Like no other art scholar, Aby Warburg still drives the exegetes of his legacy to this day.
In particular, Warburg's picture atlas “Mnemosyne” inspires ever new hermeneutical considerations due to its incompleteness and connectivity, which can be based on a huge bundle of only partially raised sources, notepads, letters and diaries in the London archive.
The increasing density of the edition, but still knowing about huge blank spots, means that much of what is published about Warburg has to be supplemented at the moment of its publication.
The most prominent example is the recent publication of the last documented version of the picture atlas. Admittedly, this knows how to convince by reconstructing Warburg's main work to a large extent with the original image material and thus allowing it to emerge from the deceptive black and white of any reproductions. But like the many analog and digital editions before her, she also makes her forget that Warburg's atlas tables on this side of the last version were often not flat surfaces, but three-dimensional reliefs on which open books, sometimes stacked one behind the other, in which could be leafed through, or plastic casts of artifacts invited to manipulate and, at the same time, archaeological uncovering of layers of images.
It's not just science that revels in Warburg.
In the past, artists too have often picked up the open ends of Warburg's picture arrangements and spun them on poetically in a wide variety of media - for example RB Kitaj with “Warburg as a maenad” in painting, Joan Jonas with “The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things ”in the performance installation or Terry Gilliam with“ Twelve Monkeys ”in the feature film.
Ceiling-high room installation
The most recent reminiscence of Warburg comes from Marcel Odenbach. The complex "suddenly one could be like the other" set up as a collection satellite # 6 in Krefeld's Kaiser Wilhelm Museum consists of two parts: a 3-channel video projection and an analog room installation. The starting point for both parts is Friedrich Denekens' collection of teaching and models, which was created around 1900 and which had the first director of the Krefeld Museum, with both educational and economic impetus, put together hundreds of reproductions of works of fine and applied art, and which the curator of the exhibition, Sylvia Martin, uncovered and has now raised awareness of the public by Odenbach.
The room installation “Untitled” papered two walls of the room in which that teaching and model collection was originally located, ceiling-high with paper black and white reproductions of hundreds of “teaching and role models” that are semantically differently linked. The room also gains a historical feel because this horror vacui piece of furniture is set apart from the foil, an empty display cabinet and three tables with stacks of photocopied teaching pictures that belong to the original furniture of the reading room. Coupled with this room is a second room, which is used for a three-channel video projection entitled “Fraud”.