Matters of Distance: Walter Benjamin’s dialectical Image, the dynamograms of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, and William Kentridge’s Drawings and the Arrival of fortuna

derek pigrum

About this exposition

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material that Warburg collected to pin to the panels of his Atlas Mnemosyne have their parallel in the printed media of out-of-date illustrated dictionaries, encyclopedias, ledgers and atlases that William Kentridge draws upon.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.

type	research exposition
keywords	dialectical image, dynamogram, fortuna, expendable, reflective- space
date	12/08/2023
published	21/12/2023
last modified	21/12/2023
status	published
affiliation	i2ADS porto University of Fine Art
copyright	Derek Pigrum
license	CC BY
language	British English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2252366/2252367
doi	https://doi.org/10.22501/hub.2252366
published in	HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
portal issue	1. HUB Issue #1 / Autumn 2023 / Distance

name	8277kentridge copy
copyright	William Kentridge, Trieste ledger series (6) 2002 Charcoal on book pages, 9 7/8 x 15 3/8 in (25 x 39 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright: William Kentridge.
license	All rights reserved
usages	picture

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Matters of Distance: Walter Benjamin’s dialectical Image, the dynamograms of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, and William Kentridge’s Drawings and the Arrival of fortuna (2023)

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