the impossible atlas: a montaged collective memory wholeness

In Warburg’s Bilderatlas, montage stands out as a favorable technique that reflects all the complexity, strangeness, tension, eclectic quality, occasional irrationality, and irony of a perspective and form of thought. The harmony of photographs arranged side by side is undoubtedly an expressive form that can be evaluated in an aesthetic context. This complex order is a counterpart to idea conflict, information flow, and document density. Things that appear excessive here have revealed this panel mechanism as a display area that has forced stacking and arrangement toward solution. Therefore, these mechanisms, which turn into a solution combining painting and sculpture, become an expressive field that makes existing complexity understandable through image-metaphor relationship and reveals the image-reference relationship through the possibilities of side-by-side display.

There is no doubt that the multi-part state here disrupts hierarchy during the ordering and stacking phase. However, this situation enriches and expands mixed quality and diversity, collage-related ideas, and hybridizes the rules related to holistic comprehension. The preference for such a mixed technique that contributes to the part-whole relationship, appropriate to the nature of the available material, within an understanding of contact and distance of a new order is therefore important. Indeed, it is highly probable that the montage thought we encounter in Warburg emerges as a display solution and becomes clear as a solution for such a narrative.

Meanwhile, the panels are a bold performance created as an installation as an image and visual field, in accordance with Warburg’s personal discourse and historical flow thought, an aesthetic event loaded with pleasures specific to artistic practices. It is a sculptural production that is liberated as a strategic display element that can reflect conflicting subjects, conflicting coexistences, or measured convergences such as contact and distance, with intellectual justifications and controversial issues.

Therefore, with his panel display, Warburg creates an image inventory that virtually divides all artistic accumulation of the cultural past into pieces, brings together his visual information elements, and constructs a field of multiple possibilities (Atlas) that establishes special and attractive sub-narrative areas. He takes care to realize this within an understanding of visual language and order at a minimum level. In this context, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne panels emerge as a discourse model for multi-part, mixed-language displays.

In this context, it is inevitable that such productions in the field of contemporary art, which take their basic reference from Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, capture new ways of meaning production in the irregular togetherness of image and text relationships. It is natural that this method or perspective, which excessively challenges the existing language, evolves into a position that has occasionally lost its control within an extremity that demands an intellectual and cognitive relationship plane. In this context, thematically stacked image sequences have not delayed in producing original plastic solutions. At this stage, even the empty formal repetition of modular sequencing having aesthetic sensation is an indicator of this potential.

Therefore, as a matter of fiction, this approach that backs up stacking and repetition, this display and production preference based on reinforcement, opens a special area for itself with a language and meaning conflict drawn into the thematic context. Just as seen in Taryn Simon, it turns into a speculative and social realist, radical display. By insistently using the same dimensions, Simon, who balances sterile form repetition with the tragic contents of photographs, presents us with a minor atlas initiative integrated with aesthetic understanding. Likewise, productions by Christian Boltanski, Gilbert & George, Tobias Buche, and Gerhard Richter, established in the mysterious and attractive area of a new display principle in this direction, gain importance as works dedicated to shouldering the burden of the world.

In any case, Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne panels, with their potential evolving to the level of artwork, represent form and meaning relationships in an accurate and powerful way. Despite remaining unfinished, they possess a provocative quality and adequacy with their wholeness and aesthetic associations. ♦