Aby Warburg's Performed Imageries in the Mnemosyne Atlas: The Unusual Birth of Performance Studies

Aby Warburg could be considered one of the first scholars who created a performance paradigm. However, there is very little or almost no reference to him in performance studies. If Warburg is mentioned at all, it is only in comparison to similar methodologies found in the history of theatre and performance. Therefore my intention is to give an insight into his heritage and place him among the forefathers of performance studies. The concepts that Warburg introduced in the traditional discipline of art history, such as Ausdruck (expression), Pathosformel (language of gestures), Nachleben der Antike (afterlife or survival of Antiquity), Einfühlung (empathy) and Mnemosyne, in a certain way, anticipated performance studies. While Georges Didi-Huberman finds Warburg’s work “prophetic”, or as a prediction of a “knowledge that will come to us in the future” (2016, 15), Giorgio Agamben (1999) claims that Warburg created a discipline that is without a proper name. Since Warburg was a creator of this nameless discipline, “only attentive analysis of his thought can furnish the point of view from which a critical assessment of it will be possible” (Agamben, 1999, 89). When Warburg did his research in Florence at the end of XIX century, he was already changing the history of art, out of indignation with the ongoing “aesthetisation” of history of art, abandoning Vasarian venerating artistic histories and/or Hegelian universal meaning of history and art. Foreseeing Foucault’s “archeology of knowledge”, Warburg immersed himself in the “unhierarchical” world of archives, in a number of private collections in Florence, finding in them a huge quantity of raw material, “both moving and unlimited”, suitable for reinventing the history of Renaissance, but at the same time for profoundly changing the art history as an academic discipline, making it “unsettled and confused”, his ghost still haunting it (Didi-Huberman, 2016, 13). Like Warburg, who wanted to enlarge the field of art history, giving it a greater social and cultural importance, through integrating art history and anthropology (behind it was the idea that art stands for something more important and fundamental than just the “simple” art work), a century later, the founding fathers of performance studies, Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, advocated the idea that theatre studies should open itself to anthropological, social, psychological, philosophical and cultural questions. Both Turner and Schechner aimed their research toward social representation and forms of social behavior during rituals and festivals, and discovered different forms of performance in everyday life, ceremonies, festivals, theatre and arts. While Warburg moved from art history to a science of culture, Schechner moved from theatrology towards performance studies, filling in all the gaps that the previous theatre studies could not resolve. For example, the complexities of Renaissance’s portraits in Warburg case could be compared to complex way of looking at intercultural performances in Schechner’s case. Since the publication of his essay “Approaches to Theory/Criticism” in 1966, in which he spoke of public activities as performance, Richard Schechner on many occasions repeated "the fundamental principles" of performance studies. According to Schechner, “intercultural performances occur across an enormous range of venues, styles, and purposes” and fit into many different instances and contexts around the world.