Fugue of Ideas: Passion, Knowledge and Memory in Aby Warburg’s Theory of the Image.
Type of activity: International seminar
Related exhibition:
ATLAS. How to carry the world on one’s back?
Fugue of Ideasis the name that Aby Warburg would give to the brief notes that accompanied the boards of images that constituted his unfinished Atlas Mnemosyne. It is also the title for this international seminar organized by the Museo Reina Sofía on the occasion of the exhibition curated by Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas. How to Store the World?For the event, experts on the history and theory of the image have been invited to come together to debate the repercussions of Warburg’s project on knowledge and critical interpretation of contemporary visual culture Atlas Mnemosyne was an anomalous project in the context of the tumultuous beginning of the 20th century. Created and installed in Warburg’s library in Hamburg from 1924 to 1929, the Atlas Mnemosyne effected a rupture by approaching the field of images not on the basis of the chronological and logocentric order of 19th century historicism, but rather on the basis of a recognition of images’ density of meaning and expressive power capable of destabilizing the epistemological patterns of art history. In the no less tumultuous beginning of the 21st century, Aby Warburg’s formulation takes on a singular meaning, insofar as today it is necessary to deploy a complex mode of iconic knowledge capable of recognizing in current imaginaries the semantic opening and empathetic power that Warburg saw in periods like the Renaissance. Today, it is no longer possible to aspire to the Renaissance faith that Warburg so longed for, a faith in the tight bond between the individual and the universal, between history and myth, or between appearance and the real; nor, though, is it tenable to fall into resignation in the face of the definitive disillusionment of the technological image in modernity that so often obscured Warburg’s vision. The drive to knowledge and to display that lay behind the Atlas project might serve as a revulsive by which it is possible to meaningfully and relevantly re-connect the fragments of an increasingly undifferentiated past and present; a mission shared by artists, art history and the museum. The seminar is divided into four roundtables that attempt to interrogate the historical and intellectual coordinates of Warburg’s project, and then to discuss the primary questions about the nature of the image formulated in Atlas that resonate in current debates: mainly, the rhetorical power of the image and its staging as pillars of modernity; the specific languages of the image and methods to approach and critically analyze those languages; finally, the value of the image as reminiscence and as a means for experience to endure over time. Program |
