atlas in Stankievech 2016


ype of research from the Warburg Institute. Probably the
most acclaimed of the panels are those which Warburg developed in close collaboration with his staff during the last years
of his life and from which he intended to create a sequential
picture atlas of human memory referred to as the Mnemosyne
Atlas. Again defying the classical boundaries of the disciplines, Warburg had appropriated visual material from the
archives of art history, natural philosophy, and science to
vividly evoke and articulate


d care) but rather as a particular agency in terms of
epistemologically and spatially working with existing materials and collections. Consequently, figures such as Warburg
51
52

Kurt Forster, quoted in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: Das anomische Archiv,” in Paradigma Fotografie: Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters,
ed. Herta Wolf (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002), 407, with further references.
One such example is the Atlas begun by Gerhard Richter in 1962; another is
Thomas Hirschhorn’s large-format, mixed-media collage series MAPS. Entitled
Foucault-Map (2008), The Map of Friendship Between Art and Philosophy (2007),
and Hannah-Arendt-Map (2003), these works are par


cts in space (even
when those objects are dematerialized as reproductions),
become productive forerunners across a range of fields: from
art, through cultural studies and art history, to the curatorial.
Essential to Warburg’s library and Mnemosyne Atlas, but
not yet articulated explicitly, is that the practice of constructing two-dimensional, heterogeneous image clusters shifts the
value between an original work of art and its mechanical
reproduction, anticipating Walter Benjamin’s essay written a


and the cosmos, was of the highest significance to Warburg as a recurring
theme. The etching is shown, for instance, as image 8 of Plate 58, “Kosmologie bei
Dürer” (Cosmology in Dürer); reproduced in Warnke, ed., Aby Moritz Warburg:
Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 106–7. The connections

105

purchased, and which is on my bookshelf at home, but which
is not in my suitcase. Thus, the Arg.org platform acts as a patch
for times when access to physical books is limited


n Trier’s Melancholia, are striking; see Anna-Sophie Springer’s visual essay
“Reading Rooms Reading Machines” on p. 91 of this book.
“Buchblättern als Lesen des Universums,” Plate 23a, reproduced in Warnke, Aby
Moritz Warburg: Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 38–9.
The title of the English translation, The Museum Without Walls, by Stuart Gilbert
and Francis Price (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), must be read in reference
to Erasmus’s envisioning of a “librar

 

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