Presentation. : The return to Aby Warburg in the current discourse of Art History

Abstract

The extensive referencing of Aby Warburg’s writings in current Art History investigations is emblematic of an increasing return to theorists and art historians from the beginning of the 20th century, in at least two different areas. On the one hand, some scholars are looking to these earlier theoretical and methodological assumptions as part of an epistemological revision of Art History that enquires into the possibility of knowledge (or non-knowledge) of Renaissance culture. This approach engages with the diversity of Renaissance culture and its gaze upon Antiquity, understanding temporality as a complex and fluid phenomenon. On the other hand, a research stream emerging in Modern and Contemporary Art poses new questions that dislocate meaning and operational concepts and disrupt the categories of analysis used to consider visual production (recent or not). By means of these questions, classificatory constraints and theoretical models founded on supposed objectivity have been newly problematized. The epistemological nature of this return to early 20th century scholarship within these two areas questions the traditional historiographical discourse on art and its considerations of images and time, and naturally leads to interest in the transdisciplinary work of Warburg (and the Warburgians). Within this return to Warburg exists, however, a kind of intellectual anxiety rooted in an emerging consciousness of a fundamental absence: a sort of doubt that arises for historians today out of the interstice between the object of investigation, the nature of its choice, and the art historian’s self-consciousness that rejects totalizing narratives. The present dossier presents texts that reflect on the fertility and political power of Warburguian thought, with regard to the logic of approximation or association of images, works, artistic and cultural references in curatorships of exhibitions, collections and collections of art already constituted and in constitution, of the transits and migrations of images from different eras and contexts in other constellations, previously unthinkable, that donate to the images themselves renewed senses in different areas.