School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemRobert Smithson’s ghost in 1920s Hamburg: reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a non-site( 2002)While we can discern an archival turn in contemporary art—of works such as Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig (1999) and of exhibitions such as “Deep Storage” (1998)—the aim of this paper is not merely to identify iconologist Aby Warburg as prefiguring that turn, but to read Warburg’s last work in relation to Earth artist Robert Smithson’s non-sites as a means of opening up discussion on the function of art as archive, and archive as art. The work with which we primarily concern ourselves is Warburg’s final unfinished work, Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29)—started the same year as the more famous, equally incomplete collection of quoted texts by Walter Benjamin, his Arcades Project (1927-1940). Warburg has always been regarded as a canonical but maverick figure: he was a founder of iconology (the study of the historical development of iconographic symbols) and the key figure in the revival of the study of Antique art (late in his life, through the agency of the Warburg Institute, located first in Hamburg and later in London). Robert Smithson was arguably the key conceptualist artist in the transition between modernist and postmodernist art; he was also a prolific and influential writer on contemporary art. Both arrived at theorisations of art as archive and of memory storage by art just at the point that the life of each was tragically cut short.