That said, the constellation-form calls for reflection on a larger scale. A singular item bathed in a remarkable aura attests as much: art historian Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne. Intended as a cognitive tool for identifying the deep logic that holds between heterogeneous images, this atlas comprised over two thousand reproductions on seventy-nine boards when its creator died in 1929. Each of the ‘screens’ – constellations of black-and-white images against a black background – offers a host of thematic and formal connections, often obscure. Warburg inaugurated a veritable epistemological rupture by pursuing historical analysis based on iconography. Placing the image at the centre of the cognitive process enabled him to deploy a mode of thinking that worked through staging (didascalies), channels (chaînages) and combination (combinatoires). The method governing this enterprise, as well as the aesthetic it entails, have made the Atlas Mnemosyne a kind of monument that is fully legible only in our own times. By decades, Warburg anticipated interdisciplinary iconographic research, pursuit of analogies, and browsing that contemporary artists prize – in other words, the common denominator of cultural experience today.
Giorgio Agamben has noted the energetic conception of images in Warburg’s project. Here, he writes, ‘is the crystallization of an energetic charge and an emotional experience that survive as an inheritance transmitted by social memory and that, like electricity condensed in a Leyden jar, become effective only through contact with the “selective will” of a particular period’.26 Each symbol constitutes a ‘dynamogram’, delivering a charge that varies in accordance with the context in which it is situated: works evolve with time and space. Warburg juxtaposed reproductions of art and advertising brochures, details of sculptures and snapshots of Hopi Indians or people walking down the street in American towns. In the same space, Delacroix’s Medea meets up with a woman playing golf, drawings by Renaissance astrologists, and medieval illuminations … If the system of thinking that Warburg set up represents the object of such fascination today, this is because it corresponds to the dominant visual matrix of our epoch. Networks, maps, charts, diagrams and constellations feature in contemporary art because they share a reticular structure: an array of points connected with each other by links, whether the latter are visible or not. Their raw material is, in essence, visual information, akin to the logic of ‘browsing’ that internet users employ when clicking from one site to another. Such information – or, more accurately, coding – does not translate into the same thing in every context. The contemporary fortunes of the Atlas Mnemosyne stem from its insistence on the dynamic nature of forms – the specific energy locating them in a heterochronic temporality that changes from one epoch to the next in keeping with the way they are downloaded into different contexts. Art is a ‘dynamogram’: an inscription programmed for time travel. Marcel Duchamp described his Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even as a ‘delay in glass’. Every work is ontologically late, and we perceive it only in bursts diffracted by the context through which we become aware of it.
Because it lacks continuity, our epoch is characterized by intermittent temporalities: a great kaleidoscope where pasts, presents and futures scintillate in furtive ‘flashes’. Art historian George Kubler, fascinated as much by Robert Smithson’s ‘ruins in reverse’ as by Aztec culture, confirms this analysis. ‘Actuality’, he writes,
is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time … Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers. These signals are like kinetic energy stored until the moment of notice …27
Benjamin associated the constellation with a general concept of history’s ‘legibility’ (Lesbarkeit): it relates to divination, the ancient science of prophetic interpretation. Starting with a particular detail (or set of details), the interpreter connects different temporalities in order to arrive at a view that amounts to prediction in reverse, prophecy turned towards the past. Such a mode of reading has been termed asterochronic – it ‘establishes connections between events that are heterogeneous in time and space’.28
‘Clues’, Carlo Ginzburg’s seminal essay from 1979, describes the emergence of the ‘evidential paradigm’ at the end of the nineteenth century: a model of knowledge based on signs that seem utterly unimportant. ‘Infinitesimal traces’, Ginzburg writes, ‘permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality’.29 This model emerged in the field of art history and in turn inspired psychoanalysis, yet it may also be discerned in detective fiction and philosophy. Like Giovanni Morelli’s essays on Italian painting, the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle feature a mode of thinking that focuses on matters normally consigned to the margins – or neglected outright. Thus, in the realm of art, the least important parts of a work – details the painter executes mechanically and, as it were, unthinkingly (hair, nails, the shape of an ear or a finger …) – allowed Morelli to assign it to a particular artist.
Comprising symptoms, clues and pictorial signs, the ‘evidential paradigm’ derives from medical interpretation and diagnostic science as much as from the detective’s patient craft. Ginzburg traces it back to the ancient practice of hunting – deciphering the mute and seemingly imperceptible tracks of animals – as well as the concept of symptom in Hippocratic medicine. By the same token, evidential knowledge shares traits with the most ancient divinatory methods – and to such an extent that Ginzburg speaks of ‘retrospective prophecies’ in Sherlock Holmes’s dazzling intuitions and Morelli’s claims. But while divination ‘analyze[s] footprints, stars, feces, sputum, corneas, pulsations, snow-covered fields, or cigarette ashes’30 in order to predict the future, the evidential method examines the same in order to reconstruct the past. This is also why Aby Warburg considered the historian of art a ‘necromancer’ capable of reviving traits of the past in the forms of the present. ‘Morelli’, Ginzburg writes, ‘set out to identify, within a culturally conditioned system of signs such as the pictorial, those which appeared to be involuntary, as is the case with symptoms’:31 in other words, one finds an artist’s signature in traces that display no intention at all (minor elements, scribblings, or the way hair or hands are painted).
Needless to say, such focus on unconscious detail leads us back to psychoanalysis. In ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, Freud acknowledged his debt to Morelli; starting in the early 1880s, he read his articles on the Italian Renaissance, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘Ivan Lermolieff’. Morelli’s method is ‘closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis’, which ‘is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations’.32 This ‘rubbish heap’ of observation, both historical and medical, provides the raw material of psychoanalysis. In the 1930s, the same register of the devalued and the rejected – albeit in terms of society and culture – offered unforetold objects of study to Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin: detective novels, hotel foyers and cabaret spectacles to the one; Parisian arcades, cinema and children’s books to the other.
Rubble
In the second half of the 1950s, Nouveau Réalisme undertook the vast project of performing an archaeology of the present by way of the vagaries of mass production and the social use that objects found. Jacques de la Villeglé’s work – an ‘urban comedy’ about French history since the end of the Second World War as related by the ‘anonymous wounded’ of advertising bills – emblematizes the aesthetics of recuperation. Benjamin Buchloh considered that Villeglé’s works, as well as those of Raymond Hains and Mimmo Rotella, offered a radical interrogation of the artist in light of the social ‘group-subject’. Villeglé, he argued, had introduced an entirely new attitude towards art: ‘By consciously denying the traditional role, [the artist] yields to a collective gesture of productivity that, in historical context, amounts to mute aggres
sion toward the state of alienation that has been imposed.’33 This notion of ‘anonymous production’, Buchloh continues, paved the way for the approaches of Stanley Brouwn, Marcel Broodthaers and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Once the notion of authorship has been surpassed, the artist becomes a collector of communal production. This problematic has greater currency now than ever: most contemporary artists take the stage as compilers, analysts and ‘remixers’ of mass culture or media-industrial production. Even if they do not share the aesthetic of Nouveau Réalisme, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Jeremy Deller, Josephine Meckseper, Carol Bove and Sam Durant have followed in the footsteps of Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Villeglé; their artistic silhouette lends form to the mythical ‘ragpicker’ Baudelaire described: ‘everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste.’34
Like philosophy for Althusser, History for Benjamin represents a veritable Kampfplatz. That said, the battlefield has been scrupulously tidied by the victors. From where they now hold power, they have mastered the narrative of events. On the ground, or already buried, lies the debris of History, the vanquished; the latter are the concern of the materialist intellectual, who seeks out emblems and tools broken in defeat. The materialist historian endeavours to ‘make present the totality of the past repressed by the vanquishers, just as the flâneur perceives a house that has been gutted more sharply than when, still intact, it formed part of his familiar landscape’.35 In other words, one should write history by starting with scraps and ruins; the task is to reconstitute, patiently, a nomenclature of invisible buildings, to rediscover the exact form of the remnants on which the social edifice now stands. Above all, the ‘historical rescue’ Benjamin advocates settles a moral debt: revisiting the narrative of History means rendering justice to the vanquished lying in a mass grave teeming with half-erased accounts, embryonic futures and possible societies. In sketching this portrait of the ‘materialist historian’, Benjamin unintentionally described – but with astonishing precision – the relation to History that artists would adopt at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.
Writing as the threat of Nazi barbarism loomed, Benjamin viewed the proletariat and left-wing intellectuals as the exemplary vanquished of the age. Since then, postmodernists have scrupulously completed the list: in addition to the ‘popular’ classes, minorities – social, ethnic, sexual and political – are eligible for ‘historical rescue’, which will occur through unearthed documents attesting to the repression to which they are, or have been, subjected. The slightest clue, the meagrest fragment, can found new narratives: ‘nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history’.36 The ‘materialist historian’ picks up fallen memories in the form of quotations; for Benjamin, they are so many ‘photographs’ of the past – what we would now call ‘readymades’ or ‘found objects’. Claude Lévi-Strauss described ethnology in the same terms: ‘once while I was in the United States … I said that we were the ragpickers of history sifting through the garbage cans for our wealth.’37 For all that, there is a difference between the anthropologist and the historian; even though they have the same object of research – social life – the one focuses on ‘conscious expressions’, whereas the other aims to ‘find, behind observed practices, the unconscious mechanisms that govern them’.38 Here, too, the unconscious marks a divide; interest bears on what has been excluded, the basis for a new science.
This lens permits one to analyze recent artistic developments, in particular works based on a critical rereading of the past through fragments and documents that qualify as ‘historical’ – provided that the designation also applies to what official history has cast off and the ‘winners’ do not wish to keep. Popular culture – alternatively, what is now called ‘low culture’ – has come to provide the artistic material of choice for the incipient twenty-first century. Such a development would be unthinkable without the Benjaminian theory of ‘historical rescue’: the political will to take on the sphere of ideology via the cultural hierarchies and official memory that it forges. That said, another element enters the equation, too – one tied to the very nature of the relationship between art and History. If one follows Benjamin’s lead, History provides the stuff of art in a form that necessarily proves accidental. The ‘photographs’ of the past employed by the artist (and the ‘materialist historian’) belong either to the world of the ‘conquered’ – that is, they are mutilated or buried – or to the reigning ideological sphere. The full significance of the universe of the dysfunctional – rejected ideas, objects that have been cast off, and degraded ways of living – appears only to an aleatory vision of History affirming that everything could have happened differently. By the same token, other accidents may yet orient the world’s march towards other ‘suns’ (as Stuart Hall puts it).
Since the late 1960s, Düsseldorf artist Hans Peter Feldmann has assembled small albums comprising found images, postcards, cuttings from newspapers or encyclopaedias, and publicity notices; occasionally, he includes his own photographs. These images – whether they present views from the window of his room or postcards of the Eiffel tower – are classified by a system whose logic is very personal, even esoteric. As a collector, if not a ragpicker, of iconography, Feldmann defies the simplistic efforts of classification that might tempt observers. To be sure, kinship exists between the images presented, but what is the principle organizing their presentation? What kind of archive is this? With Warburg, the logic of slippage and ‘Chinese boxes’ gained the right to take the intellectual stage. The logic of dreams – free association – holds. But far from staying confined to the psychic universe, as occurred in surrealism, the evidential mode now constitutes the privileged sociological approach for a somnambulistic art. Ryan Gander’s Loose Associations – the title of a series of lectures – explores the ties between found images, projected one after the other. His work attests to the logic that has laid hold of the arts in general. Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center (an array of photographs and documents on tables) belongs in this context, too, as do the works of Aurélien Froment, Thomas Hirschhorn’s sprawling object-environments, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s memory theatres.
Through exaggerated iconographic contrasts, Josephine Meckseper stages confrontations between the glamour-universe that invaded the art world in the 2000s and the militancy of revolutionary avant-gardes that once fuelled its discourse – e.g., by juxtaposing a pamphlet calling for a strike and fashion photography. In her shelfsculptures, Carol Bove brings together epochal documents (small objects, records, books …) to reconstitute the political, social and cultural constellation of American ‘flower power’; Mai-Thu Perret takes up the same matter through the fiction of a ‘feminist ranch’ in an imaginary desert, where her works are supposed to come from. Then there are the investigations of historical figures undertaken by Kirsten Pieroth (Thomas Edison), Joachim Koester (Immanuel Kant, the explorer Salomon Andrée, Aleister Crowley, the Club des haschishins …) and Henrik Olesen (Alan Turing). Danh Vō engineers hybrid forms combining personal biography and macro-history. Walid Raad’s project with the Atlas Group fabricates imaginary archives of an interminable war in Lebanon. Such works all attest to a drive to produce History – in the double sense of ‘manufacture’ and ‘submit to (legal) judgment’.
Gardar Eide Einarsson has deconstructed the security ideology of the United States with bumper sticker slogans; in a series of video installations, Mark Leckey declares Felix the Cat the primitive fetish of the televisual age; Raphaël Zarka’s works draw parallels between the history of the skateboard and Renaissance geometry; Cyprien Gaillard presents his work as archaeological ‘digs’ in twentieth-century civilization. All these artists rummage around in the dump of History to unearth buried material and reactive signals that have fallen into disuse: excavators of the minor, they present s
ingular genealogies cutting through layers of history. Their use of materials points to History as a slow process of erosion; the present amounts to a heap of ruins, through which they reconstitute the architectural logic of the edifice that once stood. Books, everyday objects, visual motifs, and images from popular magazines are interrogated about the contexts to which they belonged – like the DNA samples a coroner uses to identify bodies. The formats artists employ freely refer to the scenography of History itself: now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, display windows, shelves, libraries, tableaux, bits of popular museography and archaeological scaffolds have taken over exhibition spaces.
From the standpoint of the ‘materialist historian’, these artistic forms seem to stand outside of time. Nietzsche would have called them ‘untimely’. Such heterochrony is the signature of our age. Artists enlist increasingly powerful computing tools to archive and research the most varied epochs and places, which they present simultaneously.
The aesthetic hallmark of this push towards intemporality is the widespread use of black and white. In films by Joachim Koester or Lindsay Seers – in the iconography of David Noonan, Tris Vonna-Mitchell, Mai-Thu Perret, Olivia Plender, Mario Garcia Torrés and Tacita Dean – the two-colour process provides a metaphor for the past; it signifies that the images on display belong to History. But at the same time, black-and-white refers to an ethical environment, a climate of authenticity, inasmuch as the images seem to come from a technological landscape that precedes digital manipulation and Photoshop. When it is produced on the scene of contemporary life and culture, black-and-white signals the aesthetics of evidence, cutting through historical and ideological falsifications. The fact that found objects occur in such formal diversity indicates that when quoting the past, contemporary art is less concerned with readymades – that is, with the definition of art – than with historical or political legitimacy. Artists as different as Danh Vô, Haris Epaminonda, Simon Fujiwara and Josephine Meckseper – whose works all exhume what has been cast away – occupy a position similar to Benjamin’s, somewhere between the poet, the ragpicker and the historian. ‘I needn’t say anything. Merely show’, Benjamin wrote; ‘The rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.’39
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