'Visible World': The Atlas as a Visual Form of Knowledge and Narrative Paradigm in Contemporary Art

With his Bilderatlas dedicated to Mnemosyne, Aby Warburg anticipated a number of issues that would have arisen in art history only in the second half of the 20th century, such as: giving primacy to visual communication; choosing an anthropological approach that gives value to all images; using a method by which to offer an overview as well as a diachronic look on things well before the advent of the internet. This method, which can be referred to as “atlas-form”, is characterized by certain constant features, e.g. the montage of visual fragments, the grid arrangement, the simultaneous view of the singular and plural, the non-hierarchical relationship among the elements, heterogeneity, the open structure, intertextuality, the desire for wholeness, anachronism. It is therefore an important aesthetic and epistemic apparatus, not just in theory but also in artistic practice, because it allows, as Georges Didi-Huberman has highlighted, a continuous review of history, knowledge, and the world through images. This paper aims to trace the evolution of the atlas form as a way to rethink the organization of contemporary knowledge through some significant case-studies.