Dead and alive: Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas^†

† This article was originally given as a paper for the symposium Headstone to Hard Drive at Central Saint Martins, 25 October 2014.

ABSTRACT

The article examines some contexts that are relevant to the production of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in terms of the mass dissemination of photographic images and the ordering of images as typologies and taxonomies. The journal, L’Esprit Nouveau, Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of microscopic bodies, Flinders Petrie’s archaeological typologies and photographic methodology and Andre Malraux’s musée éphémère are among key references in the discussion. How, in Bernard Stiegler’s terms a reifying schema is produced is crucial in the discussion leading to how Rancière’s use of parataxis opens up to the possibility of an organizational order linking the analogue with the digital.

KEYWORDS:

• Warburg
• Mnemosyne Atlas
• schema
• Stiegler
• parataxis
• Rancière

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mick Finch’s research takes the form of studio practice, writing and pedagogical projects. He exhibits his work regularly and internationally most recently in Engrams, a one-person show at the Piper Gallery (London 2013) and the group show Painting, Tableau, Stage (Urban Space, Columbus, Ohio, 2013). He has published widely on visual art practices and is associate editor of the Journal of Visual Art Practice and the Journal of Contemporary Painting for which in 2015, he co-edited a special edition on Simon Hantai’s work. He lived, exhibited and taught for 20 years in France and has written extensively about post war French art. He leads the Tableau research project at CSM an outcome of which was the conference Tableau: Painting Photo Object at Tate Modern in 2011. He is a member of the French research group Peinture: un réseau de recherche funded by the French Ministry of Culture, In 2011 he was an Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School in Rome and he is a Senior Scholar of the Terra Foundation in Paris.

Notes

† This article was originally given as a paper for the symposium Headstone to Hard Drive at Central Saint Martins, 25 October 2014.

1. Information supplied by the Warburg Institute.

2. These translated excerpts, from Warburg’s journals, were from Warburg's otherwise inaccessible archive and included in Gombrich’s Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography.

3. L’Esprit Nouveau was a journal of art and architecture that was published in France from 1920 to 1925 and was edited by Le Courbusier and Ozenfont.

4. From NASA’s Voyager web site: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html . Accessed 5 January 2016.