Description
Volker Renner’s Der Grosse Preis (2013) is an artist’s book that reimagines cultural and collective memory experience of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) through the material and conceptual strategies of the book form. The ESC, a song contest held annually between mostly European nations, has become a widely studied cultural phenomenon (Dubin, Vuletic and Obregón 2022) since it first took place in 1956. Renner delves into this phenomenon in his work, an artist’s book containing photographs taken during the 56th ESC in 2011, which was held in Düsseldorf, Germany. This work deviates from usual depictions of the event; instead of centring the stage, Der Grosse Preis illustrates only the performers’ outstretched hands, cropping everything beyond these peripheral gestures out of each picture.I argue that these peripheral hand gestures function as visualisations of cultural memory (Assmann 1995, 130) within the context of the ESC. Through the omission of the performances’ identifying features, Renner’s work engages the ESC as a recurring cultural ritual, “a study in contradictions” (Raykoff 2007, 2) that continuously invokes and reinvents the past (Lewis and Hajek 2022, 69). As such, the isolation of gestures acts as a depiction of how rituals serve to maintain the ESC’s “self-image” (Assmann 1995, 132) as an event that reflects Europe’s culture, society and politics (Dubin, Vuletic and Obregón 2022; Raykoff and Tobin 2007). Methodologically, I examine the narrative of the work through resemblance (McBride 2016), a practice of recognising and contextualising visual materials, like photographs. Ultimately, I consider Der Grosse Preis as an object that reinterprets the spectacle of the ESC, visually evoking the sound of the contest through the practice of cultural memory, within the medium of the artist’s book.
| Period | 22 Apr 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Music, Sound and Memory: A Transdisciplinary Conference in Music, Sound, and Literary Studies, International Conference |
| Event type | Conference |