The afterlife of Catholic imagery:

embodied reflection and a blue that cannot be held

ABY WARBURG
Germany
1866-1929

1924-1929

Nachleben
Pathosformeln
Denkraum

You live and do me no harm

everything stems from a fear

The artist’s task was to control [violent impulses] by imposing an aesthetic form

On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life,

life-in-motion

Spyros Papapetros

Distance + animism

iconology
of the intervals

Brian Dillon, Energy & Rue

Space as a possibility of thought

Space as a possibility of

Art
as a possibility of

Thought
as a possibility of space.

'What we call the artistic act
is really the exploration
by the groping hand of the object,
succeeded by plastic or pictorial fixation
equidistant from imaginary grabbing
and conceptual contemplation’.

I like to think about how everything in the physical world is either flying together or flying apart as in mass becomes energy becomes mass becomes energy again. From our limited, human perception of time we can’t actually see that happening but that doesn’t change the fact that it is happening I like to retard the potential of the material within the sculpture, so that it retains its energy and its capacity for transformation.

I prioritise material experience over language as a way to learn about and understand the world. To me, for all its obvious accomplishments, language is an inadequate and primitive tool.

While there are ideas about psychological and emotional developmental processes held within the sculptures I make, the things themselves are actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating.

Denkraum’ is a medium of safety that keeps subject and object apart;
preventing both correspondents
from collapsing into each other.

...


‘Denkraum’ as a unity in time,
as an act of recognition by differentiation,
as a guide to subsequent sense-making.

Madman and Philosopher: Ideas of Embodiment between Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer
Norbert Andersch