Lecture: Richard Weihe: The Face and Its Double – Aspects of the Mask

For the Romans, persona was an actor’s “mask” or “role”. In the alternating of entrance and exit, of being observed (onstage) and being unobserved (offstage), persona is a protected playing field in which the actor puts himself on display for an audience. The actor’s confrontation with the audience, the conscious exposing-oneself-to-the-other, is the crucial criteria of the theater. Only the theater? The mask can serve as a kind of mind map to consider fundamental termini like individuality and identity in the area of tension between philosophical conceptualism and cultural practice. We run up against the paradox that a person needs others to become identical to himself; to bring the face and its double under cover.

Richard Weihe’s “lecture performance” considers itself an interplay between discourse and representation. Hans Belting concludes the evening by illuminating scientific/visual aspects of person(a).

Richard Weihe is a lecturer at the University of Witten/Herdeck and works as a freelance author and translator. In the last winter semester, he was a senior fellow at the IFK in Vienna; in 2006/7 he was an art, science & business fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. His Die Paradoxie der Maske. Die Geschichte einer Form (The Paradox of the Mask. The History of a Form) explores the cultural history of the mask (2004).

Hans Belting is considered one of visual media science’s founders. Until recently he was the director of the IFK in Vienna; prior to this he was a professor for Artistic Science and Media Theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. His most recent publications are Das echte Bild. Bildfragen und Glaubensfragen (The Real Image: Questions of Pictures and Belief) (2005) and Bildfragen. Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch (Questions of Images: The Sciences of Visual Media in Transition) (2007).

With actors Tobias Graupner and Sarah Kempin.

The art, science & business program was made possible with the financial support of the Baden-Württemberg State Foundation, the City of Stuttgart as well as LBBW Foundation for Art and Culture.