2013 Friday October 18 at 2 pm / Aby Warburg: the History of Art as a Scene / by Philippe-Alain Michaud / kindly hosted by the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem

14:00 - 16:15 in the auditorium of the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem
Address: Utrechtseweg 87 / 6812 AA Arnhem
For students at DAI / ArtEZ the entrance is free (student card)

Aby Warburg: the History of Art as a Scene

Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the great German art historian, founder of the school of iconology, who left his name to the famous Warburg Institute today based in London, also accomplished a drastic displacement of the concepts, on which his discipline has founded its main principles. This displacement has not so far been analysed in its ultimate consequences. In his studies of the Renaissance Warburg is not trying anymore to interpret or analyze the visual facts of the past, but rather to reactivate it, substituting therefore one meaning of the notion of representation to another. This is not a question of knowledge anymore, but rather a question of presence. To understand this shift, one has to come back to the journey Warburg made in 1895 to Arizona, where he attended the Hopi rituals, and to the consequences of this journey - that is the invention of a new method in history of art, borrowed from the recently born technology of film.



Philippe-Alain Michaud is curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in charge of the film collection. He is the author of Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York, Zone Books, 2006) and has written extensively on the relationships between art and film. He has also curated a number of exhibitions dedicated to the same topics.


This lecture is curated by Alena Alexandrova in the context of her theory seminar  Anarcheologies , taking place at the DAI in the current academic year, under the umbrella of the course How To Do Things With Theory.