Painted Poison. Painting as ‘Pharmakon’.
Lecture from Prof. Dr. Karin Leonhard, Art Science at the University of Konstanz as part of the lecture series Material transports content.
The lecture will be held in german.
In this talk, I will investigate the idea of “painting as pharmakon”, concentrating on some aspects of the complex relationship between painting, toxology, and pharmacology. This immediately brings into play other contexts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which poisons and their remedies were used - such as herpetology, herbology, or gemology -, thus mapping onto ways of ‘acting’ or ‘affecting’ the healing or damaging properties of natural substances both in medicine and in art. Such notions will also touch upon the ambivalent qualifications of what Derrida calls a “god-doctor-pharmacist-magician” (and I will add: -artist) who finds his place in the in-between, or dialectics, of life and death.