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Iconology has long been associated, and almost automatically so, with the name Panofsky. In recent years, however, increased attention is being paid to his under-appreciated forerunner, Aby Warburg.
As is often pointed out, the significance of Warburg's particular version of iconology lies not in its iconographical discovery of the meaning of pictorial symbols, but in its sharp criticism of the intrusion of nineteenth-century aestheticism into the discipline of art history. A principal achievement of Warburg's iconology, therefore, lies in its attempt to dismantle modern aesthetic premises from the study of art. It should also be noted that Warburg's "Kulturwissenschaft" thoroughly deconstructed the conventional frameworks through which art had previously been interpreted.
Within Warburg's thought there appears a daring cancellation of both aesthetic and hermeneutic paradigms which may be characterized as having the following three dynamic aspects:
First, what might be described as "Crossing the borders of cultural fields;"
Second, "Transcending the boundaries of time and space;"
And third, "Passing beyond the threshold of rational understanding."
In this paper, I will examine Warburg's thought in terms of these three facets with the hope that my comments will contribute to the interdisciplinary, intercultural, and non-logocentric study of art.
1. Crossing the Borders of Cultural Fields
First, let me consider what I have just described as Warburg's "Crossing the borders of cultural fields."
Art occupied a special position as one of the principal cultural fields in the theoretical system of modern European philosophy which developed from the early eighteenth century. In this comprehensive philosophical framework, each branch or field is thought to be differentiated by its own set of particular constitutive principles. In the domain of art, the fundamental or intrinsic law has traditionally been to be "aesthetic."
As a result of this principle, however, there has arisen a tendency to view each work of art - including those which were made before the advent of the modern world or which were produced within non-European cultural traditions - as divorced from its original social, political, or religious context and, moreover, a tendency to appreciate it with a purely aesthetic gaze. As Hans-Georg Gadamer indicated in his book: "Truth and Method," it is this abstract "aesthetic distinction" that has formed the basic presumption behind modern notions of art.
Warburg sharply, and rather cynically, denounced this modern aestheticized concept of art. For example, Warburg described traditional art historians, who zealously and exclusively worshiped their artistic heroes regardless of the social and economic conditions surrounding their artistic products, as "gourmands." He also made no attempt to disguise his plain irritation and disgust at what he called the "cultured tourists" who overran Italy, such as the sentimental Botticelli-admirers or the "superman on their Easter holidays." From this short description, we get a clear sense of Warburg's critical and scornful attitude to the then fashionable ideas of aestheticism.
Warburg's iconology, on the other hand, not only deals with "authentic" or "purely aesthetic" works of art but embraced equally what others might have described as "second-rate" or "impure" products of art. Warburg discussed both the works of "high art" so beloved by the traditional art historians - such as the paintings of Botticelli or Ghirlandaio - as well as objects of the so-called "inferior arts," namely, the decorative or industrial arts. Moreover, tapestries, calendars, stamps, pamphlets, wax figures, and so on were also a favorite part of Warburg's artistic territory. Within his "historical psychology of human expression," these supposedly "lesser" images were examined not for their artistic excellence but as historical documents of contemporary life and people's feelings about the society and culture around them. By analyzing these various materials from philological, iconographical, and stylistic points of view, Warburg revealed the precise conditions of marriage, bank business, church patronage, festivals and pageants, heraldry, astrology, and so on in quattrocento imagery.
Warburg's "Library for Cultural History"(Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek), which was founded in Hamburg in 1902 and transferred to London in 1933, is typical of his pioneering interdisciplinary study of art. Even today, the fundamental concept behind this library remains acutely relevant. Warburg's essential methodology, which refrains from isolating art from other cultural activities while highlighting its social function, is in many respects analogous to the new "Social History" which is now de rigueur in various fields of historical research. Ranging from art history to the study of religion and political economy, Warburg's interpretative method tried to reorganize the multifarious fields of human culture. Through his broad-based and detailed investigation, moreover, Warburg sought to articulate a vision of art as inextricably linked with the fabric of social activity and as deeply permeating the lives of people within society.
Finally, we must not overlook the similarities existing between Warburg's social perception of art and the ideas of "media theory." In particular, Warburg's reference to the social function of reproduced imagery, such as tapestries and prints, calls to mind the art theory of Walter Benjamin. Through his own Renaissance studies, Warburg demonstrated that the popular reproductions circulated during the fifteenth century constituted the same kind of democratic antidote to the worship-value of artistic products as did the motion picture during the early twentieth century.
2. Transcending the boundaries of time and
space
Let me now move to the second aspect of Warburg's thought, namely his "Transcending the boundaries of time and space."
Today, the academic study of art is carried out primarily by art historians. The main interests of many of these professionals are to determine the stylistic features of a given historical age, of a given geographical place, and of a given artistic personality. Art historical research which fails to pay due respect to this orthodox approach has frequently been unappreciated, ignored, or even attacked. As a result, traditional art history has, until very recently, been confined almost exclusively to the art of the western, Christian world from late antiquity to the beginning of the twentieth century. Furthermore, what might be called "influence studies" have tended to take the place of true comparative studies of art, and artistic products from Africa, the ancient Orient, India, and East Asia, not to mention the sand paintings of the Pueblo Indians discussed by Warburg, have rarely been accepted into the mainstream of art history.
Warburg, however, who did not hold a faculty position or a professional appointment, was relatively free from institutionally-imposed restrictions placed upon art-historical time and space. The lifelong theme of his image study, the "Survival of ancient pagan imagery," for example, traversed diachronically unhindered through the flow of historical time. That his exploration steps beyond spatial boundaries, meanwhile, is evident from his famous Congress lecture on the fresco paintings in the Palazzo Schifanoia in 1912, in which the word "iconology" was used in its modern sense for the first time.
His most important achievement in this respect, however, was his lecture on "Serpent Ritual," given in 1923. Here Warburg tried to clarify the function of the magical force which Pueblo Indians believed to be embodied within animal representations, by boldly allowing the ancient and the modern as well as The New World and The Old World to overlap and intermix.
I should add here that Gombrich notes that Warburg had begun to make plans to travel to Japan during his stay in San Francisco following his visit to New Mexico. Interestingly, the library of the Warburg Institute in London preserved several guidebooks about Japan which, I believe, were purchased by Warburg with such a trip in mind. If Warburg's visit to Japan had in fact taken place, it would undoubtedly have resulted in a significant reappraisal of the ancient and contemporary arts of East Asia, particularly Japan, and would have offered an alternative to the prevalent, stereotyped view of the arts of Asia current in Europe and in Japan.
Today, as we live in an internationalized and multiculturalized global society, Warburg's daring inquiry into the meaning of visual representation, which transcended the borders of time and space, suggests a refreshing and illuminating basis for the comparative or anthropological study of art. It must be pointed out that this alternative approach, a kind of "musee imaginaire," must inevitably maintain a degree of distance from the axiological standpoint of the philosophy of European modern aesthetics with its emphasis on the formal, visual, and aesthetic quality of art works. Warburg's version of iconology may, therefore, represent the starting point for a new "international style" of art history.
Incidentally, we should also note that Warburg's detailed examinations and "border-crossing" comparisons of imagery were possible precisely because of his use of photography, the vanguard image technology of Warburg's time. In this sense, his famous "picture atlas," a photographic album titled "Mnemosyne," was in fact the predecessor of the present-day CD-ROM electronic library of art.
3. Passing beyond the threshold of rational
understanding
The third and final framework that should be considered in relation to Warburg's thought is that of rationalism. The philosophy of the Enlightenment, which places absolute confidence in the unlimited capacity of reason, extended even into the theoretical treatment of art. According to the modern aesthetic approach which Warburg so strongly denounced, images must either be under the full control of rationality (as in the case of the applied arts) or decisively separated from it (as in the case of independent, "fine" arts). To the extent that this definition is accepted, Hegel's famous thesis that art will lose its contemporary significance and become something only of the past, is inevitable.
Warburg's thought was in fact positioned well within the philosophical framework of rationalism, and he was unable to extend beyond its invisible horizon. Nevertheless, he remained consistently ambivalent toward the idea of the Enlightenment and its concept that reason emancipates us from darkness. Throughout his life, Warburg could not mitigate his constant anxiety about the uncontrollable, violent power of images. One example of this particular mindset is his "pathos formula," a well-known term he employed for the emotionally exaggerated gesture-forms originating in classical antiquity. As his analysis of this phenomenon makes clear, the final target of his "historical psychology" was to make a psychological balance sheet and to illuminate the double-faced character of the Enlightenment. In short, the obsessive feeling of unrest which permeates Warburg's thought cannot be fully understood through the ordinary optimistic notion of the Enlightenment.
As a result of Warburg's deeply rooted skepticism regarding the competence of reason, he transcended the limitations imposed by an exclusively rational apprehension of artistic imagery and ventured into the realm of the "unconscious." It was during the same period that Sigmund Freud expressed his basic ideas of Psychoanalysis, and like Freud's psychiatric investigation, Warburg's "Psychology of Style" tried to throw light on the dark side of the psyche. In particular, Warburg's aim was to trace the dynamic psychological function of images which cannot be grasped and explained by merely formalistic or purely iconographical methods of art history.
It should also be noted that Warburg's bipolar analysis within his "pathos formula," namely the complex and contradictory action of liberation-degradation or emancipation-repression found within artistic imagery, anticipated the philosophy of the "Dialectic of the Enlightenment" which later came to be advocated by the so-called Frankfurt School of sociology. In fact, the "Warburg Renaissance," especially as it unfolded in Germany, came about as a result of the repeated reconsideration of art historical methodology encouraged by the so-called "critical theory" of the 1970's.
Conclusion
There are, of course, a number of problems or limitations inherent within Warburg's theory of art. For example, Warburg never relinquished his faith in the existence of "great art" in spite of his sharp criticism of the aesthetic-based methods of traditional art history. Furthermore, although Warburg's early recognition of the imagery of native Americans is arguably of significance, his study of their art was colored by a Eurocentric prejudice which imagines the "pagan" world as primitive yet original and full of vital energy. In this sense, he embraced a fantasy of a "paradise of the wild" which was shared by Gauguin, and the German Expressionists whose work Warburg himself admired. It is especially significant, moreover, that he viewed New Mexico as a living Pompeii, and for Warburg, classical antiquity was part of human heritage that must by all means be cherished and preserved. Furthermore, it is essential to recognize the limits of his methodological consciousness, in particular, his extremely positivistic theory of historical interpretation which reveals the bias of the historical context to which he belonged.
In conclusion, Warburg's theory of art-historical interpretation has frequently been described in idealized terms and surrounded with an aura of mystery. To a large extent this has resulted from a failure to accurately assess the above-mentioned problems inherent within Warburg's ideas, something which has in turn arisen from a fundamental lack of basic knowledge concerning his methods and philosophy as well as excessive expectations regarding the current significance of his thought. For a more critical understanding, as well as a demystification, of Warburg's iconology to emerge, a thorough study of his surviving papers and materials as well as a full consideration of the historical period in which he lived is vital.
Furthermore, it is crucial to recognize the full significance of Warburg's iconology as more than merely an unrealized forerunner of the ideas of the post-modernists. The rediscovery of Warburg's ideas and the synchronicity with the New Art History reveals the direct relevance of his art-historical research to current interests in art studies. If future art history is to achieve synthetic studies of images as a social discourse, it will necessitate a re-examination of Warburg's concepts of Art and Interpretation. Having briefly discussed Warburg's adamant stance against modern aestheticism, I would like to caution that art history should not avoid addressing the issues of aesthetics in critical terms.
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Renewed on 26.May 1997.
Copyright 1997Tetsuhiro KATO