PARIS.- Nouvelles histoires de fantômes [New Ghost Stories] is a poignant installation conceived by Georges Didi-Huberman and Arno Gisinger after the legendary Atlas Mnemosyne by early 20th century art historian Aby Warburg. The result is certainly not an exhibition, nor an artwork in the traditional sense, but a presentation—in a previously nonexistent form—of an incomparable meditation on the way in which photography and cinema have each prolonged past masterpieces that are testaments to humanity. Georges Didi-Huberman began his methodical reflection on art over thirty years ago, and, through its examination of history, the whole of his work has deepened our psychical and ethical relationship to images. Together with the artist Arno Gisinger, they present a new evolution of the spectacular installation that they devised for Le Fresnoy in 2012 and invite visitors of Palais de Tokyo to dive into the heart of scenes that haunt our gaze.
Just as it was hard for Charles Baudelaire to confine himself to one collection of Histoires extraordinaires, his translation of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Tales, so it seems hard for anyone who observes the ghostly destinies of images to remain content with only one episode of their Ghost Stories. Towards the end of his life, Aby Warburg coined a remarkable aphorism that crystallized his historical and anthropological thinking about images as well as his use of the photographic Atlas, stating that for him it was a question of a kind of “ghost story for the full grown-up” (Mnemosyne. Grundbegriffe, II, 2 July 1929). In 2010, on the basis of this double, or rather triple incentive—prompted by the words atlas, stories and ghosts—Georges Didi-Huberman conceived an extended exhibition entitled “Atlas,” presented with new variants at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Deichtorhallen-Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg. In this perpetual process of transformation, the exhibition was destined to take a totally new form when Arno Gisinger agreed to develop, with about 1200 images, a photographic interpretation of it, not only through the objects contained in it, but also through the process of its making, through its staging, its unnoticed aspects, and its objective
coincidences.
This exhibition deals therefore with the ghostly life of the images, which make up our present as well as our historical and artistic memory. It takes on the guise of a contemporary homage to the work of Aby Warburg whose great atlas of images—entitled Mnemosyne, the Greek name of the goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses—brought together a thousand figurative examples in which the entire history of images was arranged in such a way as to let us perceive the most fundamental problems of western culture. Today, however, it is up to us to recompose “New Ghost Stories,” a task incumbent on artists, philosophers and historians alike. One that needs to be constantly redone in order to enable us to understand that we only experience our present through the combined movements, the montages of our memories (gestures we make toward the past) and those of our desires (gestures we make toward the future). The images should then be considered as potential crossroads of all these combined gestures.
Aby Warburg
MNÉMOSYNE, Plate 42
Georges Didi-Huberman produced a video sequence for Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains, which is projected as a loop at the entrance to “New Ghost stories.” The sequence is tantamount to a rostrum camera exploration, to a real “dive” into plate 42 of Aby Warburg’s atlas Mnemosyne, in its final 1929 version. This plate had the following title: “Pathos of Suffering in energetic inversion (Pentheus, maenads at the cross). Bourgeois keen, heroized. Ecclesiastic keen. Death of the redeemer. Entombment. Meditation of death.” On it we see works by Donatello, Mantegna, Verrocchio, Signorelli, Carpaccio as well as Raphael.
The issue at stake is to put forward a montage that shows the energy—the polarized, dialectic, reversible energy, as for example between the expression of mourning and that of desire—as well as the dynamism appropriate to the gestures of lamentation. And in such a way as to illustrate the notion, fundamental in Warburg, of “pathos formulas” (Pathosformeln), as both aesthetic and anthropological configurations obstinately, and often unconsciously, transmitted over the long course of our cultural history.
Georges Didi-Huberman
MNÉMOSYNE 42
Mnemosyne 42 is a work conceived by Georges Didi-Huberman at the invitation of Alain Fleischer. It is a tribute to plate 42 of the atlas Mnemosyne, which is devoted to gestures of lamentation. Mnemosyne 42 is displayed as an outsize, animated atlas plate (approximately 1000 square meters). It is “set” on the floor of the glass-roofed area and is viewed from a walkway, as we would contemplate the sea from the rail of a boat. Its theme is identical, but the examples chosen follow the path that goes from the classical examples dear to Warburg right up to modern and contemporary cinema: Eisenstein with Pasolini, Glauber Rocha with Theo Angelopoulos, Paradjanov with Wang Bing, Jean-Luc Godard with Harun Farocki… The installation also includes ethnological images and documents drawn from political history.
The issue at stake in this work is indeed to give an idea of the energy that survivors unfold over their dead. It even leads to a political interpretation of plate 42 by showing how “populations in tears” [“peuples en larmes”] are liable, under certain circumstances, to spark a gesture of emancipation capable of turning them into “populations with arms” [“peuples en armes”].
Arno Gisinger
ATLAS, SUITE
Atlas, suite is a photographic essay produced by Arno Gisinger at the invitation of Georges Didi-Huberman. It is a both sensory and conceptual montage of images taken in the framework of the exhibition “Atlas,” as it was shown in Hamburg in 2011. Just as the initial exhibition was a sort of “atlas of an atlas,” the work by Arno Gisinger now appears as a new “atlas” of that exhibition: a new perspective showing specific works, specific details and specific moments of its adventure, so as to form an almost cinematographic suite.
This work confronts us therefore with an “exhibition at the time of its technical reproducibility,” a light exhibition, and above all one that has been rethought in photographic terms. It is therefore a work on the photographic medium itself, and on the complex relationships between the works and the different ways in which they can be reproduced and represented So it is less of a set of “pictures from an exhibition” than a sequence of “ghosts from an exhibition,” continually moving on the picture rails of the Palais de Tokyo. Among the peculiarities of Arno Gisinger’s work is for him to arrive at the venue of his new exhibition with just a hard disk in his pocket. He then chooses his formats and his montages according to the space, prints his images on the spot, and glues them directly to the walls. When the exhibition is over, the images are simply destroyed. Thus on every new occasion, he reconstructs everything anew, reassembles and rethinks his material—a way to assert, as every editor of images attempts to, the inexhaustible nature of the possible constellations.
Arno Gisinger
SUITE BURCKHARDT
Arno Gisinger photographed the leafing through the pages of a precious document, which, along with the writings of Warburg, Benjamin, Marc Bloch and W. G. Sebald, constituted an important step in the theoretical considerations on the atlas. It is an old notebook that Jacob Burckhardt transformed, between 1833 and 1836, into a kind of epistemological “boîte-en-valise” [box in a suitcase]. In it, the historian produced numerous montages, comparing sketches, drawing maps, pasting here or there his “ready-mades” of old documents … Let us not forget recall that three major thinkers asserted themselves to be disciples of Burckhardt: the first is no other than Nietzsche, while the remaining two are the two great founders of contemporary art history, Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg.
What aroused Arno Gisinger’s interest is not only the intrinsic importance of this outstanding document, but also the fact that it constitutes on its own a research in graphic layout, which anticipates everything that photographic organization would later allow in Warburg’s work. The photographic approach to the process of leafing through this old working notebook also turns it into something that seems to anticipate problems of a cinematographic nature.
Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher and art historian. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Since 1982 he has published about 50 books on the history and theory of images, the most recent of which, dating from 2013, being L’Album de l’art à l’époque du “Musée imaginaire” (Hazan) and Phalènes. Essais sur l’apparition, 2 (Minuit). He organized several exhibitions including “L’Empreinte” at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1997), “Fables du lieu” at Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, 2001), “Atlas” at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2010), and recently, with Arno Gisinger, “Histoires de fantômes pour grandes personnes” at Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing, 2012) and the Museo de Arte do Rio (Rio de Janeiro, 2013). The exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is a completely new—and final—version of the latter.
Arno Gisinger is an Austrian artist who lives in Paris. He also teaches at the Université de Paris 8. He is developing a practice, which combines photography and historiography, through the work on the representation of the past and the questioning of the status of images in our contemporary societies. Between 2012 and 2014 he elaborated two projects that revolved around the transformation of images when confronted to the spaces where they are to be exhibited: Topoï reconfigures his major works into the space and time of four different exhibitions in Europe, while Atlas, suite questions the complex relationship between the artworks and their photographic interpretations through an exhibition approached from every dimension related to its making. Arno Gisinger has published several books encompassing photography, history and fiction, among them L’Ordinaire de l’oubli (Société française de Photographie, 2001) and Konstellation Benjamin (Transphotographic Press, 2009).
Arno Gisinger is an Austrian artist who lives in Paris. He also teaches at the Université de Paris 8. He is developing a practice, which combines photography and historiography, through the work on the representation of the past and the questioning of the status of images in our contemporary societies. Between 2012 and 2014 he elaborated two projects that revolved around the transformation of images when confronted to the spaces where they are to be exhibited: Topoï reconfigures his major works into the space and time of four different exhibitions in Europe, while Atlas, suite questions the complex relationship between the artworks and their photographic interpretations through an exhibition approached from every dimension related to its making. Arno Gisinger has published several books encompassing photography, history and fiction, among them L’Ordinaire de l’oubli (Société française de Photographie, 2001) and Konstellation Benjamin (Transphotographic Press, 2009).
