Warburg, Benjamin and Kulturwissenschaft

In continental Europe the intellectual legacy of Aby Warburg is currently a major topic of debate. Several eminent German art historians have announced that the completion of the edition of Warburg’s writings is now a national priority. As the holder of Warburg’s papers the Warburg Institute is actively involved in editing Warburg’s writings. Walter Benjamin was almost a generation younger, but his legacy, in contrast, has been much more widely discussed. The comparative cultural historical method Warburg and Benjamin introduced independently offers ample ground for comparison, as scholars have shown in recent years. By looking at historical periods with a similar transitional character, Warburg and Benjamin developed radically new ways of perceiving and presenting the historical changes they observed. Above all they were both interested in human psychology as a constitutional factor for the phenomenon called ‘culture’. The terminology they developed through intuition is based on similar ideas, and has indeed become part of the language of the discipline of cultural history.

The aim of this conference to explore the parallels between two eminent theoretical thinkers and to inspire a new attention to Warburg’s writings in the UK.

  Programme

Thursday 14 June

10.30 Registration and Coffee

11.00 Welcome and Introduction: Peter Mack and Claudia Wedepohl

Matthew Rampley: “Benjamin’s Warburg: On the Influence of Walter Benjamin on Aby Warburg”

12.00 Michael Diers: “Warburg, Benjamin, and the Paradigm of Cultural (Art) History”

1.00 Lunch for all participants in the Common Room

2.00 Horst Bredekamp and Claudia Wedepohl: “Aby Warburg meets Albert Einstein: Mars as a Lantern of the Earth”

2.50 Gerhard Wolf: “Warburg’s and Benjamin's Mediterranean Chronotopoi: Image, Language, Space”

3.40 Tea

4.10 Christopher Johnson: “Figuring the Baroque: Warburg and Benjamin”

5.00 Andrea Pinotti: “Origin vs Genesis. Warburg and Benjamin in the Footsteps of Goethe’s Morphology”

6.00 Reception for all participants in the Common Room

7.00 Dinner (for speakers and organisers only)

Friday 15 June

10.00 Coffee

10.30 Philipp Ekardt: “Towards a Science of Dress: Warburg and Benjamin as Fashion Thinkers”

11.20 Cornelia Zumbusch: “Modern Forms of Fashion: Warburg, Simmel, Benjamin”

12.10 Alice Barale: “Perseus and Medusa: Between Warburg and Benjamin“

1.00 Lunch for all participants

2.00 Frederic Schwartz: “Aby Warburg and the Spirit of Capitalism”

2.50 Karen Lang: “This and That: Detail and Analogy in Warburg and Benjamin”

3.40 Tea

4.00 Howard Caygill: “Warburg, Benjamin and the Archives of Outsider Art”

4.50 Closing Discussion

5.20 Conference ends

Registration

Please note: This conference is now fully booked. If you would like to be added to the waiting list please email:Warburg(at)sas.ac.uk. As the Institute’s Lecture Room can only accommodate 90 people, it is vital that you register and pay for the conference in advance. Please do not come to the Institute on the day of the conference unless you have received confirmation of your booking. We are very sorry to have to disappoint people who cannot attend, but this conference has proved to be very popular. 

Registration: £40 (£25 for concessions) including coffee/tea, and a sandwich lunch. Please email Warburg(at)sas.ac.uk to register