Ud24_T05_"The Heritage of our Time: The Mnemosyne Atlas" / Georges Didi-Huberman

UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA

udd

24

federico soriano Textos 2018-2019

05 HERITAGE OF OUR TIME: THE MNEMOSYNE ATLAS

DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. In Atlas, ¿How to carry the world on one’s back?

It would not be difficult, paraphrasing the formulas of Ernst Bloch in Heritage of this time, to consider the atlas form -as well as the montage from which it comes- as the treasure of images and thoughts that we have of the “collapsed coherence” of the modern world. Since Warburg, not only the atlas has profoundly modified the forms - and therefore, the contents - of all the “cultural sciences” or human sciences, but has also encouraged a great number of artists to rethink completely, in form of compilation and reassembly, the modalities according to which the visual arts are made and presented today. From the Dadaist Handatlas, Hannah Höch’s Album, Karl Blossfeldt’s Arbeitscollagen or Marcel Duchamp’s Boite-en-valise, to the Atlases of Marcel Broodthaers and Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski’s Inventaires. photo montages by Sol LeWitt or the Album by Hans-Peter Feldmann, the whole armor of a pictorial tradition explodes. In this way, far from the single picture, locked 1

in itself, bearer of grace or genius - even in what we call masterpiece, some artists and thinkers have ventured down again, let’s say so, towards the simplest more disparate table. A painting can be sublime, a “table” probably never will be.

Table of offering, cooking, dissection or assembly, depends.

Table or “sheet” of atlas (say plate in English or sheet in Spanish, but French table, the same as Tafel in German or Tavola in Italian, has the advantage of suggesting a certain relationship both with the domestic object and with the notion of picture). As in the case of the trace-ageless procedure that so many contemporaries will have systematically explored since Marcel Duchamp -we found that, to invent a future beyond the painting and its great tradition, it was necessary to return to the most modest table and its unthinkable survivals. . The atlas is an anachronistic object because heterogeneous times work on it always in agreement: the “reading before anything” with the “reading after all”, as I said, but also, for example. the technical reproducibility of the photographic age with the oldest uses of that domestic object called “table”. I remember that, in the structuralist era, there was much talk of the painting as “inscription surface”: in effect, it establishes its authority through a durable inscription, a spatial closure, a verticality that dominates us from the wall from which it hangs, a temporary stay of cultural object.

The painting would consist, therefore, in the inscription of a work (la grandissima opera del pittore, wrote Alberti) that pretends to be definitive before history. The table is mere support of a task that can always be corrected, modified, when not starting over. A surface of encounters and temporary positions: in it one puts and alternately 2

removes everything that his “work plane”, as we say so well in French, receives without hierarchy. The unicity of the picture happens, at a table, the continuous opening of new possibilities, new encounters, new multiplicities, new configurations. The beauty-glass of the painting-its centripetal beauty found, fixed with pride, like a trophy, in the vertical plane of the wall-gives way, on a table, to the beautyfracture of the configurations that come into it, centrifugal beauties - Indefinitely moving findings in the horizontal plane of your board. In Lautréamont’s famous formula, “beautiful as the fortuitous encounter in a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, the two surprising objects, sewing machine and umbrella, do not constitute, of course, the essential: it counts more the support of encounters that define the table itself as a resource of beauty or knowledge - analytical knowledge, knowledge by cuts, reframings or “dissections” - new.

By propitiating the meeting, in the same preliminary sheet of his Mnemosyne atlas, of a geographical map of Europe and the Middle East, a set of fantastic animals associated with the constellations of the sky, and the genealogical tree of a family of Florentine bankers, Aby Warburg he did not think in any way that he was acting as a “surrealist” historian. What nevertheless appears on its plate - its small “work table” or assembly - is the very complexity of the facts of culture that all its atlas tries to relate in the long duration of Western culture.

For the rest, the few words chosen by Warburg to introduce the problem at stake did not try to simplify the inexhaustible of his task: there is, he said, a great “diversity of systems of relationships in which man finds himself compromised” (verschiendene Systeme von Relationen, in die der Mensch eingestellt ist) and that the magical thought (das magische 3

Denken) presents in the form of “amalgam” (Ineinssetzung).

From the beginning, then, Warburg enunciates in its atlas a fundamental complexity -in anthropological order- that was not treated or synthesized (in a unifying concept) or to describe exhaustively (in an integral file), nor to classify the A to Z (in a dictionary). The aim was to elicit the appearance, through the enruentro of three dissimilar images, of certain “intimate and secret relations”, certain “correspondences” capable of offering a transversal knowledge of that inexhaustible historical complexity (the genealogical tree), geographical (the map ) and imaginary (the animals of the Zodiac).

Even though the Mnemosyne atlas constitutes an important part of our inheritance - aesthetic inheritance, since it invents a form, a new way of arranging the images among themselves; epistemic heritage, because it inaugurates a new genre of knowledge-, and continues to deeply mark our contemporary ways of producing, exposing and understanding images, we can not, before even outlining their archeology and exploring its fertility, to silence its fundamental fragility. The Warburgian atlas is an object thought out of a bet. To bet that the images, grouped in a certain way, would offer the possibility -or better, the inexhaustible resource- of a rereading of the world. Rereading the world: linking their disparate pieces in different ways, redistributing their dissemination, a way of orienting and interpreting it, yes, but also of respecting it, of tracing it back without trying to summarize it or exhaust it.

But in practice, how is that possible?

Undoubtedly, the famous Warburgian dictum “God nests in detail” (der liebe Gott steckt im Detail) could be added, which interprets it dialectically: an imp always nests in the atlas, that 4

is, in the space of “intimate relationships and secret “between things or between figures. An astute genius lies somewhere in the imaginative construction of “correspondences” and “analogies” between each singular detail. Is not a certain madness inherent in all the great challenges, not based on it, in the background, all the companies exposed to the dangers of the imagination? This is the Mnemosyne atlas: projected in 1905 by Aby Warburg, its effective beginning did not take place until 1924, that is, at the precise moment in which the historian emerged - he climbed, he recovered - from psychosis. The Bilderatlas was not for Warburg a simple “record” or a “summary in images” of his thought: he proposed rather an apparatus to put thought back into motion, precisely where history had stopped, precisely where they were missing still the words. It was the matrix of a desire to reconfigure memory, giving up fixing memories-the images of the past-in an ordered story, or something worse, definitive. It was unfinished to the death of Warburg in 1929.

The always interchangeable character of the image configurations, in the Mnemosyne atlas, indicates in itself the heuristic fecundity and the intrinsic unreason of such a project. At the same time finished analysis (because Mnemosyne does not use in total more than a thousand images, really very few in a life of art historian and, more specifically, in a photographic archive like the one constituted

by Warburg with his collaborators Fritz Saxl and Gertrurd Bing), and infinite analysis (because we can always find new relationships, new “correspondences” between each of the photographs). Warburg, it is known, hung the images of the atlas with small tweezers in a black cloth mounted on a frame-a “picture”, wow-, then took a picture or ordered it to be taken, thus obtaining a possible “table” or sheet of 5

his atlas, after which he could dismember, destroy the initial “picture”, and start another one to deconstruct it again.

This is, therefore, our inheritance, the inheritance of our time.

Drift madness, in a sense: proliferating tables, ostensible challenge to any sorting reason, seismic work. But in another sense, prudence and knowledge: Warburg understood well that thought is not a matter of found forms, but of transforming forms. Subject of perpetual “migrations” (Wanderungen), as he liked to say. He understood that even dissociation is capable of analyzing, tracing, re-reading the history of men. Mnemosyne saved him from his madness, from his 6

Detail of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne de Aby Warburg.

“elusive deities”, so well analyzed by his psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. But, at the same time, his ideas continued to “spring up” usefully, like dialectical images, from the shock or the relation of singularities to each other. Neither absolutely crazy disorder, nor very sane ordination, the Mnemosyne atlas delegates in the montage the ability to produce, through encounters of images, a dialectical knowledge of Western culture, that tragedy always renewed - without synthesis, therefore - between reason and unreason or, as Warburg said, among the astras of that which elevates us to heaven of the spirit and the monsters of that which rushes back to the chasms of the body.

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