Arts in the Technical Age, I

Concept: Birgit Recki and Benjamin Fellmann

2019 not only sees the centenary of the Universität Hamburg, but also the 90th anniversary of Aby Warburg’s death. This year, the Warburg-Haus focuses on Aby Warburg and the birth of modern art history in Hamburg within a programme on the occasion of the university’s jubilee: »Arts in the Technical Age«. Since the 1920s, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W., Warburg Library of Cultural Studies) played a major role in establishing art history and in interconnecting the humanities at Universität Hamburg. With the inauguration of the library’s building in Heilwigstrasse no. 116 in 1926 – today’s Warburg-Haus, that has been open to the public again since 1995 – her founder Aby Warburg had also provided an institutional place dedicated to interdisciplinary exchange. Inspired by the innovative impulses of Warburg’s art historical works and their methodological reflections,  the »Hamburger Schule« (Hamburg School of Art History) around Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Gertrud Bing, William S. Heckscher, Edgar Wind et al. found worldwide recognition through decades of continuous productive research, before and after the library’s exile to London in 1933. The annual topic »Arts in the Technical Age« traces the topicality of Aby Warburg’s approach to the 21st century. The university’s jubilee is a welcome occasion to evoke the role played by Aby Warburg, his family and the circle of scholars around him in the creation of the university in Hamburg – among them especially Erwin Panofsky, first full professor of Art History, and philosopher Ernst Cassirer, one of the first professors appointed in 1919 and rector of the university in 1929/1930. Attention is also given to the current projects and activities at the Warburg-Haus, its archives, research centres and its scientific and cultural setting.

After the opening event with an exhibition and performance by Israeli artist Hila Laviv in October 2018, the lecture series in the first half of 2019 focuses on Warburg’s relationship to technologies, especially film and airships, the animation of technique in film, options of the perception of artefacts in the Middle Ages with regard to the uncovering of the Hagia Sophia mosaics after 1931 and their impact on the use of film and on avant-garde photography, and music and sound in the digital age (Thomas Hensel, Gertrud Koch, Barbara Schellewald, Rolf Goebel). During the summer term, a seminar introduces students to the history of the Hamburg School of Art History. The lecture series is complemented by thematic guided walks in the city on the tracks of Ernst Cassirer, Aby Warburg and Fritz Schumacher, Hamburg’s Chief Planning Director and teacher of the architect of the Warburg-Haus, Gerhard Langmaack (Birgit Recki, Karen Michels, Hermann Hipp). Visits organized in cooperation with the Denkmalverein Hamburg (historic preservation society of Hamburg), guided tours for students and interested visitors, film projections and other events as well as an open day in June 2019 with an evening lecture on Aby Warburg’s relationship to scientific research in Hamburg (Michael Diers) open the Warburg-Haus to the city and invite to discover its history, archives and research centres.
In the second half of 2019, the lecture series addresses architecture as technique on the example of the cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica, techniques of chronological propulsion in cinema and the Hamburg planetarium as a branch of Aby Warburg’s K.B.W. (Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, Christiane Voss, Uwe Fleckner). In autumn, an interdisciplinary evening with poetry and art will take place in the reading room on roaming about in metaphysical and actual darkness, supported by the consortium Humanities in the European Research Area (Lenia Safiropoulou, Andrej Hovrin, Nathalie Karagiannis, Christina Nakou, Yannis Hadjinicolaou). On the occasion of the jubilee exhibition on this year’s 150th birthday of the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg art museum) a seminar in the exhibition will take place in cooperation with the Provenance research department of Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Liebelt Chair for Provenance Research at Universität Hamburg (Ute Haug, Gesa Jeuthe), and in October a lecture will be given to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Aby Warburg’s death (Bill Sherman, The Warburg Institute, London).