Lecture by Jérémie Koering

Jérémie Koering

A hunger for pictures
Lecture in French

We are used to thinking about images through the prism of their visibility, and of course there are good reasons for doing so. But what happens when the image, through its materiality, its social functions and its artistic stakes, appeals to other senses? What happens when sight gives way to touch or taste, and the figurative artefact is no longer just looked at but drunk, eaten or ingested? What logic governs their consumption? And on what occasions do we gorge ourselves on them?
These are just some of the questions that will help us to understand why it is possible to ingest a magic seal, a medieval waffle, a Renaissance engraving or a work by Piero Manzoni, Dennis Oppenheim or John Cage, rather than just contemplating them.

Jérémie Koering is Professor of the History of Modern Art at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). His work focuses on the political (Le Prince en représentation, ed. Actes Sud, 2013) and poetic (Léonard de Vinci. Dessins et peintures, Hazan éditions, 2007; with S. J. Campbell, Andrea Mantegna, Making Art History, Wiley-Blackwell éd., 2014; Caravaggio, juste un détail, INHA ed., 2018), and on the historical anthropology of images (Les Iconophages. Une histoire de l'ingestion des images, Actes Sud ed., 2021/Zone Books, 2024).
Jérémie Koering is also interested in the history of art history. His current research focuses on the metaphors of the artistic process during the Renaissance, Velázquez's Meninas (Une occasion royale, Actes Sud ed., 2023) and drawing as an epistemological tool in art history (Meyer Schapiro, Hubert Damisch, Louis Marin, Leo Steinberg).

This programme of lectures is a co-production of UCArts - Direction de la Culture d'Université Côte d'Azur and the National Museums of the 20th Century in the Alpes-Maritimes. The six conferences are organised in partnership with the Association of the Friends of the Marc Chagall national Museum. 

The programme has been put together by the museum in collaboration with Josiane Rieu, professor of 16th-century French literature at the Université Côte d'Azur and member of the CTEL, Centre Transdisciplinaires d'Epistémologie de la Littérature et des Arts Vivants. 

To find out more about our conferences programme for the 2023-24 season

Jérémie Koering. Portrait : © Isolde Pludermacher, 2023