Research Catalogue

What Walter Benjamin calls a ‘dialectical image,’ Aby Warburg a dynamogram and William Kentridge fortuna are a sudden occurence in the distance between the past and a ‘now’ of recognizability of a new constellation. The nature of the vast number of citations that Benjamin compiled from the sources available to him in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris for his Arcades Project, the thousands of reproductions of Renaissance works of art and other contemporary material that Warburg collected to pin to the panels of his Atlas Mnemosyne have their parallel in the printed media of out-of-date illustrated dictionaries, encyclopedias, ledgers and atlases that William Kentridge draws upon. Benjamin’s notation, the panels of Warburg’s Atlas and the print media of Kentridge are seen as expendable, reflective spaces, linked to potentiality but free from the pressure of preservation. The new, unforeseen constellations that arise are posited against a cohesive but reductive linear whole or progression. The montage is the medium used by all three where the intervals or distance between images is what generates the assembly, disassembly and reassembly of images or citations that, in the case of Benjamin, generates fragmentary essays, in Warburg in his convoluted theoretical writings based on the dynamograms he perceived in the panels of the Atlas, and in Kentridge the various stages of his process of drawing that he stop-frame films and projects.

The idea of the exposition was triggered by an email exchange between artists Mike Croft and Derek Pigrum on 30th November 2022. The two artists have for more than a year been maintaining an email correspondence on matters of mutual interest concerning their visual practice and theoretical explorations. On this occasion Croft had read something by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the automaton, the latter of which he knew to be of great interest to Pigrum, the email to Pigrum of which opens the exposition. The resulting email response from Pigrum has as its point of focus a visit he had made the day before to the KHM (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in his home city, Vienna, where what he terms ‘the automation of contingency that generates repetition’ was as usual in operation. The references Pigrum made in the email to his own artistic work and existing works of art and cultural and historical artefacts suggested his text might be divided and illustrated, the resulting format of which is the present exposition. Several additional responses to the email exchange’s content ensued, termed interventions in the exposition, leading to a closing email exchange dated 11th December 2022. A third email exchange between 13th and 14th December has resulted in a Postscript section. Croft’s contribution pivots, he suggests, around Lacan’s coined term ab-sense, very approximately interpreted to mean absence of meaning between patterns or continuum – in the linguistic context signifiers –that are nonetheless not reducible to mere nonsense. The running through, as it were, of contingency in Pigrum’s practice – which he points out is not his only interest and prompts a need to show the broader picture, as it were, a pivotal influence for him being Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne – may be considered informed by sense more so than meaning. The exposition is an example of how an ongoing correspondence can be an important aspect of each artist’s practice.