books, 2020). 
 “On the Chronopolitics of Form, or the Blue Flower in the Land of Biotechnology”, in Christian Kosmas Mayer, ed. Rainer Fuchs, mumok Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, 2019. 
“The Rehearsal as Form: An Essay on Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers” (with Dorothea Walzer), Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics, ed. Sabeth Buchmann, Ilse Lafer, Constanze Ruhm (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).

Teaching and Supervision

Jenny currently teaches a variety of undergraduate modules, including “Planetary/Provincial: Modern Art and Architecture in its Global Context”,  “The Modern Arts of Living” and the “History of the Category ‘Art’”. 

She welcomes enquiries from potential postgraduate students keen to work on topics relating to modern and contemporary art and architecture in its global contexts, German interwar culture, questions of life and the living/dead, aesthetics or feminism and materialism. Prospective students should contact Jenny directly at: jenny.nachtigall@ucl.ac.uk. 

Biography

Jenny Nachtigall joined the department in 2022 as a Lecturer in Modernity and its Critical Histories. She was awarded her PhD in the History of Art at UCL in 2017. Prior to her appointment, she held visiting professorships in the history of art and aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the Städelschule Frankfurt, and the Goethe University Frankfurt. Jenny’s research and teaching were supported by the AHRC, the DAAD, the DFG Foundation, Etxepare Euskal Instiutua and VW Foundation a.o.