Aby Warburg’s Legacy, The Atlas and The Visual Essay: Montage, Editing, Emotion and Gesture

Abstract

Taking as a reference Warburg’s iconology of the interval, this paper attempts to explore the logic of montage, editing and juxtaposition as one of the pillars of contemporary audiovisual creation and research. Warburg’s legacy, more active today than ever, gives priority to transmission, historicity and artistic empathy, and the development of a history of art that is less concerned with periods and authors than with ‘what happens to the observer’ based on the vital, emotional response to the repertoires and afterlife of gestures, the pathos formulae that have been passed down through history, escaping classification into trends. The great project Mnemosyne is an atlas of images conceived as a moving archive. His attention to time shocks and the dialectics of image is a big reference for the use of poetic and critical editing in the work of filmmakers, artists, photographers and writers. But above all, editing and juxtaposition a central tool in contemporary artistic research is its condition of laboratory.

Keywords

• Aby Warburg
• montage
• mnemosyne
• gesture
• visual essay