Article:

Über das Unsichtbare im Sichtbaren. Szenographische Visualisierungsstrategien und moderne Identitätskonstruktionen am Beispiel von Jeff Walls AFTER »INVISIBLE MAN« BY RALPH ELLISON, THE PROLOGUE

The discussion of Jeff Wall’s photo artwork AFTER »INVISIBLE MAN« BY RALPH ELLISON, THE PROLOGUE (2001) serves as an example for the main thesis that the definition and the constitution of modern man is not only determined by cur-rent discourses, practices and technologies of today’s natural sciences, but also by current cultural techniques such as the holistic scenographic visuali-zation and presentation skills of contemporary individuals. In modernity forms of identity are not only based fundamentally on the identification with social roles, but rather as well on traditional stereotypical images and cultur-ally free-floating visual codes. In an era of postcolonialism and globalization, as well as in a technologically networked and fully mediated world, these are no longer easily and clearly assigned. Instead they even lose more and more by their general media availability and free citability their former regime of classification. Nevertheless, images are still able to trigger effectively a marked visibility and fatal stereotypes by essentially contributing to process-es of the construction of identity and the constitution of the social ego in con-temporary societies.