1The art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and the artist-researcher Arno Gisinger revisit the genesis and different steps of their joint project, which originated in the exhibition “Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back?” created by Georges Didi-Huberman for the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. In their two texts, the authors consider the historical and theoretical stakes related to image montages as a type of architecture of knowledge.

An exhibition in the age of its technological reproducibility

2Georges Didi-Huberman

3First, there was the exhibition “Atlas.”1 It was quite a massive and complex undertaking (I don’t recall the exact number of square meters in the large, splendid halls of Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía: between two thousand and two thousand five hundred). At the ZKM - Museum für Neue Kunst in Karlsruhe - the exhibition was a bit more limited in size, but at Hamburg’s Sammlung Falckenberg the space was even larger (nearly five thousand square meters, I believe, over several floors of its complex architecture). The work was intense, tense, in every sense of the word, with fairly short preparation times, even though it was based on questions I had been reflecting on for several years regarding what I call “knowledge through images,” which is also, inevitably, knowledge through montages of images. It was an exhibition on - with, through - such montages: it was, therefore, more precisely, a great montage of image montages, a great atlas of atlases of images.

4Tense work, too, because my approach to the question of atlases wasn’t without a polemical attitude - whether conspicuous or not, I don’t know - vis-à-vis certain theoretical models that the contemporary art world has internalized as all the more clear-cut because they have never been made explicit, let alone challenged (I am particularly thinking of the cliché of an historical and aesthetic division between “modernism,” “antimodernism,” and “postmodernism”). Hence my passionate discussions with Manolo Borja Villel, the director of the Reina Sofía Museum. Our periodic meetings over the eight or nine months prior to the exhibition’s opening proved decisive in every sense of the word: theoretically important - precisely because we confronted and harmonized our respective aesthetic and historical models - and immediately productive of very concrete decisions on the final content of what was going to be presented to museumgoers. In visiting the installation of Reina Sofía’s permanent collections, I had noticed the extent to which Manolo felt personally concerned by the question of image atlases, even though at that time, I believe, he didn’t yet appreciate the necessary distinction between the atlas and the archive, the latter of which was very much in fashion at the time. That is why I chose not to act as the “absolute master” of the works to be exhibited - the position of absolute master, legitimized by one’s own abstract authority, has always seemed abhorrent to me, ethically as well as epistemically - but rather to talk over with him every theoretical perspective, every artist, and every word we envisioned for the exhibition.

5The great benefit I gained from my position was that I learned an enormous amount from someone who knew the situation of contemporary art from the inside (which isn’t the case for me). The difficulty was that I constantly had to defend and justify, but also to clarify, my overarching intention as well as my choices of detail, my “rules” as well as my “exceptions.” Being a non-professional curator - my work environment isn’t the museum or gallery, a public institution or the art market - I was sometimes confronted with reasoning that utterly escaped me or, when I could make sense of it, even enraged me (for example, when an artwork was considered unworthy of being exhibited because of the simple fact that it had already hung from the museum’s walls, or when certain institutions refused us loans for cultural-strategic reasons: no large Boetti “because” a retrospective will soon be taking place, etc.). But once the works were hung, I understood how much the final result owed to all the tensions, to all the preliminary discussions, to all the haggling, which contrast so much with the sovereign but potentially solipsistic work of the solitary researcher. Without these challenges, the exhibition may have had more breadth, but it probably would have been more naïve and, in any event, less relevant.

6The same tension - the same dialectical or dialogical confrontations - was also part of the Hamburg exhibition, since we had to take into account the specific contributions of the Falckenberg Collection and, therefore, the viewpoints of a collector who fiercely “de fended” the logic of the space and his choice of images (for example, by increasing the space allotted to Hanne Darboven or Dieter Roth, or by introducing new artists such as Gerhard Rühm, Arthur Köpcke, Richard Hamilton, Anthony McCall, etc.). In order to turn our debates into a new interplay of montages and our mutual disagreements into common experimentations with arrangements, Harald Falckenberg and I ended up literally transforming the initial presentation at the Reina Sofía without, however, losing track of or weakening its theoretical intent - quite the contrary. While Aby Warburg was the guiding light of the exhibition, which took his atlas of images Mnemosyne as its point of departure, it was the dialectical thought of Walter Benjamin - his thinking on “dialectical images” - that was its driving force in terms of development, process, and result.

7Nowadays, all professionals and enthusiasts of contemporary art are - or believe themselves to be - familiar with Benjamin’s ideas. For starters, everyone knows - or believes they know - the theoretical lessons of his famous text on “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in its two versions from 1935 and 1938.2 The importance of such a text for the “art world” is all the stronger because it practically begins by taking a position on the politics of art, which is the motivation behind the questions that such a world asks itself, especially in the context of major museums or educational institutions like the Reina Sofía Museum, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, or the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg: “the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art,” Benjamin writes, “differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purposes of fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.”3

8In a museum like the Reina Sofía, where no less than Picasso’s Guernica hangs - and where Manolo Borja has had the additional pedagogical daring of putting on view certain controversial historical documents such as the film of Buenaventura Durruti’s funeral in 1936 - the question of such a “politics of art” is obviously crucial. Indeed, technological reproducibility is at the center of museum “policies”: today, modern art museums exhibit as many “reproducible” works (engravings, photographs, films, various editions of objects and books) as “original” works (paintings, sculptures, drawings), which is a valuable way to question and shift aesthetic hierarchies. But we have to remember that the primary political lesson that Benjamin draws here in fact has to do with the divide between “cult value” and “exhibition value,” the second of which accounts for “the aura’s present decay,”4 the equivalent of the degradation of the world of images.

9Benjamin explained the division in the following terms: “Art history might be seen as the working out of a tension between two polarities within the artwork itself, its course being determined by shifts in the balance between the two. These two poles are the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value. Artistic production begins with figures in the service of magic. What is important for these figures is that they are present, not that they are seen. The elk depicted by Stone Age man on the walls of his cave is an instrument of magic, and is exhibited to others only coincidentally; what matters is that the spirits see it. Cult value as such even tends to keep the artwork out of sight: certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain images of the Madonna remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are not visible to the viewer at ground level. With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has a fixed place in the interior of a temple. A panel painting can be exhibited more easily than the mosaic or fresco which preceded it.”5

10The problem becomes a great deal more complicated as soon as we recognize that this “working out of a tension” that Benjamin identifies - and politically even promotes - between cult value and exhibition value would soon be absorbed, dissolved, destroyed in what we might call the cultural value of art today, where the word “culture” must be understood not in the anthropological sense, which is the only interesting one, but in the sense that different “ministries,” responsible for its preservation and prestige, determine to give it. In other words, exhibition value has become cult value in the fullest sense of the term: from the split between cult and exhibition, we have moved to the cult of the exhibition, and such is the problem with which every “politics of art” is today confronted. What happens when, by “magic” - a magic first revealed in inter-museum and sometimes inter-governmental negotiations and “insurance value” - twenty-two of the thirty-five existing Vermeer paintings are assembled in the same exhibition space, or when the icons of Sinai leave their silent monasteries for the first time and end up in the middle of Manhattan on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. These are the moments when genuine bourgeois-tourist pilgrims make their way to The Hague or New York. Only the “cult aura” can explain why people probably otherwise quite reasonable - would spend seven hours waiting in line in the snow to attend an exhibition.

11Cult value’s spectacular takeover of exhibition value no doubt explains a certain number of tensions, or for that matter contradictions, that I sensed in Madrid during the preparations for “Atlas.” In a bold and exemplary museum like the Reina Sofía, no one doubted that the issue of technological reproducibility was at the heart of what one might call the atlas’s modernity. The fact that Warburg’s plates no longer exist in the original in no way detracts, even formally, from their effect when they are reproduced; the fact that Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise exists in multiple iterations in no way detracts from its historical and aesthetic “value” - quite the contrary. But, in a major art museum like the Reina Sofía, things couldn’t be pushed too far: display a photograph, yes, but it absolutely had to be a vintage photograph (this was the case for Moholy-Nagy’s work, among others); display a manuscript, yes, but it absolutely had to be the original, thus excluding the possibility of facsimiles (this was the case for W. G. Sebald’s work as well as for Malevich’s “atlas,” which the MOMA refused to loan). It was no coincidence that spaces that are less “cultic” - those that aren’t yet the site of pilgrimage - and more experimental like the ZKM and the Falckenberg Collection didn’t hesitate, over two successive stops of the “Atlas” exhibition, to display Warburg’s, Claude Simon’s, and Sebald’s precious manuscripts in the non-precious form of their facsimile reproductions. Since, according to the ancient adage, “all that is rare is dear,” we can see why the cult value of artworks in large part intersects with their market value, and why the venerated god of this whole story bears a vague resemblance to the sacrosanct Art Market.

12Walter Benjamin, however, argued that the significance of technological reproduction “extends far beyond the realm of art.”6 Thus, if we want to take the lesson of this great thinker seriously, first of all, we should recognize that the economics of the exhibition constantly tends to reincorporate technological reproducibility into the realm of art; second, we must therefore attempt to re-dissociate, within the realm of art itself, the exhibition value from its own specific cult value. For example, by finding alternative forms of exhibition that cut through - or subvert - the cultural-cultic economy of prestige, market-magic value, and the sacred status of the images on display in the spaces of contemporary art. If, as Benjamin suggests, at the broadest level of political anthropology, “the crisis of democracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions governing […] public presentation”7 (it is, of course, above all a question of the presentation of politicians themselves), is it not urgent that we ceaselessly invent new forms - because they are quickly exhausted, reincorporated - for the public exhibition of images?

13An exhibition like “Atlas” naturally called for these kinds of reflections, since the atlas of images is a form - at once a form of knowledge and a visual form - that is historically inseparable from the conditions of reproducibility of the elements of which it is composed. It was only logical that, as it traveled, the exhibition would gradually lose the “rarest,” the most “unique,” and the “dearest” elements: indeed, it was difficult to transport for an extended time the Roman marble from Seville, Marcel Broodthaers’s especially fragile sculpture, Giamcometti’s masterpiece On ne joue plus, and Paul Klee’s volatile herbaria. If Arthur Rimbaud’s atlas - an object otherwise extremely fragile, already nearly in tatters - followed the exhibition’s itinerary until the end, it is probably because the librarians at the library-museum in Charleville-Mézières didn’t understand how extraordinary the object was precisely because of its “holes,” that is, the cut-outs the poet had made in the atlas’s geographical plates. Thus, at our arrival - in the galleries in Hamburg, which were less “royal” and, all in all, more “industrial” than in Madrid - there were somewhat more photographs and artworks linked to reproduction generally, as with Hanne Darboven’s work, Guy Debord’s large series, or the immense Walker Evans (not a print in the usual sense, but an enlargement that he himself made), whose anonymous faces I had the opportunity to compare with the no-less immense gallery of famous men by Gerhard Richter (it, too, presented in its photographic version).

14Simultaneously, several institutions, whether museums or not, asked me to bring the exhibition to them. In particular, I heard through Stefanie Baumann that requests to that effect had come from Beirut and Rio de Janeiro. But these types of projects are impossible to pull off as conventional traveling exhibitions, on the one hand, because of the limited-term loans of the artwork, on the other, because of the financial cost and space required for such an exhibition. The idea then came to me quite naturally - in other words, as the logical continuation of the Warburgian and Benjaminian hypotheses from which “Atlas” had been conceived - of putting together an exhibition in the age of its technological reproducibility: an exhibition of varying size (be it miniscule), easily transportable throughout the world, and, especially, on a reasonable budget. Moreover, as my work took me from Madrid to Karlsruhe and from Karlsruhe to Hamburg, I had acquired a taste for experimentation - always potentially renewed - with the scale of the exhibition and the “narrative” modifications of its installation. Here, once again, Benjamin elucidates the principle in his text on technological reproducibility, whose “age” is typified by what he calls the “capacity for improvement” of the configuration of images, whose reassembly is always possible, in potential if not in fact8 (although it is up to us alone to transform this potential into fact).

15Finally, the idea for an “exhibition in the age of its technological reproducibility” may have only occurred to me in the abstract, and may not have occurred to me at all, had I not benefited from the instincts of the person who, better than any other, could pull the project off: Arno Gisinger. I had gotten to know his photographic work better from the project Konstellation: Walter Benjamin en exil.9 The latter, which not only displays a deep understanding and a genuine “to the letter” appreciation of certain of Benjamin’s major ideas, matched perfectly with the working conditions - travel, mobility, maneuverability of formats according to the exhibition space - required for such a project.

16Gisinger had abandoned (how daring and how wise!) the classic photographic print and its concomitant market-aesthetic value. There are thus no vintage prints to reverently collect among his work, no image offered as the nec plus ultra of its object aura. In short, no paintings. Although very high technical expertise defines his photographs - whether grain or pixel, in their range of colors and composition - they exist primarily on the flash drive he has in his pocket when he arrives at the exhibition space, let us say, in Beirut or Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition value of his work is therefore systematically dissociated from any kind of cult value. He assesses the space in which he is supposed to exhibit then decides on the number, order, and, in particular, the scale - which can vary quite a lot - of his images. He pastes pictures on the walls that are perfectly adapted to and not imposed on the space that contains them. When everything is finished, everything is destroyed. Unlike the great “altarpieces” of certain famous photographers, so heavy in their picture frames and so laden with “insurance value” - there is no object to worship.

17Gisinger thus agreed to photograph the exhibition “Atlas” in its ultimate version - in Hamburg - and he did so by immersing himself in every aspect of the museum work: the several thousand images he produced show every stage of the setup, hanging, and disassembly of the exhibition. And it is from this huge body of work that “Afteratlas” ( “Atlas, Suite”) took shape, opening up multiple possibilities for reassembly - new connections, new contrasts, new constellations, and the beginnings of new stories - which all these images carry with them. In short, “Afteratlas” would be an exhibition without cult value (what “Atlas,” with its collection of masterpieces, hadn’t yet achieved), thereby realizing a commitment inherent in Benjamin’s “politics of art.”

18But things are perhaps still more complex. For while Benjamin was content with the opposition between the painting as “uniqueness and permanence” and the reproduction as “transitoriness and repeatability,”10 Gisinger goes further, re-dialecticizing every term of the opposition: by adapting his “sequels” or “constellations” to each exhibition space, he turns technological reproducibility into an instrument of non-repeatability and even uniqueness, since each exhibition - from Le Fresnoy to Rio and from Beirut to the Palais de Tokyo - was necessarily very different from the others. At the same time, visitors could later use the “deck of cards” of the catalogue to invent new configurations, in other words, new significations, on their own walls, tables, or floors, thereby liberating this “optical unconscious” to which, in Benjamin’s view, every reassembly worthy of the name gives unique access.11

Jacob Burckhardt, Alterthümer, 1833-1836. Jacob Burckhardt-Stiftung, Basel. Photograph: Arno Gisinger.

Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnesmosyne, 1929. The Warburg Institute, London.

Arno Gisinger / Georges Didi-Huberman, L’oeil de l’enfant sur le cauchemar de l’histoire (Pascal Convert), from the series Nouvelles histoires de fantômes, 2012.

Arno Gisinger / Georges Didi-Huberman, Histoires de fantômes pour grandes personnes. Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing, 2012. Exhibition view. Photograph: Arno Gisinger.

Arno Gisinger / Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, Suite. Museu de Arte de Rio, Rio de Janeiro, 2013. Exhibition view. Photograph: Paula Huven.

Arno Gisinger / Georges Didi-Huberman, Nouvelles histoires de fantômes. Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014. Exhibition view. Photograph: Romain Darnaud.

Arno Gisinger / Georges Didi-Huberman, Afteratlas. Beirut Art Center, Beirut, 2013. Exhibition view. Photograph: Arno Gisinger.

Arno Gisinger / Georges Didi-Huberman, Afteratlas. Beirut Art Center, Beirut, 2013. View of installation/collage. Photograph: Beirut Art Center.

19The art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman is among those who have thoroughly absorbed Walter Benjamin’s theories on how photography transforms works of art. In parallel with his theoretical work, he has developed over the years his own authentic practice of photography. This practice is not that of a photographer-artist nor that of an applied photographer: like a cameraman or editor, Didi- Huberman apprehends the world through framing - or rather through de-framing. He observes, scrutinizes, and carves out the real; he takes shots, he captures images; he tries to understand the world of objects through the act of photography. It would be tempting to say that he thinks, that he organizes his thought, photographically. His pictures of tree roots, taken in a park in Rio de Janeiro on a Sunday afternoon, instantly become the basis for reflection on the questions of rootedness and revolt. The approach is exactly the same when he studies Fra Angelico. He photographs in situ all the details of the artworks (as well as their settings) in order to understand the artist’s work and the viewer’s place. Photography literally triggers the art historian’s thought.

20For nearly two centuries, we have been accustomed to seeing and thinking works of art by way of their multiple photographic transformations and reproductions, without which we have a hard time even imagining them. Walter Benjamin’s theories about the aura, Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, and André Malraux’s Musée imaginaire have become commonplace in the history of twentieth-century Western art, which for a very long time considered photography solely as a means of reproduction. Its role was to serve as the “humble handmaid” of the arts and sciences, as Charles Baudelaire described in his famous text on the Salon of 1859:

Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty, which is that of handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature. Let photography quickly enrich the traveler’s album, and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons. So far so good. Let it save crumbling ruins from oblivion, books, engravings, and manuscripts, the prey of time, all those precious things, vowed to dissolution, which crave a place in the archives of our memories; in all these things, photography will deserve thanks and applause.12

21The Salon of 1859 can be viewed as the writer’s ex negative recognition of the birth of a new medium, even if a certain positivistic and dichotomous nineteenth-century thinking would long exclude photography from the realm of art. Despite this, the invention of photography itself is intimately and deontologically linked to the question of its relation to artworks.13 The first “heliographic” experiments conducted by Nicéphore Niépce were guided by the issues of transfer, reproducibility, and multiplicity. Around 1845, the photographic diptych14 that shows William Henry Fox Talbot in Reading, working in his studio on his book The Pencil of Nature, brings to the foreground of photography what would become two of its principal subjects: the human figure (portrait) and the reproduction of works of art (paintings and sculptures).

22On the theoretical side, and in the broader context of an archeology of nineteenth-century knowledge, the birth of the idea of photography15 was not without consequence for the history of modern art. Indeed, as Siegfried Kracauer observed in the 1960s,16 photography was not only contemporary but consubstantial with the invention of history as a discipline. The question thus arises for art history: how did photography change art historians’ methodologies?

Jacob Burckhardt: thinking art through images

23As one pages through Jacob Burckhardt’s logbook Alterthümer, one witnesses the birth of a new mode of visual thought, a new methodology, still pre-photographic but already anchored in the principles of field observation and the display of artworks through images. Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) created and “assembled” this fascinating document between 1833 and 1836 by repurposing an old accounting ledger, which he transformed into a kind of epistemological “boîte-en-valise”: in it, the (art) historian produced numerous montages, comparing sketches, inserting maps, and pasting his ready-mades of old documents. Three important thinkers would later declare themselves Jacob Burckhardt’s disciples: the first is none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, followed by the two great founders of contemporary art history, Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg.

24These last two incorporated photography in systematic although quite different ways into their historiographical practice: the first, from a normative perspective, the second, from a pragmatic one. At the end of the nineteenth century, art historians otherwise at the forefront of their discipline realized somewhat belatedly that the understanding and transmission of works of art had become inconceivable without photography. Its growing presence in the realm of publishing (the first images printed on a large scale) and teaching (transparent photographs projected on screens) would have a profound heuristic impact on the discipline.

Heinrich Wölfflin: how to photograph sculpture (?)

25Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who in 1893 succeeded Jacob Burckhardt to the renowned Chair of Art History at the University of Basel in Switzerland, systematically used photographic reproductions in his courses. In a classroom submerged in darkness, he organized his lectures around two side-by-side screens in order to compare projected images. This double projection allowed him to make normative judgments of artworks as well as to assess the quality of the photographic reproductions. Indeed, Wölfflin understood photography as no more than an instrument for illustration, following in the tradition of the “very humble handmaid.” He recognized the impact of photographic reproduction on the perception of artworks, especially sculptures, and looked to impose on photographers the way in which they ought to reproduce them.

26In his programmatically entitled essay “Wie man Skupturen aufnehmen soll” ( “How One Should Photograph Sculpture”), published in three parts in the German review Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst in 1896, 1897, and 1915,17 he even goes so far as to define the photographic viewpoint from which a classical sculpture should be represented. According to his arguments, there is only a single correct perspective - frontal - which is precisely the one that photographers should adopt. Moreover, the photographer should refrain from any stylistic effects, such as the addition of special lighting. But even if we imagine that all photographic parameters could be eliminated, a photographic reproduction remains a photograph. The most “neutral” point of view remains a point of view, and every framed shot ultimately remains a framed shot. No doubt increasingly aware of these facts, Wölfflin ingeniously added a question mark to the title of his third article, published in 1915: “How Should One Photograph Sculpture?”

Aby Warburg: the atlas principle

27The approach of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) to photography is a great deal less normative than Wölfflin’s or Malraux’s.18 Even if the Mnemosyne Atlas is formally rooted in the codes governing the representation and organization of knowledge specific to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its plasticity as well as the light weight of the photographic material allow for ever new interpretations. Warburg also used photography as a mediation of his thought, and this in two different ways. On the one hand, his atlas is made up of photographic images that he specially ordered or bought, among which there are also printed pictures from the press. On the other hand, he used photography to reproduce and systematize different constellations of his atlas. In an irony of history, only photographic reproductions of the Warburgian atlas now remain. These glass plates, created by one of his assistants, are preserved at the Warburg Institute Library in London.19

Photographing “Atlas,” the original

28The principle of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is intimately linked with photography; meeting at the intersection of Benjaminian and Warburgian theories, then, Didi-Huberman and I had an immediate understanding when he asked me to devise a sequel to his exhibition “Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back?” Transforming the experience of the exhibition into images became the central concern and modus operandi of this new form of collaboration between art historian and photographer. Didi-Huberman had already created his personal atlas of images from his digital archives, providing the iconographic basis for the exhibition “Atlas” (the original), a body of work published in the exhibition catalogue of the Reina Sofía Museum.20 One of the particularities of the exhibition was the underlying assumption that authors are producers of new forms and that artists, in turn, produce thought. It led to the coexistence of artworks (paintings, sculptures, photographs, etc.) and multiple other objects (books in display cases, film projections, etc.) that each had its own specific status (original, facsimile, etc.). Only photography could capture and bring these different objects of thought to the same level of attention.

29The shots of the exhibition in Hamburg in November 2011 were thus conceived with a view to photographic “transformation” rather than “information.” The tribute paid to these material and immaterial works was meant to be resolutely subjective while at the same time seeking to express both the regard of a moving spectator and the specificities of the photographic act itself. Accordingly, the photographs show the photographed object (or rather its absence) and the details of their own means of production: the technological device involved, the framing, focal length, and depth of field, the moiré effects of a television screen, etc. The distinctive features of the Falckenberg Collection’s exhibition spaces (numerous galleries over several floors, labyrinthine stairwells, windows with multiple views, “neutral” neon lighting, etc.) also played a decisive role in the visual language developed. The photographic work, which encompasses the different phases of setting up and taking down the exhibition, presents the exhibition not as a final product but as a process.

Assembling “Afteratlas”/ “Atlas, suite”

30Following “Atlas,” we broke up the spatial and temporal unity of the pictures in order to construct the photographic sequel to the exhibitions. Like Warburg, we used our picture box to reconfigure it, to give it various forms at different phases of the project. A batch of 1,200 pictures, spread out like a deck of cards on a table, provided the basis for the four different constellations we exhibited between 2012 and 2014: at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, the Museu de Arte do Rio in Brazil, the Beirut Art Center in Lebanon, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. At each step, we developed a new version of the installation that took into account the specific features of the space by adapting our selection of images, formats, and material.

31At Le Fresnoy, which is at once a research, a production, and an exhibition space, photographs on poster paper extended along a 400-foot passageway of the large hall and were destroyed at the end of the exhibition. In Rio de Janeiro, the exhibition space had no walls. Another ephemeral form thus had to be found: the photographs were printed on boards, which were then arranged into islands on the floor like files or books opened on a table - all within a museum space that would soon become a library. At the end of the exhibition, the boards were transformed into furniture that was specially created for the project and that is now used for educational purposes at the museum. The third stop, at the Beirut Art Center, was inspired by Aby Warburg’s notion of Wanderung. The choice of forms and formats (large posters of 356 x 252 cm) was influenced by the omnipresence of political and advertising posters in Beirut’s urban environment. Our idea was to bring these images into the exhibition space.

32It was under the large glass roof of the Palais de Tokyo in 2014 that the journey’s adventure of experimentations came to an end. Under the title “Nouvelles histoires de fantômes” [ “New Ghost Stories”] the exhibition returned to and developed the principle already in place at Le Fresnoy: a dialogue between Mnemosyne 42 and “Afteratlas”/ “Atlas, Suite,” between projected images and paper, but on a larger scale and as part of a new experience for visitors. In this way, through these four variations of the project, we tried to ask questions about the multiple relationships between photography and art history. How do photographic images transform works of art? Can photography become a critical tool for analyzing what we consider a work of art, for analyzing its role and social functions within the interpretive system that we commonly call “art”?

33For several years, this complex and crucial question has attracted the attention of a certain number of scholars, art critics, and cultural institutions.21 In a recent work, the German art historian Felix Thürlemann has proposed the concept of “hyperimage” in order to think about the production of images and the visual constructions of the contemporary world in a new way.22 According to him, collectors, curators, art historians, and artists are all creators of hyperimages. In exhibitions, essays, illustrated art books, or the classroom, they construct arrangements, montages of ephemeral ensembles, that each time lead to new interpretations of the works of art. In the last two centuries, the status of photography has transformed from the humble handmaid of the arts and sciences to the prolific producer of hyperimages.

34NB: A first version of these texts was published (with different illustrations) in the Palais de Tokyo’s review Le Palais on the occasion of the exhibition “Nouvelles histoires de fantômes” in 2014.