RESUMEN DARO

En griego, la palabra
atlas se forma combinando la a prosttica (es decir, elemento no
etimolgico que se aade al principio de una palabra sin modificar su sentido)
con una forma del verbo tla, que significa portar, soportar. Tlas o atlas es,
literalmente, el portante por antonomasia. Pero portar no es algo sencillo. Portar
slo es posible mediante el encuentro de dos vectores antagonistas, la pesadez
por un lado, la fuerza muscular por el otro. Portar manifiesta, pues, la potencia
del portador y, asimismo, el sufrimiento que aguanta bajo el peso que
lleva. Portar es un acto de valor, de fuerza, y tambin de resignacin, de fuerza
oprimida: son los vencidos, los esclavos, los que ms intensamente sienten el
peso de lo que portan.

Al reunir en su biblioteca, en paralelo a las imgenes de la fototeca, una serie
completa de estudios sobre el mito de Atlas y su iconografa22, Aby Warburg
trata de observar experimentalmente la dinamografa de esa figura a travs
de contextos histricos e ideolgicos diferentes. Porque soporta el mundo entero, Atlas es
capaz de personificar el imperio de los hombres sobre el universo.
Porque permanece inmovilizado bajo el peso de la bveda celeste, es capaz
asimismo de personificar la impotencia de los hombres frente al determinismo
de los astros. Entre esos dos polos extremos, la historia de las imgenes
ofrece un extraordinario abanico de versiones, bifurcaciones, inversiones, e incluso
perversiones. P.65-66

Tal sera la gran leccin de este mito: un castigo transformado en saber inmenso,
un exilio transformado en territorio de abundancia, y aun de placeres dionisiacos.
Atlas, guerrero vencido, obligado a inmovilizar su potencia, hroe desdichado
y oprimido por el peso de su pena, acaba siendo algo inmenso y moviente,
fecundo y rico en enseanzas. En adelante, dar su nombre a una montaa (el
Atlas), a un ocano (el Atlntico), a un mundo submarino (la Atlntida), a toda
suerte de estatuas monumentales destinadas a sustentar nuestros palacios (los
atlantes)43, y pronto a una forma de saber que plasma en imgenes la dispersin
y la secreta coherencia de nuestro mundo todo. De nuevo comprobamos aqu
la pertinencia de las nociones aportadas por mile Durkheim y Marcel Mauss,
por Claude Lvi-Strauss despus, sobre la fecundidad epistmica de los mitos, su
notable funcin heurstica y clasificatoria44. P. 69

ME QUED EN P. 70: ME PARECE QUE EL ATLAS FARNESIO..








Mnemosyne 42
Georges Didi-Huberman
Exhibition Room
Mnemosyne 42 is the experimental answer to Alain Fleischers April 2012 proposition to create a work on
images in the context of Le Fresnoy Studio national des arts contemporains. The rules of this proposition were
at once very open and very strict. Very open, because like everything that counts in Alain Fleischers eyes, it
concerned a game of invention, with those very serious things that haunt us in history and in images: the
general title that was eventually chosen for the game actually took up Aby Warburgs phrase for defining his
own object of study in the Mnemosyne atlas, or the history of images, as a ghost story for adults.1
It was nevertheless strict in that Alain Fleischer had directly set out the limits of space and visibility: first, it
was a question of doing something with the space of the grand nave of Le Fresnoy Studio national des arts
contemporains (approximately one thousand square metres). Second, Alain wanted everything on view to be
seen exclusively from the gangway of the first floor where, moreover, we were to install Atlas, suite, a series
of images by Arno Gisinger created from the Atlas exhibition2 (in its ultimate version, as it was exhibited in
Hamburg at the Sammlung Falckenberg). Third, therefore, the exhibition to be invented had to be directly
engaged with the discussion developed in Atlas and in Atlas, suite, namely, that the montages of images were
specific forms of knowledge of the world and of its history. Fourth, everything had to be conceived of and
created in just four or five months with relatively limited resources (Le Fresnoy being very different from a
museum or a kunsthalle).
So what was to be done? What was to be shown? Were we to bring together a new ensemble of works by
different artists who created atlases of images? There was neither enough time for that, nor was there the
means; and besides, what was the pertinent choice after the 140 or so artists presented in Atlas? Choosing a
single work? But why only one, however complex or monumental it might be? (It is true that for an instant I
thought of Franz Erhard Walther.) Then the most interesting aspectbut also the most restrictiveof the
initial proposition came into play: that everything would be visible from above, viewable only from the
gangway in the Fresnoy. I initially thought of using large tables (a memory of Gabriel Orozco perhaps, and
perhaps because I would have liked to have included him in the initial presentation of Atlas in Madrid)large
tables upon which images would be placed, arranged like tarot cards during a visit to a circus clairvoyant
(albeit on an enormous table). Then, in a flash, the idea of a projection came to light (a recollection perhaps of
the very first exhibition at Le Fresnoy which was indeed titled Projections). It was coherent with the aim of
the work as was envisioned together with Arno Gisinger: an exhibition without any original works, an
exhibition that would be light and easily adaptable anywhere; all in all, a part of a portable atlas, part of a one
thousand square-meter exhibition in the age of its mechanical reproduction.
The idea was quite simple: to project onto the ground, vertically from the ceiling of the nave, a gigantic plate
from an atlas; to take upbecause I have frequently come back to this in my works-in- progress over the last
few yearsthe forty-second Mnemosyne plate that Aby Warburg devoted to the Piet motif and to the
lamentations that the living murmur, utter, shout or sing before their dead;3 and to pay new homage to this
plate,4 not only by projecting it in dimensions that Warburg would never have imagined, but by
accompanying it, by commenting on it, by prolonging it, and by making it come out of itself, in order to
create around it a whole constellation of new images. The images are in black and white (as in Warburgs
work), but also in colour. Still images (as in Warburgs work), but moving as well. Silent images (again as in
Warburgs work), and ones with sound. Images that I know, that I have before me, in that part of my
computer, which for a long time now, I have come to refer to as my atlas.
It would have been enough to choose, to arrange, and to make a montage of all these images or sequences of
images. It would have been enough to experiment: to see what this might create, to play with the relationships
between images, rhythms, scales, dimensions, or colours. Perhaps as Warburg had done with his black hessian
screens and his little pincers with which he endlessly arranged and rearranged his great figurative puzzle of
the tragedy of Western culture as he called it. And to the vertigo already aroused by the photographic
montage of Plate 42 must be added, in vast proportions, the vertigo of other images whose coexistence, I
imaginesince I write these lines before having seen or concluded anything whatsoevercould well produce
something like a great kaleidoscope of the motions of the soul, from the perspective of, or according to,
the cornerstone of mourning and lamentation. It would be worthwhile, one day, to attempt the same thing with
joy.
*
Aby Warburg,
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (plate 42) 1929
The Warburg Institute
The images of Mnemosyne 42 arise to a certain extent from the memoryand even the citation which is
central to the arrangementof the Warburgian plate. As though by strata (for still images) or by successive
waves (for moving images): archaic figures and ancient sarcophagi, medieval frescoes and Italian altarpieces
(Duccio, Giotto, Lorenzetti, Boticelli, Bellini, Crivelli), reliefs by Donatello or Bertoldo di Giovanni, the
Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and intensely sculpted groups by Guido Mazzoni or Niccol dellArca, to name a
few. Soon enough, however, the great moderns: first of all Goya, whose Disasters of War, unknown to
Warburg, decline (to the point of nausea and infamy on the one hand and total dereliction on the other) the
various gestures adopted by the survivors before the dead; and then of course Picasso, who prepared and
prolonged Guernica through a whole series of studies on the cry, tears and pain in the face of history. Perhaps
even Bertolt Brecht, who documented and collected in a montage several Piet situations in his work journal
and his War Primer.
Francisco de Goya, Los Desstres De La Guerra (Material
Grfico) 18th plate (out of series 50), 1863
Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional De Espaa Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel,
1955
Courtesy Eulenspiegel Verlag.
One must then introduce movement, which is a more delicate operation to the extent that I did not seek a
kaleidoscopic abyme or abyss effect, nor any chaotic confusion whatsoever, but instead the possibility for the
spectator to compare certain images in movement and to take advantage of spacethrough intervals, the
scales of figures, hazardous desynchronization, and the configuration of the ensemblewhich this
comparison beckons. First of all, there will be certain monuments of cinema in which scenes of lamentation
intervene by way of narrative hooks, or crucial moments: Eisensteins Potemkin, Vangelo, Medea or Rabbia
by Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as, for example, Terra em transe by Glauber Rocha. The archival images will
be collected in a montage by Artavazd Pelechian in Nous; the cinematographic documents of the public
funerals of Buenaventura Durruti in 1936; Yasser Arafat in 2004; or Kim Jong-Il in 2011. Two extracts from
Zhao Liangs film Petition, The Court of Complaints will also be on view, in addition to ethnographic
documents such as those collected by Ernesto De Martino in Italy in the 1950s, or by Filippo Bonini Baraldi
who in 2004 filmed a lamentation of Rumanian Gypsies. Also part of the exhibition is a martinete funeral of a
cante jondo sung by Manuel Agujetas near a photograph of Carmen Armaya on her deathbed. All of this
unravels as but an indication, since the Lamentations folder of my own atlas of images, which contains
some two thousand six hundred audio and visual documents, is far from closed.
*
Mnemosyne 42 is thus presented like an immense carpet of images projected onto the floor of the nave of Le
Fresnoy. It is therefore an installation, as is commonly said. The question, however, is: Are the
philosopher and the art historianeven the exhibition curatornot assuming the role of artists? Of course
they arent.
The question should not be articulated in such terms. Mnemosyne 42 is not a work of art for the very trivial
reasons that it will not be for sale, and it will not live on. Rather, it will give rise to other equally impermanent
forms (except perhaps the book, which remains the fundamental element of my work). More profoundly, it is
not a work per se, concluded, or operated (opus operatum); but a visual modus operandi that is at once
historical and argumentative. It is intended to remain a site; the site of the construction of a laborious labour
(opus operosum). I simply consider the nave at Le Fresnoy to be like the exhibition space inherent to that
space of experimentation and work that the Studio national des arts contemporains is. A place for exhibition:
it is not a place for saying I-me or I-me- the-artist. Nor is it a place for the self-fulfilling there is the
work, as though the working were completed in a work, and the work endowed with value. In this context, a
place for exhibition is merely somewhere to lay out visual and reflective configurations, just as someone who
seeks to arouse anothers reflection lays out an argument.
Film still from Terra em transe (1967) Directed by Glauber
Rocha. All rights reserved. Film still from Cimetires dans la
falaise(1951) Directed by Jean Rouch. Jean Rouch
The fact that Le Fresnoy is a place of research had considerable impact on my choice. The first dimension of
Mnemosyne 42 is its heuristic dimension: what will be seen in the thousand horizontal square metres of the
nave is, on the whole, just a particular extension of the organisation of imagesthe open organizationby
which I do my historical and philosophical research every day. It is a projection of what happens on the thirty-
three centimetres of my laptop computer screen. Albeit magnified, it is a working tool that is open to
modification along the way, as opposed to being an aesthetic result. The spectacular exhibition of this tool
is not necessarily something pinned to its own axioms (for otherwise its heuristic and experimental content
would disappear) or on its visual choices.
On the other hand, the fact that Le Fresnoy is also a school engages the pedagogical dimension of Mnemosyne
42. Here too, it is simply a matter of the disproportioning of a visual arrangement that I developand
modifyin my weekly lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. I have, however, learned
from Warburg, as I have from Bertolt Brecht or Walter Benjamin, that pedagogy (the transmission of
knowledge, not in the least of the gay science) is such a crucial question that it cannot be separated from a
poetic dimension. There is no production of knowledge without problematization; that is, without questions
posed at a new expense. Yet there are no new questions, not even new contents of knowledge, without an
invention of forms; without a form-making that can draw our attention to the questions themselves. As
such, Mnemosyne 42 comes under what we could quite modestly call a visual essay. This is why, once again,
the installation is not to be seen as a work of art, but rather as a mere arrangement that instigates questions.
It is worth remembering how Theodor Adorno characterised what is at the same time the theoretical and
poetical form of the essay: it is a form for coordinating elements rather than subordinating them to a causal
explanation; a form for constructing juxtapositions outside of any hierarchical method; a form for
producing arguments without renouncing their affinity to the visual image; a form for seeking a greater
intensity than discursive thought can offer; a form for not fearing discontinuity and for seeing in it, on the
contrary, a sort of dialectic at a standstill, a conflict brought to a standstill; a form for refusing to conclude
and, yet, for letting the totality light up in one of its chosen or haphazard features.
It is a form which, consequently, always proceeds in an experimental way, essentially working on a
presentation, which reveals a certain relation to the work of art, even though its aim is clearly non-artistic. It
is an open formneither teleologically closed, nor strictly inductive, nor strictly deductivethat agrees to
present a contingent and fragmentary material in which what is lost in precision is gained in legibility. It is a
form that is both realistic and dream-like, able to suspend the traditional concept of method by seeking
its truth content in the transitions.5 All in all, it is a question of re-actualising this form of montage that
inherited the paradoxical method assumed by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project: Method of this
project: literary montage. I neednt say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no
ingenious formulations. But 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.6
The choice and arrangement of images in Mnemosyne 42 at last seeks to give clarity to the political dimension
inherent in the way that the theme of lamentations is treated therein. First, through the de-prioritised
coexistence of documents and of works of art, where an old Romany woman filmed by an
ethnomusicologist can rightfully appear alongside the Virgin Mary of Giottos Piet; and then, through the
practice of citationbut not appropriationwith the aim of giving images back to everyone rather than
taking them for oneself when one fancies oneself to be the author of everything. Finally, it is a question
of making sensitive the dialectic established between lamentation (the emotion, the non-power, the pathos)
and political demands. We will see here how peoples in tears eventually become peoples armed, or at least,
people who are not satisfied with pitying themselves in the face of death, but who demand justice and who
make a complaint against a certain state of the historical world.
(3 July 2012).
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