Aby Warburg

Tanto las crónicas de la conquista, pasando por los relatos de los exploradores de la colonia y temprana república, como los desplazamientos de las violencias contemporáneas, muestran una relación importante entre violencia y territorio, cuya encarnación plástica está testimoniada en una serie de imágenes que también hacen parte de la memoria sobre los hechos oprobiosos del pasado de los colombianos. En el presente artículo quiere mostrarse la posibilidad de acceder a una suerte de dimensión topográfica o espacial de la memoria a través de algunas imágenes en las que se muestra de modo patético esta relación entre territorio y violencia. Para acometer el objetivo del artículo se tratará de mostrar en qué sentido una forma compositiva como el montaje, caracterizada a partir de la práctica historiográfica de Aby Warburg, puede dar cuenta de la poética del territorio expresada en algunas imágenes de caminantes del siglo XIX y del siglo XX. (La responsabilidad de la publicación del panel de imágenes cuenta por parte del autor, no de la revista)

La relación de la alta cultura brasileña con sus bases populares es de larga data y el modernismo brasileño de los años veinte y treinta presenta un antecedente ineludible. El caso de Bahía –debido a la fuerte presencia de la cultura africana– es significativo. A partir de los años cincuenta se reúnen en dicha ciudad una cantidad de artistas e intelectuales de formación vanguardista generando lo que se dio en llamar la “agitação cultural bahiana”. Tanto en las exhibiciones que cura como en sus escritos de época, Bo
Bardi elabora algunas hipótesis sobre la importancia de la cultura popular brasileña en el cambio político que se gestaba en esos tiempos que exceden la disciplina arquitectónica. Este trabajo busca rescatar la figura de Bo Bardi como ensayista y curadora de arte para poner su pensamiento dentro de un contexto histórico cultural en el que –desde diferentes esferas artísticas como la literatura, las artes visuales y el cine–se deposita una gran confianza en la cultura “otra” como agente de transformación política. Si bien la inclusión de la cultura popular en el campo estético y la adopción de
una perspectiva etnográfica que propone Bo Bardi acuerda con un espíritu de época, a través de las exhibiciones que cura y de sus textos, se pueden rastrear ciertas operaciones que son innovadoras y originales para su contexto.

Presented at "Pictures of War: The Still image in Conflict since 1945" at Manchester Metropolitan University (Manchester, UK) on 24 May 2018. The art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) famously proposed a theory of affective gestures, called Pathosformeln. They were reproduced throughout time, via works of art, photography, and ritual. In the resurgence of interest in Warburg’s work, it is insufficiently acknowledged that his theory was evolutionary in nature, and as such was predicated upon two notions: that gestures in works of art are mimetically accurate, and that the gestures in question are universal. Images of conflict lie at the heart of this issue, as pictures showing aggression and defence are arguably depictions of evolutionary responses to external pressures.

However, Warburg’s approach appears untenable in the wake of subsequent findings from different disciplines: first, iconographic research noting the reliance upon conventional gesture in art; and second, psychological and neurological research upon the cultural boundaries of affective display.

In this talk, I propose that the theory of Pathosformeln can be updated by appealing to the very conventionality of artistic representation and social behaviour. I argue that imagery has a type of agency that propels gestures, and their understanding, forward in time. This mixture of convention in representation and behaviour may be termed a “visual habitus”, where the practical becomes symbolic through repetitive accretions. I provide a number of visual examples of this visual habitus in action over time.

Este ensaio crítico pretende compartilhar impressões, reflexões e inquietações advindas do primeiro contato, ou primeiras leituras e outras conversas e apreciações sobre os estudos do historiador Aby Warburg em meados de maio de 2013 na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Tem como proposito tecer apontamentos que questionam as teorias de Warburg diante de uma força hostil frente a questões politicas, territoriais e culturais relacionadas aos estudos culturais advindos do continente americano. Uma possível trama de intenções políticas e econômicas que agiu em tempos do Renascimento Europeu, tão eximiamente estudado por Warburg, e que tem suas reverberações nas culturas coloniais até os tempos atuais, será apontada neste estudo como uma paródia dos conceitos Imagem Sobrevivente (Narchleben) e a Fórmula de pathos (Pathosformel) a serem subvertidos em Tramosfórmula das Imagens Insistentes.

A  visual constellation in the style of Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. It can be seen as a continuation of Aby Warburg's famous texts on North American Indians and snake rituals. The plate is based on the visual examples discussed in a seminar on Warburg's cross cultural comparative method with my student at the International Master's programme in Visual Culture at the Division of Art History, Lund University, Sweden. The plate was in the end used as a pedagogical tool to teach students the splendour and pitfalls of art historical/visual reflection and cross cultural comparative analysis.

Actuellement à la Monnaie de Paris, l’exposition À pied d’œuvres(s) se propose de sonder le passage de la verticalité à l’horizontalité de la sculpture et son rapport immédiat au sol. Bien que pour certaines œuvres présentées cette relation soit un paramètre heuristique et ontologique, pour d’autres, le rapport au sol n’est qu’un corollaire implicite à l’installation et à l’œuvre. D’après cette exposition, la mise en exposition au sol sans l’ « intercalaire » d’un socle semblerait être suffisante pour justifier ce passage conceptuel et stylistique. En revanche, un tel tournant spatial devrait, au contraire, être sondé à l’égard de ses enjeux historiques et ses interconnexions esthétiques. Si les années 1960 et 1970 ont basculé horizontalement l’expôt en le transposant directement sur le sol (privé, public, naturel, etc.) d’un espace d’exposition désormais en crise ; aujourd’hui, à la suite d’une idée de sculpture élargie, cette horizontalité semble plutôt investir le domaine expographique. Cela fait que l’horizontalité de la sculpture et, plus en général, de l’expôt dans l’art contemporain devient un dispositif critique qui met en question le concept d’exposition et qui interroge l’évolution historique du spectateur et de ses modalités d’appréhension et de jouissance esthétique.
En partant de la vidéo de Pipilotti Rist exposée à la Monnaie et en poursuivant avec l’approfondissement d’autres expositions, telle que Nouvelles histoires de fantômes (2014) organisée par Didi Huberman au Palais de Tokyo, nous nous proposons ainsi d’approfondir la dialectique entre l’horizontalité de l’œuvre (des projetions), l’expérience spatiale et esthétique du spectateur, et les dynamiques de présentation muséographique.

The book is still available on order from the publisher :

https://www.aspeditions.be/en/book/pneumatology/15244

How do wind and breath challenge the traditional conception
of an image as something seen and read?  The book that you hold
in your hands attempts to answer this question by addressing the structural relations that have determined the representation of these motifs across di erent cultures. What does the pneuma – denoting both breath, wind and air – tell us about the human psyche and
the structure of images? To articulate cross-historical and cross- cultural connections between representations belonging to di erent media, the diachronic art historical overview is particularly useful. In order to cover all of the important modes of representing the pneuma, a wide range of art historical and anthropological sources is analysed, like the Chinese landscape, the German myth of the wild hunt, the architecture of the wind, Paul Celan’s poetry and
the 18th century representation of the Wind Trade (Windnegotie).
e  rst part provides insight into the control and direction that wind has conferred to human existence.  e second part addresses wind as a  gure that structures our understanding of the soul, and
its conception as space where a ects dwell. In the  nal part, an iconological inquiry investigates the way in which the representations of the pneuma – from the Renaissance to 21st century art – have radically altered our understanding of the image. Reading visual structures across various artworks, the essay treats wind, air and breath as in a-motifs, intensities that have changed the canonical understanding of art and its history.

Los temas relacionados con la memoria y la historia ocupan un espacio creciente en las teorías culturales. En este trabajo se explora con carácter prospectivo el potencial de las ideas de Aby Warburg para resituar algunos aspectos del pasado precolombino en lo que respecta a sus imágenes. Warburg ofrece un análisis basado en consideraciones antropológicas y no estilísticas, al mismo tiempo vincula imagen y memoria, sobre todo con su concepto de “pervivencia”. Se muestran las limitaciones del discurso histórico colombiano creado por la Regeneración, el análisis se centra en la imagen de cabecera del Papel Periódico Ilustrado, una imagen muy elaborada y que resume su pensamiento histórico en el cual no hay cabida para el pasado anterior a la llegada de  los españoles. Se muestran  algunos modelos de “pervivencia” de las imágenes de ese pasado y se plantea de una manera general la cuestión de la liberación de su potencial, más allá de su presencia museística, las tensiones entre archivo  y memoria, y la necesidad de rescatar “los restos” y “fragmentos” como formas de “pervivencia”.

Ernst Robert Curtius, né en 1886 en Alsace, est renommé comme l’auteur de l’idée de littérature européenne. Il était critique littéraire dans les années 1920. De plus, il faisait des recherches sur la continuité de la rhétorique européenne pendant la seconde guerre mondiale. Le bulletin de recherches, Ernst Robert Curtius e l’identità culturale dell’Europa, est réalisé d’après un colloque international à Bressanone et Innsbruck en 2009, qui a été organisé par Ivano Paccagnella et Elisa Gregori de la chaire de philologie romane de l’Université de Padoue. Durant les vingt dernières années, les Italiens ont abordé Curtius avec enthousiasme, comme ce colloque le prouve. Ceci est le cinquième colloque international consacré à Curtius. En 2007 et 2008, Paccagnella et Gregori ont organisé des colloques sur d'autres grands romanistes allemands, Erich Auerbach et Leo Spitzer. Le nombre de participants a pratiquement doublé depuis. Ainsi, les 27 collaborateurs de ce volume ne sont pas nécessairement des spécialistes de Curtius. Ce bulletin de recherches a la particularité de discuter de l’idée d’Europe chez Curtius relativement à l'UE, le post-colonialisme et la mondialisation. On pourra y trouver une étude de la différence entre les sciences sociales et les aspects culturels dans les études sur l'UE, et une relativisation de l’eurocentrisme.

This thesis offers an adjunct to recent theories of the haptic contingent upon proximity by considering how embodied engagement might take place at a distance. Developing a broad definition of gesture as a motion away from the (carnal or camera) body that is nonetheless always attached to it, the thesis seeks a state of in-betweenness unmediated by touch. Two chapters explore this gesture-as-bodily-extension as an analytical approach to art. Each focuses on an insistently individual artist, according them a different theoretical approach apiece in order both to do justice to that individuality and to test fully the potential and limits of the gestural approach in question. The first chapter focuses on the writings and films of the écrivain-cinéaste, Chantal Akerman, whose gesturality, equal parts literary and cinematic, is explored through Giorgio Agamben's similarly language-based thoughts on gesture, the moving image and repetition. Charting a three-stage gesture of (displaced) demonstration (proximal, medial and distal) that finds its linguistic correlate in a triad of slippery shifters (là, là-bas and ça), it examines how, and why, the artist, in a relentless process of 'ressassement' informed by atrocities always one step away from first-hand experience, translates these to page and screen as the story of 'la petite chose à côté'. The second chapter centres on the photographs, films and installation work of the artiste-cinéaste, Agnès Varda, using an approach developed from selected writings by the German art historian, Aby Warburg, the majority translated into English for the first time. As with Akerman, Varda's work insists upon a spectatorship premised on distance; however, it also demands complicity. Defining the viewing experience not as the still contemplation of moving images but as the active contemplation of still ones, the chapter explores the relation between onlooker and image by harnessing Warburg's vision of a gesture encoded in the artwork that may be triggered anew through mobile, engaged and bodily spectatorship from afar; a vision underpinned by his concepts of the animated accessory (bewegtes Beiwerk), the memory-image (Erinnerungsbild) and the in-between space of artistic encounter (Zwischenraum). Ultimately, this thesis asks, and answers, two questions. What can theories of gesture contribute to a close analysis of artists whose work demands distance? And do these highly individual artists exceed the scope of theory – and in so doing, expand it?

The article investigates the discourse of contemporary visual culture studies informed by the paradigmatic shift in the field of humanities, known as pictorial turn. Drawing upon the concepts outlined by William J. Mitchell and Mieke Bal, the author argues against the possibility of ahistorical simplifications that might occur when thinking in terms of pictorial turn comes into a growing prominence within the discipline. Certain comparison is drafted as a warning; employing the field of visuality as the universal theoretical basis, without taking into account the specificity of the historical experience, would be parallel to the poststructuralist hegemony of textuality. Similar argument addresses the examples of discourse on visuality built upon models of primarily textual analysis. Therefore, the author emphasizes the necessity to reach out to the earlier modern theory on visual culture proposed by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, who were investigating the themes (or emplying the methods) that has been largely overlooked and / or shifted to the margins.

A study in extremes, panel 45, builds on the sequence of panels 41, 41a, 42, 43, & 44. But it does so to signal a perilous “loss” of metaphoric distance. Here frescos by Ghirlandaio emblemize the "afterlife" of classical "expressive values" in the Renaissance. Yet Ghirlandaio’s use of the grisaille technique is not able to fully moderate or mediate the intensity of the passions. Thus even as the Massacre of the Innocents metonymically yields to The Blood of the Redeemer (while also anticipating the Eucharistic theme of panel 79), and even as the serving girl in Birth of John the Baptist heralds the all-important theme of the nymph whose “life in motion” [bewegtes Leben] animates Warburg’s own thinking, the panel heightens the lethal threats (e.g., plague, tyranny, war) against the possibility of achieving psychological “balance” [Ausgleich].

Aby Warburg has traditionally assumed a marginal position in the discipline of art history, long overshadowed by his predecessor Erwin Panofsky. Over the past two decades, however, Warburg’s intellectual legacy has undergone a significant reappraisal, and Warburg is now recognised as clearly standing at the intersection between anthropology and art history. This surge of interest has recently been given visual form in the exhibition “Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back?” curated by French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. Taking its point of departure from Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925-1929), the exhibition reflects the critical proximity of Warburg’s cultural and anthropological ideas within Didi-Huberman’s own project.

Discourse on the issue of “simulation” or “diving” among soccer’s public exploded in the 1990s and has remained a perennial talking­ point. What little academic work does exist on the phenomenon, such as that produced by Paul H. Morris and David Lewis, is inscribed in the field of behavioural psychology and seeks to assist referees in spotting deceptive behaviour. This paper breaks new ground by considering the issue outside of such instrumental frameworks, focusing instead on the aesthetic issues that diving brings into play.

Art historian Lynda Nead has demonstrated that sports photographs ­ which function as “delays” or “extractions” from the “ceaseless motion” of the contest, allowing for ‘a contemplative and perhaps critical spectatorship’ ­ can accrue into genres. Her example is the boxing “head­punch” photograph, which Nead asserts as an independent sub­set of ‘a long tradition of the visual depiction of pain’. I make the claim that much the same can be said of the material investigated in my paper: the “dive” photograph constitutes a distinctive genre within the larger set of soccer photography, and is plugged into a visual tradition of hyperbolic anguish which also encompasses artefacts as diverse as Laocoön and his Sons, Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa and Charcot’s photographic studies of female hysterics.

What makes the “dive” photograph distinct from Nead’s focus is the extent to which the subjects themselves are responsible for theatrically opening up the “delay” that Nead describes. This paper draws connections between the scandalising and scurrilous treatment to which divers are subjected in the British media and the broader disavowal of on­ pitch theatricality implicit in FIFA's long­standing directive against what their Technical Committee once decried as “excessive demonstrative attitudes”. Working through theories of performative visuality advanced by Aby Warburg and G.E. Lessing, the paper ultimately argues that the diver's transgression, as perceived from the ethical standpoint of the mainstream British press, is one of acknowledging their own status as a viewed entity, with all the gendered implications that carries.

Erwin Panofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts has been a core text in the study of art and art history since its publication.

This paper is part of a series of critical and unique academic explorations of seminal works in the humanities and social sciences - books and papers that have had a significant and widely recognised impact on - and across - their disciplines. It has been created to serve as much more than just a summary of what lies between the covers of a great book. It attempts to illuminate and explore the influences on, ideas of, and impact of that book.

With a growing list of over 180 titles across a broad range of subject areas, Macat works with leading academics from the world’s top universities to produce new analyses that focus on the ideas and the impact of the most influential works ever written. By setting them in context – and looking at the influences that shaped their authors, as well as the responses they provoked – Macat encourages readers to look at these classics and game-changers with fresh eyes.

This paper reveals how both contemporary and prior views of the nature of the pictorial arts since early modernism have been underpinned by the classical concept of mimesis, and as a result has brought with it a pre-occupation with both representation and the privileging of the visual. Through tracing the concept of mimesis from its Platonic and Aristotelian roots, the paper will reveal how the concept permeated the visual arts during early modernism, particularly through the work of art historian Aby Warburg. The concept remained dominant within art history until the late twentieth century, and still has its lingering grip on the visual within non-representational models. In discussing ‘the more than visual’ nature of the pictorial image, the paper draws insight from ‘enactivist’ literature; particularly Francisco Varela’s concept of ‘perceptual guidance by action’ provides a framework within which to theorise perception as structured by movement and action, and as such the whole multi-sensory-motor experience. Providing a theoretical platform within which to re-think the pictorial image as a multi-sensory-motor process in which no one sense modality is privileged. As such, in offering a speculative theory, the paper maintains, the ‘enacted pictorial image’ should be theorised as a ‘trace’, not of a visual world of experience, but of an entire enacted reality.

La historieta constituye una parcela de los medios que utilizan la secuen-cia de imágenes estáticas para comunicar y narrar. Gracias al concepto «configuración visual secuencial», que constituye el punto de partida de este libro, es posible incorporar los factores histórico y formal en su definición como un lenguaje visual discontinuo. El tebeo se presenta, en consecuen-cia, como un medio de masas que, en el siglo XX, ha compartido su imaginario con el del cine, pero que a la vez no ha rehusado ampararse en la vasta herencia de la historia de la secuencia narrativa. En un caso y en el otro, la pregunta ¿qué caracteriza a la expresión visual de la his-torieta? parece tener un mismo corolario: la dialéctica entre continuidad y discontinuidad, que requiere ser estudiada desde un punto de vista capaz de conciliar análisis de la forma, historia y supervivencia de lógicas y estructuras visuales. En función de ese punto de vista, y del magisterio de autores como Gino Frezza, Thierry Groensteen, Benoît Peeters y Daniele Barbieri, este libro se propone aproximarse a una perspectiva formal y estructural cen-trada en el historietista, en los recursos con los que cuenta, los sistemas retóricos desarrollados por el cómic y el modo de mimesis, es decir la manera en la que se crea la ilusión de la reproducción de los aconteci-mientos que integran el relato. La historieta puede contemplarse en función de tres inscripciones fundamentales: la que surge de su perte-nencia a la configuración visual secuencial; la que afecta a su forma plástica y nace de su capacidad para hibridar palabra y escritura y, final-mente, aquella que atañe a su difusión, a su lugar en el consumo de masas y su relación con el imaginario temporal que rodea al lector y al autor. A través del cuerpo de este breve y por fuerza incompleto compendio de aspectos formales, se propone una aproximación centrada en la téc-nica que medie entre la viñeta, esto es, la unidad primera de la tensión entre discontinuidad y continuidad visual, y los dos despliegues que dan pie a la figuración secuencial: la página y el álbum.

After WWI, Fritz Saxl assembled nearly 20 educational exhibitions for the department of national education in Vienna. Today, little is known about these exhibitions since almost all the related materials are lost. Only Saxl's letters as well as the few articles he wrote about them provide immediate insight.

This Note on Aby Warburg’s Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdrucks- kunde, published for the first time in 2011, seeks to highlight the philosophical con- tent of Warburg’s iconology in his earlier thinking. In particular, a close examination of the fragments lends credit to the hypothesis of a possible convergence between Warburg’s ‘pragmatic science of expression’ and Ernst Cassirer’s theory of expression around the idea of ‘a general science of culture as the doctrine of man’s affective ex- istence’, founded on the expressive symbolism of images which are captured mythi- cally by thought.

Este artigo apresenta dois conceitos fundamentais da teoria iconologica desenvolvida por Aby Warburg, a  Nachleben e a  Pathosformeln , com o intuito de compreender como se da a sobrevivencia das formas na historia da arte, como desaparecem e ressurgem em outros tempos. Deste modo, vai ser estabelecido atraves da sobreviencia das formas, o  pos-vida das formas antigas sobre a representacao da ruina, atraves de elementos arquitetonicos, que estao presentes nas gravuras de Giovanni Battista Piranesi e que ressurgem nas pinturas de Giorgio De Chirico e tambem em Roy Lichtenstein. Especificamente, as formas investigadas como uma imagem sobrevivente sao observadas atraves dos tambores das colunas de templos e de antigas construcoes em ruinas, que representam a arquitetura greco-romana, assim sendo, analisada do periodo neoclassico ate a arte moderna.

Die Bildgeschichte des Begriffs Terrorismus wird im 21. Jahrhundert gerne in Hyperimages dargestellt. Über die Assemblage diverser Kontexte entstehen so Bildensembles, die den Eindruck vermitteln, als handle es sich bei Terrorismus um eine historische zusammenhängende Visual History. Dabei werden bestimmte Figuren wie etwa Osama bin Laden besonders hervorgehoben und einschlägige Bilder wie jene der Anschläge vom 11. September 2001 als Medienikonen und Diskursmarker in Hyperimages eingesetzt. Sowohl in den Massenmedien als auch in der Kunst wird die Bezugnahme zum Terrorismus gerne über plurale Bildkonstellationen hergestellt. Der folgende Beitrag verfolgt die Anwendung der „Atlas-Methode“ nach Warburg und im Kontext der von Felix Thürlemann aufgestellten Theorie des Hyperimage anhand von Fotografien, Bildclustern und Ausstellungsdisplays von Thomas Hoepker, Clément Chéroux, Hans Peter Feldmann, Gerhard Richter, Peter Bergen, Der Spiegel, Stern, Willem de Rooij, Thomas Hirschhorn, Al...

An excerpt from Sergei M. Eisenstein's memoirs describing a night visit to the museum of Chichén Itzá in Mexico is set forth as a real life example reflecting, both from a visual and theoretical perspective, the architecture of Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and his concept of Denkraum. Drawing upon Warburg's own writings and F. T. Vischer's theory of symbol, the paper looks at Eisenstein's experience at the museum as highlighting the dynamic relation between man's religious/magical and scientific/rational psychic poles, and the in-between space of thought inherent to the concept of Denkraum and visually represented by the empty dark intervals separating the images in the Bilderatlas. Adding significance to its argumentation, the paper also hints at an affinity between Eisenstein's film montaging and Warburg's image assembling criteria.

METADATA. HOW WE RELATE TO IMAGES Lethaby Gallery 10 Jan—3 Feb 2018 An exhibition organised by the International Research Group “Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology” in collaboration with Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

This book takes its start from a series of attempts to use Caravaggio’s works for contemporary humanitarian communications. How did his "Sleeping Cupid" (1608) end up on the island of Lampedusa, at the heart of the Mediterranean migrant crisis? And why was his painting "The Seven Works of Mercy" (1607) requested for display at a number of humanitarian public events? After critical reflection on these significant transfers of Caravaggio’s work, Francesco Zucconi takes Baroque art as a point of departure to guide readers through some of the most haunting and compelling images of our time. Each chapter analyzes a different form of media and explores a problem that ties together art history and humanitarian communications: from Caravaggio’s attempt to represent life itself as a subject of painting to the way bodies and emotions are presented in NGO campaigns. What emerges from this probing inquiry at the intersection of art theory, media studies and political philoso...

This edition of Aby Warburg's early theoretical manuscripts provides a dense, highly biograpic documentation of his unique way of thinking. The notes, schematic drawings, and diagrams of the young scholar offer unique insight into his working methods. The volume includes key documents from the early phase of Wraburgs's thinking and research on his theory of images and symbols between approx. 188 and 1905.