Mechtild Widrich

Department Chair, Art History, Theory, and Criticism

Educated at the Art History Institute at University of Vienna (Mag.Phil.), and the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism), I held positions at the University of Basel, the ETH Zurich and at the Universities of Vienna and Zurich, before joining SAIC in 2015.

Concurrent Positions:
I am an Affiliate Scholar at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame for 2023-25; I taught as Guest Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (fall 2023) and at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (spring 2022).

I work on the intersection of contemporary art and architecture: I research and teach on art in public space and the question of the public sphere (in particular contemporary monuments), on performance art and its mediation, and on aesthetic theory. I am interested in the power and means of representation, in the broader institutional and political context of artistic production, in spatial dynamics and site-specificity, and in issues of "authentic" and "bodily" experience under mediated conditions. Another interest is theory, in particular beauty and ugliness. I currently work on several projects, the most recent one on the late 19th century discourse around ethnicity and difference in vernacular architecture.

2022-23 University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; 2018 University of Chicago Hong Kong Center; 2018 SAIC Literary Lions Award for Art Historical Research; 2016 NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. I am also the recipient of fellowships from the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Fulbright Foundation, and several fellowships from MIT.

Most publications can be downloaded from my academia.edu page, and here is only a selection.
 

Books

• Monumental Cares. Sites of History and Contemporary Art. Manchester University Press, series: "Rethinking Art's Histories," winter 2023
• Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Manchester University Press, series: "Rethinking Art's Histories," 2014
• Presence (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016, editor, with Philip Ursprung and Jürg Berthold, and contributor)
• Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Interaction and Occupation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), editor, with Martino Stierli, and contributor
• Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, editor, with Andrei Pop)
• Krzysztof Wodiczko, A 9/11 Memorial (London: Black Dog, 2009, editor, with Mark Jarzombek)
• Wien II. Leopoldstadt. Die andere Heimatkunde (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1999, editor, with Werner Hanak)

Translations

Translation of Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen [1853; Aesthetics of Ugliness] (under contract with Bloomsbury, London, 2015, paperback 2017, with Andrei Pop).

Texts in Scholarly Periodicals (selection)

• From Rags to Monuments: Ana Lupaş’s Humid Installation, Art Margins Online (January 2022)
• “Monumentos, Experienca y Memoria,” Arcadia (September 2020)
• Future Anterior, Ex Situ. On Moving Monuments (vol. 15, no.2), co-editor and author “Moving Monuments in the Age of Social Media”
• "The Naked Museum: Art, Urbanism, and Global Positioning in Singapore" (Art Journal, vol. 75, no. 2, summer 2016), 47–65
• "The Willed and the Unwilled Monument. Judenplatz Vienna and Riegl's Denkmalpflege," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH), Vol. 72, No. 3 (Sept. 2013), 382–98
• "The Informative Public of Performance: A Study of Viennese Actionism, 1965–1970," TDR. The Drama Review, No. 217 (February 2013), 137–51
• "Process and Authority: Marina Abramovi?'s Freeing the Horizon and Documentarity," Grey Room, No. 47 (May 2012), 80–97

I am active on several committees: in Chicago on the Grant Park Advisory Council on Art, Monuments, Markers; in Austria I am part of the Board of Directors of the American Friends of the Vienna Museums, and I serve on the Academic Advisory Board of the Jewish Museum Vienna. I am on the editorial boards of the following academic journals: Future Anterior (US), Cadernos de Arte Pública (Portugal), Vesper. Journal for Architecture, Arts and Theory (Italy), and Život umjetnosti (Croatia). From 2019 to 2022, I served as board member and reviews editor for Art Journal (US).