Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

by Phillippe-Alain Michaud; trans., Sophie Hawkes
Zone Books, New York, 2004
382 pp., 114 illus. Trade, $33.00/£21.95
ISBN: 1-890951-39-0.

Reviewed by Michael Punt

University of Plymouth

Mpunt@easynet.co.uk

Phillippe-Alain Michaud’s new book, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion does three things. Two it does rather well, and the third it leaves open for other scholars and artists to pick up. The first thing that it does well is to remind us who Aby Warburg was and why he is important today. In 1892 Aby Warburg, the eldest son and heir to the M. M. Warburg Bank defended his doctoral thesis on Botticelli's paintings of the Birth of Venus and the Primavera. It revealed these paintings as works in which the programmed interaction of classical and modern forms were juxtaposed in such a way that in their surrender to a contemporary context there was a release of spirit. This exposed the function of art as the ritualistic liberation of the contained, and reiterated the Dionysian impulse that had been driven underground (at least in the arts) by the stoic rationalism of the classical period. By following what might be called an ethicalist vision, Warburg showed the limitation of bounded disciplines in art history and the insufficiency of canonical terms such as "The Renaissance" to fully account for the acts of human consciousness during its prescribed period.

Warburg (1866-1929) recognised that art could be understood not exclusively as an epistemology of objects, but was also the trace of a historically persistent human obsession with movement and one of many activities which ritually re-enacted the transient moment of "becoming". But art, according to him, was crucial because in painting and sculpture, for example, in the bringing into being an intention matter was subordinated to human consciousness. His approach was informed by the rising confidence in Cultural Anthropology and (although it seldom appeared in his work directly) the emergence of cinema. The effect of these two key influences can be seen in the organisation of his library in Hamburg the KBW (Kultur-wissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg), which, in addition to the books, also contained over 20,000 images. Toward the end of his life he used this collection to produce a series of black painted boards on which he attached images of artefacts from quite different times and cultures to reveal a continuity of ideas that operated in contradiction to their temporal and geographic provenance. These boards, of which we have an incomplete record, were subsequently called the Mnemosyne Atlas. They were stood purposefully against the shelves in his library and in this arrangement proposed a relationship between memory and culture that refused to reduce the human ritual of art to artefacts in the service of master narratives of influence and attribution. They epitomised his idea that the origins of the obsession with movement lay in a world-view that revelled in excess and boundless possibility.

What is at stake in Warburg’s intellectual approach and his Mnemosyne Atlas extends beyond the boundaries of art into a broader set of concerns that embrace science and technology. As with some late nineteenth century theoretical physics, his real object of study was the distance between the individual and the object. In this context the crucial condition for movement was not the incompatibility between the magical and the logical, but the impossibility of connection between them: In the dark gap of indeterminate dimension between one state and another the only possible connection was the pulse of ahistorical consciousness. Michaud’s way of retelling of Warburg’s life and ideas (and credit here must also go to the translator) is compelling and evocative of the current debates that occupy us at the fringes of art and science. At times his discussion of the way that Warburg saw the Renaissance resonates with some of the philosophical writings of Varela and a more radical constructivist view of the world. However, Michaud’s rhetorical tactic of situating him in a contemporary context of ideas also amplifies the injustice that Warburg has been subjected to by historians and art educators. Although his ideas were influential, his own unique contribution fell into a certain obscurity, and his work became known primarily through his students (Wind, Saxl, and Panofsky especially) and certain forms of art practice. His ideas arguably lie at the core of the post war art school movement and the fascination with collage and montage editing which more or less shaped the aesthetic of video art and performance. And his understanding of art as universal impulse inflected by style but never subordinated to it, together with his use of the image as an epistemological object and his method of practice research (the mnemosynes and rearranging the library in order to express the inexpressible etc.) are the essence of much current thinking.

Michaud can claim great credit for making this evident in the way that he tells the story in an engaging style that wears its knowledge lightly. Sophie Hawkes, the translator, has done a good job in presenting complex concepts without the need for endless rereading that most translations of French theory used to insist upon as a badge of seriousness. It is however in dealing with the relationship between cine Aby Warburg and the cinema that Michaud does less well which, given that he is the curator at the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, may be surprising. It is also surprising that when he talks of early cinema and its invention, there are some historical errors, and one still from Griffith’s Way Down East used as an illustration is wrongly titled. (This may be an editorial slip since it is correct in another paper elsewhere.) The larger difficulty is that Michaud reveals the intellectual significance of Warburg in the text but does not apply his ideas to his own profoundly teleological conception of history. As a consequence, the more one becomes engrossed in the connections the Michaud’s text makes and the implications that flow from it, the more frustrated one becomes by the way that he tells the history of cinema as a technological and formal inevitability. What the book finally misses is Warburg’s significance for the enterprise of history as it is currently understood as a contingent view of something we choose to call the past.

Warburg forms part of a corpus of European ideas that developed on the cusp of the twentieth century and were too quickly overlooked. In particular, the subtle philosophical thinking of Henri Bergson that was displaced by the more mechanistic intellectual paradigms of psychoanalysis and semiotics at precisely the moment when science needed the tools to manage contingent truth and relativism. That said, Michaud does a great service in the way that he reopens the problem of history as he accounts for Warburg in such an engaging way. In doing so, his book is a considerable contribution to the growing intellectual enthusiasm for articulating those ideas epitomised not only in the work of Bergson but also in more contemporary thinkers such as Vilém Flusser, Edgar Morin and Barbara Maria Stafford.