Geographies of Light and Language

Aby Warburg wrote in 1923: “Human culture evolves toward reason in the same measure as the tangible fullness of life fades into a mathematical symbol.” We can lean on that sentence as an allegorical caveat to the pitfalls of art history itself. That is, the wild potential of our medium, the unpredictability that erupts between what we see and what we say, is ever prone to be tamed into the institutional reason of a discipline. Like Warburg, contemporary art writers who experiment across geographies, languages, and different research imaginations also remind us that there can exist an object of art only insofar as it is contingent and intertwined; art-historical investments in description give rise to first-person immediacies, sometimes suppressed, but in whose cultural encounter subject and object are for a moment indistinguishable.