Abstract

Connection entails relationality. Aby Warburg’s Atlas project is a staging of connections and relations. The question to be addressed at the outset concerns the grounds of connectivity. And thus, what structure and maintains the differing modes of relationality and connection at work within it. While it will be essential to explore detail, the response in Warburg’s case is delimited by the body or more specifically by different positionings of the body. Within the context of Warburg’s Atlas they are differences that allow for the types of generality or forms of abstraction entailed by his conception of the pathosformel. Excluded from these formal delimitations are the ways bodies are always already the enacted presence of ethnicity, gender, ability, social positioning, etc. Bodies are informed from the start. And yet, those connections are increasingly problematic. As populism as a political position becomes both normalized and naturalized, those forms of enactment are either resisted or refused in the name of abstractions. These abstractions have a double quality. Their power to exclude cannot be disassociated from the absence of any content other than an empty idealization. Hence the counter point – the adumbration of other modes of thinking connection and relationality – cannot be dissociated from the activation of grounds of judgement. Part of that activation is the positioning of “works of artµ in public spaces such that their mediation of the everyday cannot be disassociated from their work as art. These positions will be developed within the openings created by the work of the Australian artist Peter Drew.