The exhibition is based on Mnemosyne Atlas Aby Warburg (1866-1929), one of the richest intellectual artifacts and mysterious given the history of art as an intellectual discipline. Warburg, which today is the center of fierce debates among theorists who try to invoke the authority right to be submitted, at least it was a singular character, and I hope to one day include the comic series on art Javier Olivares and I are doing little by little. The scion of a banking family in Hamburg, resigned his position in exchange for having the means to indulge in the study of images throughout his life. His passion for relapsing forms of different historical cultures (and ahistorical, one might say) led him to inquire into the ceremonies of the Hopi Indians (like the ritual of the snake) and decipher the meanings literary network that supports 's consecration Botticelli's Primavera (in perhaps his best-known text).
Warburg went crazy and did a stint in an asylum, very concerned, among other things, the psychological trauma which led to World War I Europe. On leaving the clinic in 1924, undertook to organize their unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas, a set of panels arranged in a circle in his library, which relate images (art and not art) from different periods, following criteria sometimes so subtle that even today are widely discussed. Who wants to get a true idea of \u200b\u200bwhat the project was Mnemosyne 're in luck, because in 2010 in Spain Akal published a book version of it, based on the edition of Martin Warnke Claudia Brink.
The fact is that the Mnemosyne Atlas has always seemed an idea that was flying over the horizon of comics, not in vain because much of its meaning should be sought in the investigation of how images create meaning to be side by side other, and how that meaning is changed by varying the relationships established only by its contiguity ", but in the case of Bodyworld , as I said, the adjacencies are numerous and I think nothing casual .
From the beginning, Didi-Huberman establishes the relationship of the atlas with table and the table , and indeed, the curious landscape format but vertical chosen by Dash Shaw and Chip Kidd for the printed version of this graphic novel was originally published online appear to be read calls on a table. Spread over it, consulted as through the design suggests that we consult the maps of the scene where the action is, Bodyworld atlas regains its status. A condition that is implicit in his own way, and not merely a literary excuse, as in the comic "Dark Cities" of Schuiten and Peeters, that may be more decisive raids on the geographical question we've seen so Now in the tradition of bullets. But while the authors of theory molehill mapping have been used as a literary theme in the wake of Borges and Calvino, Shaw what he has done has been to confuse the map with pictographs , thus calling into question the how, in fact, work associations in the cartoon images. A map, in fact, does not function as a linear story in sequence, but as a network of connections that the interest (practical) of the same reader-user. As Didi-Huberman says: "So, first, the atlas does skip frames. Breaks the self-proclaimed certainties of science secure their truth and art insurance their criteria. Invented, among all these, interstitial areas of exploration, heuristic intervals. Deliberately ignores the final axioms. " And those axioms -final in comics for years have been being might be called axioms mccloudianos or eisnerianos - are those that call into question this conception of Bodyworld atlas that is not far from singular and characteristic of this work, but a late drive that already in many contemporary comics. We can go to Chris Ware Lint, or we can come to this page in Nofuentes Álvaro Buendolor 2 :
Or we can view this page Toxic Charles Burns not as a "sequence incoherent" but as an "image map" whose path must be rebuilt the reader:
As these, and like many others, Shaw flees the linear law with Bodyworld to draw a true chorography: a map of a city civic artificial an experiment in managing the human race, the end of the day. No wonder that the protagonist is botanical: botanical catalogs also have their place in the exhibition Atlas, where the scientific images in their drive positivist ordering the world, scratched the orbit of the aesthetic, that is, finally, the unique value and objective leave us.
The microcosm of Boney Borough of Bodyworld is not so different from the landscape that gave birth to the Mnemosyne Warburg. As I said, Warburg lived a traumatic World War I, as a "psychomachy" that ended up altering their own mental health. Your Atlas was a way to regain sanity. Didi-Huberman writes that "an era of modern atlas opens up the practice of sampling painful chaos of history" and in the same way, the rational mapping Boney Borough tries to impose order on a painful history. The school children are the first generation born without knowing the horrors of war. Is that different-generational experience of those who come with the war behind them and those who are born in innocence-that must be reconciled in the atlas of Bodyworld , as all maps, aims to organize the heterogeneous, put regarding the particular and universal, fundamental issue Didi-Huberman swinging on some verses of Goethe:
"What is universal?
singular case.
What particular?
million cases. "
Bodyworld In the pop appeal of drugs as a binding element facilitates the final encounter between the particular and universal, individual consciousness and the "superorganism." But of course, the solution is ironic that the truth is paranoid.
Dash Shaw is the living example of the shift that has taken the comic in the last ten years. Author "born free", has spent his brief career yet away from the demands and traditional industry formats. It still has many more pages ahead than behind, and not easy to know where that road takes you. With all his greatness, his courage and sparkle, this Bodyworld otherwise probably not, as Didi-Huberman suggests closing your text with a reference to Unamuno, a slit through which a glimpse of the "fire to come" . To conclude with the same words with which the French writer concludes that seem so appropriate to close a text about comics on modern comic: 'This is really difficult-and-practice dialectic anyone trying see time . "
who want more, here's the review I wrote on the American edition of Bodyworld ten months ago: Body and world .
More than that, another review of Bodyworld in entrecomics .
