Exceeding epistemology
In the book “Aby Warburg and the image in motion” by Philippe-Alain Michaud (translated by Sophie Hawkes) 2004, Georges Didi-Huberman calls Warburg’s eager to “exceed the epistemological framework of the traditional discipline” to “gain access to a world open to multiple extraordinary relationships” dangerous, a symptom.
Image Dialectic
The use of images in conversation with other images (in other words, the use of dialectical images) became one of the standard gestures of the art of the twentieth century. While Aby Warburg developed his method of association by applying the rules of visual arts (iconographic constraints) to interrelating paintings, it is unclear whether he also applied them to the panel as a whole. His methods may have been similar to those of juxtaposition, dualisms or polarities which consider the contrasts, analogies, tensions and anachronisms among objects. In literary sciences they are often named as: similarity, likeness, equivalence, parallel, correspondence, correlation, comparison, resemblance, consonance, relation, reconciliation, closeness, metaphor, allegory, alientation and estrangement.
Pathos Formula
In the history of art, Warburg was interested in the expression of emotions (“pathosformeln”) and cosmology (how the human being understands and represents the cosmos). Aby Warburg struggled to bring together these two aspects in the Mnemosyne Atlas. (worms eye and birds eye view.) The Mnemosyne Atlas is an attempt at transmitting his ideas about how the human defines himself and his position towards the cosmos in a general way and the history of that and towards the inner cosmos (psychology) and how that is expressed in images. One approach is systematic and seeks to explain how psychology works through impression and expression and how that develops through time and space.
Unfit Format
The 63 panels of the Mnemosyne Atlas are a preliminary format on which Warburg attempted his constellation through trial and error, never reaching a definite state. The work is stuck in progress. Aby Warburg chose the format of the “Bilderatlas” to combine the historical and geographical elements (images) as a medium for his theories.
Pathos Formula
Pathos Formula15: fossilized psychic states; psychohistory; “patheď mathos” understanding; introspection; analysis of the phenomenon of apparition between proximity and strangeness; interior monologue; despecification of discourse to arrive at metadiscourse; critique of the supremacy of language to the genesis of meaning; cinematic model of thought; metamorphoses; zigzag; snake ritual
The Atlas proposes an art of the in-between, what Warburg called the ‘iconology of the interval’.
“Our realm is that of the intervals”
(Sigmund Freud)
The Atlas Panels
The panels were made of a wooden frame by a local
carpenter and stretched with black linen fabric.
Later, the panels had a supporting frame which made them movable objects.
He didn’t necessarily have each of them made as individual panels and reused the same panel multiple times due to lack of storage space.
The panels themselves were lost when Warburg’s
colleagues, fleeing Nazi Germany, relocated to London, and the images are now dispersed in the archives of the institute.
The photographs don’t show the bottom part of
the panel.
After-life
However, the Atlas, as a printed two dimensional medium was too simple to translate his complex ideas. Although Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas may have been an attempt to three- or even fourdimensional reading, its two-dimensional format borrowed from the educational medium of the “Bilderatlas” was limited and, perhaps, anti-curated. Aby Warburg never fully succeeded in defining a cultural theory or a system.