socks-studio

Some days ago, Flavien Menu from N-D-L-R published a long post including many images and the introductory text of the “Mnemosyne Atlas” by art historian Aby Warburg (a work left unfinished in 1929).

The Mnemosyne Atlas is a figurative atlas consisting of a series of plates. Each plate is made up of a montage of works of art from the Renaissance, from the antiquity (artworks, playing cards, archeological finds…) and from the 20th Century (newspapers, stamps…).

The Bilderatlas uses thousands of images inasmuch they can provide an immediate way of “speaking the world”, of vehiculating, through their primordial energy and evocaton, cultural tradition and social memory. The images are put in relation so as to weave several themes around a core element, and inducing the beholder to an interpretative process: “the word to the image” (zum Bild das Wort). In this sense the Atlas works as a machine that illustrates the mechanisms of tradition, themes and figures from the past to today. The entire range of emotional stirrings (aggression, defence, sacrifice, mourning, melancholia, ecstasy, triumph, etc.) is expressed through the revival of movements, gestures and postures, that is the Pathosformeln – expressive formulas of emotion that are either taken directly from ancient models, or reappearing as mnemonic traces (Engram) in successive works.

The Atlas was left unfinished due to Warburg’s death. The “Daedalus Version” (the first published edition of the “Letzte version” of 63 plates) sunk to oblivion and has been only recently rediscovered, with the work of philosophers and art historians such as Georges Didi-Huberman (whose exhibition “Atlas – How to Carry the World on One’s Back” is a direct heir of Warburg’s plates) or the online “Rivista di Engramma“, that organised an exhibition of the Mnemosyne Atlas in Venice in 2004 (and that is the principal source of this description). See the online reproductions here.

Flavien Menu gently gave us the possibility to reproduce here this content, for the sake of archival and diffusion. We just replaced the French translation of the introduction (The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past) with its English translation by Matthew Rampley. (Originally: “Einleitung,” written in German c. 1926–9. First published in Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000) (a second edition published in 2003).)

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Unearthly imagery by Andres Valerio.
Via: In Freaks We Trust

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In 1972 Ettore Sottssas Jr. imagines a domestic environment composed of a networked system of grey plastic containers,  equipped with sliding wheels and plastic cables for reciprocal linking. Each container follows a function: a stove for cooking, refrigerator, wardrobe, shower room, the jukebox, library and a reading room. They represent a catalog of possibilities within which everyone can choose according to his own culture, and also organize, through their grouping or removal, either a solitary or a collective experience of living space.

“Not only the containers can be grouped or dissolved, but they can also take continuous configurations, or be snake-like, stiffened as Chinese walls, create transparent or closed, narrow or deep or broad, open or short areas, they can thus draw the most suitable scenario for the drama one intends to carry our or is actually carrying out.”

The technical drawings, paintings and furniture are accompanied by a film, which enhances the utopian nature of the project: more a series of ideas that a finished product, an ideal scenario of collective coexistence and communal living typical of those years. The anti-commercial logic of the project is reflected in the building of a domestic space where the individual is not subjected to any bias of “possession” of objects. The functions of living are universalized, since everyone can simply choose to use what he feels necessary. The project moves an implicit critique to the bourgeois household and foster the ideal of an emancipated woman which is free from the daily routine of cleaning the house or cooking. Instead, the collective, anarchic experience leaves to the individual the choice of how to live the domestic space. Sottsass said about the Mobile and Flexible Environment : “The idea is that anyone who lives in the midst of this furniture can bring them closer or move them away from his family whenever he wants to do it: so that he can manifest his feelings through the furniture, either if he’s in a solitary or in a group adventure, because the states, needs, dramas, joys, illnesses, births and deaths also take turns in the spaces.” 

The film often describes oniric and dreamlike situations (probably recalling drugs’ use), and frequently adopts decoupages inspired by horror or crimes movies, in sequences of images without a unity of time, place and narrative. This brought Peter Lang, Luca Molinari and Mark Wasiuta, which have recently shown these films to the public after more than forty years of their production, to give credit to the Director Magri for staging a perfect Brechtian theater, denuded of distracting contexts.

Informations from ” Design e comunicazione audiovisiva industriale”, a thesis by Matteo Riva at the Politecnico di Milano (2009-2010) whose text is downloadable here.
Images via:  Koichi Yanagimoto‘s Utopia board on Pinterest. (Images with texts are from Rassegna Magazine)

Previously on Socks:  ETTORE SOTTSASS JR. – THE PLANET AS A FESTIVAL, 1972

Tracey Emin‘s new works, exhibited at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NY are a series of gouache-and-pen drawings based on photographs of herself posed nude in a chair.

Loneliness and blunt emotions are the raw material of Emin’s work: in the monoprint-and-pen work “That’s How You Make Me Feel” (2012), the text begins: ”That’s how you make me feel, like a black mass of nothingness, an ugly space felled with my own sadness…”

Tracey Emin: I Followed You To The Sun is a two-part exhibition featuring over 100 works of art, including a series of new bronze sculptures, paintings and drawings, embroideries, and a short film.