Atlas: How to carry the world on one's back?

An exhibition that surveys the power of composing, dismembering and reassembling the image.

The crucial show by Georges Didi Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One's Back?, presented earlier in the spring at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, was inspired by the great art historian, Aby Warburg's musings that every image, while maintaining its unique energy, expresses unease, bringing with it other constellations of images and endless references to thought. The show will be presented again in Hamburg so that those who didn't see it in Madrid can see it from May 7 to August 7 at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsrhue, one of the most committed art centres in Europe to contemporary thought. (This time the English version of the catalogue that was sold out in Madrid will also be reprinted).

What drives the Warburgian desire to create an Atlas, shared by many artists in their practice and by Didi Huberman in his bold attempt to open art history to currents of philosophy and psychology? What drives the writer and essayist to disassemble and reassemble the world through his images and where exactly does this gesture lead?

Bertold Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno (the Adorno of the essay as form) are among the tutelary deities of the show that Didi Huberman, as essayist, conceived within a logic of experimentation and testing. And, of course, one cannot help but think about Foucault and Deligny, Deleuze, Borges and Carl Einstein, the Giacometti of the notebooks, Chris Marker or Jean-Luc Godard. Debts are expressed and are infinite. The show's principal merit lies, indeed, in its not being attracted by the allure of the archive, but instead in its being able to show the work of artists—whether painters, filmmakers, writers, photographers—image by image as they compose, decompose and recompose the real in images, and act upon our seeing.

Guy Debord, <i>Guide psychogéographique de Paris: discours sur les passions de l'amour: pentes psychogéographiques de la dérive et localisation d'unités d'ambiance,</i> 1957, lithograph. © MACBA Collection. Consorcio Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. — Guy Debord, *Guide psychogéographique de Paris: discours sur les passions de l'amour: pentes psychogéographiques de la dérive et localisation d'unités d'ambiance,* 1957, lithograph. © MACBA Collection. Consorcio Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

When visiting the show, it is impossible not to dialogue with the texts—not only those of the authors involved in the show but also those of the art historian. "The eye is my favourite, because it invites us to go beyond the glance, beyond what is seen," Alejandra Pizarnik writes in her diary; without losing a bit of what one can see, it is in this spirit that Didi Huberman must have organized the materials in the rooms after the long years of preparation that preceded the show. Today the public benefits from this. To delve into the unconscious memory of the images—what they show and what they hand down to us—becomes the duty of every visitor who has the choice of following the art historian, but creating his/her own path. The imagination is born from the image; every image forms and receives more images.

August Sander, <i>Workers</i>, 1928. © Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2011. — August Sander, *Workers*, 1928. © Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2011.

The Atlas—Didi Huberman seems to say—stimulates the viewer (and much more than the archive!). Not leaving oneself distanced from the images, but discovering a critical distance from which to observe them is the greatest thing that can happen to us—showcase after showcase, notebook after notebook, reproduction after reproduction, painting after painting, movie after movie—in a "dance" that, for the first time, seems to takes into account Benjamin's reflections on the work of art at the time of reproducibility threatening the status of Art with a capital A. In this way, the masterpieces are encountered, but in fact we penetrate what moves them and exceeds them: and so we go. Keeping up, bravely placing thought in balance with the images, leading it to dialogue and live through images, requires a courage and a contempt of risk that are unique in the world that accompanies us.

Handing over to the images the time that they contain and to the viewer not only the ecstasy of what they conceal but also our power and unrest seems to be the challenge that Atlas successfully answers.

Reading room, Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, photographed during the exhibition <i>Ovid,</i> 1927. © Warburg Institute Archive, London. Photo Warburg Institute. — Reading room, Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, photographed during the exhibition *Ovid,* 1927. © Warburg Institute Archive, London. Photo Warburg Institute.

Articulating, dismembering and reassembling the image has always been the passion, the task and the madness of art history and philosophy. Georges Didi Huberman entrusts us with this awareness. Handing over to the images the time that they contain and to the viewer not only the ecstasy of what they conceal but also our power and unrest seems to be the challenge that Atlas successfully answers. Without directing and without forcing, Didi Huberman thus starts only with Aby Warburg (whose ability to know through sight in a non-systematic, non-exhaustive way he acknowledges), but in the company of the centuries, he attempts to transcend him.

Gerhard Richter, <i>Übersicht,</i> 1998. © Collezione Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes. — Gerhard Richter, *Übersicht,* 1998. © Collezione Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes.

Here then, we are surprised to discover the processes that lead to the work of Alighiero Boetti, John Baldessari or Marcel Broothaers, Gerard Richter or Alfredo Jaar, Giuseppe Penone or Sigmar Polke, Robert Morris or Sophie Ristelhueber, Pascal Convert or Harun Farocki. Polemos and quiet in a variety of figures, ruptures and breaks, unions and momentum, raising experience as authority and challenging the authority of his own experience, entering, as Georges Bataille would say, "the "kingdom" that kings themselves enter defeated".
Federico Nicolao

Sol LeWitt, <i>Photo of Florence,</i> r 609, 1976. © LeWitt Collection, Chester, Conneticut, USA. — Sol LeWitt, *Photo of Florence,* r 609, 1976. © LeWitt Collection, Chester, Conneticut, USA.

Atlas: How to Carry the World on One's Back?
ZKM, Museum of Contemporary Art
7 May 2011–7 August 2011

Josef Albers, <i>Quetzalcoatl Monument, Calixtlahuaca,</i> undated photographs mounted on cardboard backing. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany — Josef Albers, *Quetzalcoatl Monument, Calixtlahuaca,* undated photographs mounted on cardboard backing. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany

Marcel Broodthaers, <i>Atlas,</i> 1975, © Collection MACBA. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. — Marcel Broodthaers, *Atlas,* 1975, © Collection MACBA. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Atlas: How to carry the world on one's back?

An exhibition that surveys the power of composing, dismembering and reassembling the image.

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