Art and history

Rothko Toast + Jams: SFMOMA for Jogging, 2013

Acme bread, apricot butter, and wild blueberry jam!

aby warburg tried to find the silver lining of chaos, and that is (literally) how the new exhibition at the museo nacional centro de arte reina sofía in madrid starts. warburg used his bilderatlas mnemosyne project to give meaning to the world, using the same techniques that artists throughout history have used to understand their own reality. collectionism, serialism, structuralism (in its literal meaning). but this is not something constricted to art, we all build schemes and structures to organise a world of which, socratically, we know we ignore more than we know.

george didi-huberman curates the exhibition and presents us with a discourse on the structures of chaos and  how they have affected the arts, specially contemporary art, that suffered two tremendous blows when photography and cinema appeared and evicted the old art from its central position becoming the new arts of memory.

images have become an equation that tends to infinity exponentially; every second there are more and more images and more ways to store them. we have reached a point in which the amout is overwhelming. we would need two or three lives to analise all the images and data we see in a single day. but now we regard most of them as marginal and simply discard them, as our mechanism of coping with the load, as the sculptre of atlas the giant remembers us at the beginning of the exhibition.

and that is precisely the problem of the exhibition: the amount of pieces. at several moments one simply feels overwhelmed and overflowed with images, lost, not facing the exhibition, but facing the world. and then we understand warburg and his project.

lámina de imágenes número uno

sobre la pervivencia (Nachleben), digamos supervivencia, de la figura griega del sátiro encarnada en Charlie Parker y Thelonious Monk. También el nacimiento del Jazz y la cultura negra de los 50