Media Object: Atlas, collecting the world

[Under construction]

Introduction:

As a media object I choose 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 catagories were added in the 19th century, actually any information that could be systematically organized could be considered an Atlas. Warburg's Atlas set to aim at something differently though.

Warburg started creating his Atlas project in 1925 and was still working on it when he passed away in 1929. It consisted out of ...

“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.” (p. 18)

"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." (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
Heuristic technique
Knowledge as punishment
Reaching totality through fragments
The idea of images as knowledge

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