The essay is part of a volume dedicated to the montage as a trans-medial operation of meaning production. The publication - co-produced with the Swiss NCR "Eikones - The power and meaning of images" of the university of Basel and the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art in Paris - is fully situated in the new interdisciplinary horizon of an "image theory" ("Bildwissenschaft" in the German cultural area, with Eikones as one of its excellence research centers) focused on the modalities of the production of sense specific to images. In this frame, the contribution aims at exploring the semiotic productivity of visual montage through a close analysis of the "Atlas" of photographs, sketches and heterogeneous visual fragments assembled by German artist Gerhard Richter since the early Sixties. Often considered as an "anomic archive", i.e. a random collection of fragments that points to the impossibility of memory and selection in the context of postwar culture, the Atlas is here exposed to a close analysis that reassess it in a visual form of knowledge production. Through the methodological instruments of visual semiotics (interaction between figurative and "plastic" semiotics, figural etc.) the contribution shows that a different interpretation of that work is possible and even necessary. Far from refusing any possible hierarchy or 'content', the Atlas explores the issue of traumatic memory in postwar Germany through some genuinely visual operations on its plates. In order to understand those operations, the author argues, one has to seriously take into account the 'atlas-form' as visual form of knowledge production. Through the analysis of some of the plates from the early Sixties to the Nineties (the early mixed fragments of advertising, war and domestic life and the later plates dedicated to German landscapes and railway) the paper offers evidence of the visual strategies through which the Atlas gives new 'legibility' (in the Benjaminian sense of "Lesbarkeit") to the persistence of a traumatic memory linked to World War II in postwar Germany.
“Re-monter l’archive. Montage et travail de mémoire dans Atlas de Gerhard Richter” in: A. Beyer, A. Mengoni, A. von Schöning (eds.), Interpositions. Montage d’images et production de sens, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, pp. 131-149 [ISBN 978-2-7351-1439-9].
MENGONI, ANGELA
2014-01-01
Abstract
The essay is part of a volume dedicated to the montage as a trans-medial operation of meaning production. The publication - co-produced with the Swiss NCR "Eikones - The power and meaning of images" of the university of Basel and the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art in Paris - is fully situated in the new interdisciplinary horizon of an "image theory" ("Bildwissenschaft" in the German cultural area, with Eikones as one of its excellence research centers) focused on the modalities of the production of sense specific to images. In this frame, the contribution aims at exploring the semiotic productivity of visual montage through a close analysis of the "Atlas" of photographs, sketches and heterogeneous visual fragments assembled by German artist Gerhard Richter since the early Sixties. Often considered as an "anomic archive", i.e. a random collection of fragments that points to the impossibility of memory and selection in the context of postwar culture, the Atlas is here exposed to a close analysis that reassess it in a visual form of knowledge production. Through the methodological instruments of visual semiotics (interaction between figurative and "plastic" semiotics, figural etc.) the contribution shows that a different interpretation of that work is possible and even necessary. Far from refusing any possible hierarchy or 'content', the Atlas explores the issue of traumatic memory in postwar Germany through some genuinely visual operations on its plates. In order to understand those operations, the author argues, one has to seriously take into account the 'atlas-form' as visual form of knowledge production. Through the analysis of some of the plates from the early Sixties to the Nineties (the early mixed fragments of advertising, war and domestic life and the later plates dedicated to German landscapes and railway) the paper offers evidence of the visual strategies through which the Atlas gives new 'legibility' (in the Benjaminian sense of "Lesbarkeit") to the persistence of a traumatic memory linked to World War II in postwar Germany.
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