(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Art History
The Aby Warburg lecture and the Image in Motion was held at the Stenersen Museum 30. May. The event was a collaboration between the Stenersen Museum, Aesthetic Seminar and Blaker dairy's friends. Our concept of history is usually straightforward and chronological. This is also the case in art history, where it is common to imagine that epochs follow epochs, and style replaces style. From such an angle, forms, motifs, techniques and expressions will also be outdated, because the art, presumably, is moving forward. Of course, many people dispute such an understanding of art, but it has proved difficult to establish real alternatives with effect outside academia. Just look up a regular art history book – what you get is just such a teleological development story, where works follow works, and form follows form. However, the problem with such a chronology is obvious, since the apparent emergence of successive styles, artists and works – and how they relate to each other in tradition and influence – is never as sharp and simple as it immediately seems. First and foremost because it is usually those with money and power that remain in the history books – but also because it turns out to be very twisted to talk about someone really development – whether we mean a development for the better – in art history.
Venus's hair moves, as if by strong wind, and the body swings, as if an enormous weight is on the figure.
- A sign of the weight of the story? Or that the repetition of a figure involves a transfer? – The point is that the meaning of an image can be found not only in the image itself, but also in the context in which it is placed. For Warburg, an image was always marked by other images to liveor afterlife. So it is not just about images as independent entities, but the forces acting on them in the new contexts in which they end up. Thus, the space between the images is as important to Warburg as the image itself – he called it "the iconology of the interval". When a picture or motif from another time is repeated, it will also mark, or mark, the space between then and now, between the origin and the provisional endpoint.
For Warburg, an image was always marked by other images to liveor afterlife.
- So the continuity we mean to see in history is just a surface? – Yes, because the form of the story is discontinuous: it is acknowledged, or experienced, in flash or lightning, as Walter Benjamin later puts it in his Theses on the philosophy of history. The relationship between past and future is configured at a moment marked by the distance in time, but also in space. For Warburg, therefore, it was not only the distance between, for example, antiquity and the Renaissance that was interesting, but also the spatial extent. By traveling in space, you also move in time, he thought. Warburg's visit to North American indigenous peoples in the 1890 century thus becomes a scathing experience. - In what way? – With the natives he discovered a ritual relationship with representation. It was not a passive, contemplative relationship to images, but about being part of the image self. The indigenous people did not reproduce image objects, but recreated the image space itself as a place, a scene, an experience. By dressing up as mythical figures drawn from the imagery of the predecessors, the natives in their ritual dances became part of the representation itself. This idea of becoming part of a visual culture, rather than making images into objects, found Warburg in a different form in the Kachina dolls. He painted spirit figures decorated in colors, cotton noises and feathers – like both gives life to their predecessors and acts as toys for the children. A picture lives on, but not by cutting the roots of a previous picture world. Maintaining this continuity was crucial for Warburg. - If we look at Warburg's latest project, Mnemosyne, does he also make art history a kind of ritual matter, where the concrete repetition of the story is realized through the viewer's own retelling of the elements? – It is MnemosyneThe Warburg project is best known for, and is also the strongest expression of his alternative understanding of art. Mnemosyne consists of a series of velvet-covered posters, where Warburg attached photographs of various works of art together with images from everyday life, advertising and popular culture. These were supposed to be a scene for the dynamics between different images he was talking about – he also called them "dynamograms", because there were different style elements or sub-motifs circulating through the different images. Here Botticelli could be placed side by side with a soap advertisement or a woman playing golf. Or a zeppeliner and images of antique sculptures could be displayed together. This is a non-linear art story, but also an art story without pictures, since there is no absolute order of the order. The story, and the forces that are in it, are preserved as open.
Anyone can rearrange the elements of the story into their own story
- Isn't that just a chronology break? – Warburg made a history of art that was not fixed. A Nietzschean art history driven by historical forces and not by individual works. There is talk of a movement through the history of forms and motifs, or specific gestures and figures – "pathos formulas" as Warburg called them – which can be regarded as a continuous sequence of images throughout history. Among other things, this is what is cinematic about him, which I write about in my book – that is, he is concerned with how a form or figure is always underway, or that the movement arises and is activated across specific works of art. In the same way as frames in a movie, the art history becomes a story about images in operation. - Doesn't he also encourage the viewer – every viewer – to find his own "film", so to speak, in the history of art? Or to be storytellers, ie to intervene in the archive of pictures and find their own "traveler" figure in the pictures and intervals between them? – At least this is an understanding of art in which the chronological, as well as the individual work, is subordinated to the movement that takes place across works and existing chronologies. But there is also talk of an art-historical point of view where the subject, the viewer, in any case is included in the artistic experience. The subject enters the representation, if you will, to the extent that he actively participates in the transference that is the history of art. - So the viewer of art revives forms by becoming part of the image he brings back? – There is a room for the viewer here, where there is, strictly speaking, no image completely outside the view. In this way, we could also say that no artist has ever made a picture. Figures and shapes transposing or moving through history are such a complex and contradictory field that notions of an image become too limiting. The interview is over. I sit and think about the connections between art history and the rest of the story. “The movement in question is therefore as much about the subject who looks at the work as it is about the object being viewed. The viewer leaves the passive view in order to be actively involved in the representation, ”Michaud writes. Warburg thus provides the individual place in the production of knowledge, in how the art, but indirectly also the human, story is to be told. Thus, he gives the story a bigger place in the individual as well. Isn't it an illusion that each of us is powerless outside the course of history? Drawing upon Warburg's pictorial understanding, anyone can rearrange the constituents of the story into their own narrative. There is an apparent ease in assigning the individual role of narrator and archivist in this way, but tremendous knowledge and acumen are required to find the right intervals. It is not our unimportance as individuals that prevents us from intervening in history, but our ability to arrange the images in a sequence.
Røed is a literary and film critic in Ny Tid. kjetilroed@gmail.com
