Each Person's Museum: Montage and Phantasms

Abstract

For Warburg, each image is the result of cultural and temporal shifts, which settle, or sediment, and survive as form, transforming each image into an energetic and dynamic moment that cyclically recurs in a phantasmagorical manner that Warburg calls Pathosformel, and that flourish in friction. One can also approach André Malraux's concept of the imaginary museum from these considerations, in the sense that his exercise of the imaginary museum develops a history of art according to similarities (formal and rhetorical), but one not governed by influences. The imaginary museum's main importance lies, then, in a kind of experimental visual montage that aims to take into account, in art, a larger, more expanded cultural heritage than the Greco-Roman matrix of Occidental art. 

English version: Leslie Damasceno.