Media Object: Atlas, collecting the world

[Under construction]

Also still considering writing about

Introduction:

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
Heuristic technique
Knowledge as punishment
Reaching totality through fragments

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