Media Object: Atlas, collecting the world

[Under construction]

Introduction:

As a media object I choose the Atlas, more specifically the Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg. The atlas in its geographical context was created in the late 16th century by Gerardus Mercator. For years to come atlas's contained information about geography and cosmology. More categories were added in the 19th century, actually any information that could be systematically organized could be considered an Atlas by then. But I would like to consider an Atlas as a book of images and knowledge, or images as knowledge.

In his Bilderatlas Warburg sets to show how certain motifs of gestures and bodily expression reappeared through visual history (from Antiquity till his time). Art historian Warburg started assembling his Atlas in 1925. It consisted out of more than 60 panels and over 1000 images he left the project unfinished in 1929 when he passed away.

“The atlas as a publishing genre sprang from a desire to collect together images from one particular area of knowledge. It became clear from the work of Any Warburg, however, that these collections of images could just as easily have their roots in a dense web of thoughts, in a kind of non-systematic system out of which would emerge a complex fabric (or ‘text) woven out of various intellectual, spiritual and artistic phenomena.” (Didi-Huberman, p. 18)

"According to his aspirations as recorded in the diaries, the Mnemosyne Atlas sought to construct a model of the mnemonic in which Western European humanist thought would once more, perhaps for the last time, recognize its origins and trace its latent continuities into the present, ranging spatially across the confines of European humanist culture and situating itself temporally within the paramets of European history from classical antiquity to the present." (Buchloch, p. 14) 

"While according to Warburg collective social memory could be traced through the various layers of cultural transmission (his primary focus being the transformation of <<dynamograms>> transferred from classical antiquity to Renaissance painting, the reoccuring motif of gesture and bodily expression that he had identified in his notorious term as <<pathos formulas>>), Warburg more specifically argued that his attempt to construct collective historical memory would focus on the inextricable link betweeen the mnemomnic and the traumatic." (Buchloch, p.14).

"But the Atlas, at least according to it's author's intentions, would also accomplish a materialist project of constructing so ial memory by collecting photographic reproductions of a broad variety of practices of representation. Warburg's Atlas thus not only reiterated first of all his life-long challenge to the rigorous and hierararchical compartmentalization of the discipline of art history, by attempting to abolish its methods and categories of exclusively formal or stylistic description. Yet by eroding the disciplinary boundaries between the conventions and the studies of high art and mass culture, the Atlas also questioned whether mnemonic experience could even be constructed any longer under the universal reign of photographic reproduction, establishing the theoretical and the presentational framework to probe the competence of the mnemonic from which Hoch's scrapbook would emerge a few years later." (Buchloch, p.15)

"Since Warburg’s work, not only has the atlas profoundly modified the forms – and therefore the content – of all ‘cultural sciences’ or human sciences, but it has also incited a great number of artists to completely rethink – as a collection and a re-montage, a piecing together – the modalities according to which the visual arts are elaborated and presented today." (Didi-Huberman, p.18)

The Titan Atlas was condemned to carry the sky after the Titans lost the war (Titanomachy) to the Olympians. The sky is often often depicted as an orb showing information about cosmology and geography. Through carrying the sky, Atlas had the time to gather all that is to know about the earth and the sky, hence the name given to the book containing maps. The atlas as a book was first created in the 16th century, and since then is mostly considered as an encyclopedia of maps. But I would like to consider an Atlas as a book of images and knowledge, or images as knowledge. Therefore I will look at the Mnemosyne atlas of Aby Warburg and how this has influenced arthistory in general, but also inspired artist. I will look at how the tableau as the vertical leading pictoralistic tradition was challenged by 'tables'.

Farnese Atlas & August Sander, Arbeiter

“One can add that, on Atlas’ shoulders, the celestial sphere offered him the possibility of a real tragic knowledge, knowledge through contact and pain: everything he knew about the cosmos he gained from his own misfortune and his own punishment. A close knowledge but an impure knowledge for that reason: an anxious and even ‘grivous knowledge if we take the expression that Homer uses in the Odyssey literally, to characterize Atlas: “the malevolent Atlas’ he says, using the formulation oloophron (from the adjective loose, meaning ‘harmful’), and who yet ‘knows the depths of all the seas and supports the great columns that hold earth and sky apart’. Atlas would therefore protect us, with his bodily strength, rom the sky crushing the earth. But, with his spiritual strength, he is as knowledgeable of the abysses as he is of the great cosmic intervals: he is the holder, therefore, of an abyssal knowledge that is as worrying as it is necessary, as ‘harmful’ as is it fundamental."

Keywords: tables instead of tableau's
Warburg: new model of time: concept of nachleben = that there is something that remains over time, maybe is updated in different times and cultures, these patterns that reemerge in different stage of culture, something to do with memory. Traces are made after an experience and somehow memory is very dynamic, it can be updated, there are new associations of traces, and Nachleben is a concept that has a resonance with some neurobiological aspects of memory. There are traces that are reupdated, that are reassociated with time. This works as a model, but not in practice to explain the "Warburgian unconsciousness"
Heuristic technique
Knowledge as punishment
Reaching totality through fragments
The idea of images as knowledge

Cultural vs. personal memory <> Warburgian unconsciousness

The dynamic that goes on between conscious and unconscious in creating the combination of images
A dance between the conscious and the unconscious
Visual cortex sensitive to angles and lines and contrast etc.

Conscious creation of distance > the means which by he moves from the demonic towards the estatic
Nietzsche polarity < dionysian <> Apolian
To de-demonize these images, but also his own past

Hannah Hoch scrapbook <> Tumblr

Bibliography:
G. Didi-Huberman (2010), Atlas: How to Carry the World on One's Back?, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
R. Arnheim (1969), Visual Thinking, University of California Press