Undergound Connections on the Snake and Nymph Between Aby Warburg and Carolee Schneemann

Abstract

This article returns to concepts coined by Aby Warburg, to explore their heuristic potency in the Historiography of Contemporary Art, through problematizing the expansion of Carolee Schneemann’s pictorial gesture in inaugural performances of the 1960s. The beginnings of Schneemann’s work –based on own theoretical precepts (and on a tacit Warburgian methodology)– revealed performances as a montage of heterogeneous times. The nymph emerged in this sense as a theoretical and representational object, placed between propitiatory mimetic powers and the classical concept of mimesis. To this end, ideas on Warburg’s legacy proposed by Hubert Damisch and Georges Didi-Huberman are discussed. Such a dialogue allows us to enrich the understanding of temporal and visual regimes, by opening problems that emerge from the epistemic displacements fostered by the works of Warburg and Schneemann: among these, the paper focuses on the underground connections on theories, ideas, and practices between both authors, due to the problematic status (both poetical and theoretical) of photography.