by Jon Lackman | 28 January 2009 | Books, Theory
“We Germanocentrists tend to fetishize the untranslatability of Kulturwissenschaft. But we have our reasons,” writes Michael P. Steinberg in his recent review of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History by Karen Lang and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Philippe-Alain Michaud:
Its practice engages cultural history, analysis, and interpretation according to a depth/surface dialectic where meaning resides and must be coaxed into visibility. The image, according to this model, can be interpreted as a beautiful symptom. The model offers a historical and anthropological challenge to art history, thus throwing a gauntlet first to art-historical scholarship. In recent years, the Warburg approach has been explicitly reclaimed by an argument in favor of a cultural history of the image as part of a continuing critique (Warburg’s critique) of the formalism of art history and in a newer dissatisfaction with the surface-to-surface limitations of semiotically based visual studies. Insofar as the image itself can be extended metonymically into the semiotic surface of the contemporary moment, then the cultural analysis or cultural history of the image becomes a depth analysis of the present, or indeed a depth analysis of the past/present dialectic in any image or any moment at the point of its production. In at least one context, the Warburgian history/analysis of the image has produced a veritable institution; I refer to the Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History) at the University of Leeds. Warburg’s presence is less explicit but just as present in the institution on which the Centre-CATH is modeled, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) of the University of Amsterdam. In recent years as well, scholarly attention to Warburg’s method and to Warburg himself has increased, though these two agendas are not easy to combine. Anthropology and art history have not yet produced the fusion for which one might hope.
