Ghost Stories for Adults
“Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange...”
W. Shakespeare, The Tempest (act I, Scene 2)
This exhibition considers the ghostly life of the images that constitute our present as well as our past – both historic and artistic. That which we experience every day as the actuality of images, both in the realm of art and through the media, in fact often turns out to be a composite of new things and of “survivals” [survivances] that emerge from the depths of human history, a bit like in yesterday’s dream images from the farthest realms of our past can be at work.
The exhibition is a contemporary tribute to the work of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), who became for art history what Sigmund Freud became for psychology; both “woke up the ghosts” of our everyday activities. Freud did that mostly in his immense work devoted to the interpretation of dreams, creating an astounding montage of dream narratives thus allowing for the first and masterly theory of the unconscious. Warburg did a similar thing in his grand atlas of images, entitled Mnemosyne, from the Greek name of the goddess of memory, putting together thousands of visual examples, in which the presentation of the whole history of Western images makes us see the most fundamental problems of civilisation.
Artists, philosophers, historians are also here in order to make us understand that we live the present only through combined movements, montages of our recollections (gestures that we sketch towards the past) and desires (gestures that we sketch towards the future). Images should thus be seen as possible encounters of all combined gestures.
Georges Didi-Huberman
