Art History in its Longue Durée (Georges Didi-Huberman)

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Art History in its Longue Durée (Georges Didi-Huberman)

The Sun Drivers of Taos

Not far from Santa Fé, Aby Warburg visited the Pueblo town of Taos in the 1920s. On the flat roof of the fifth story of one of the buildings set into the rocks, the European questioned some of the Indians who were observing the movement of the sun. The sun rose over the vast Taos plateau.

Could the Indian, who seemed to be some kind of seer, imagine that the sun was a fiery ball formed by an invisible god? You can see that it is hardly a ball, replied the Indian priest, though possibly a structure made of fire.

It turned out that the twelve “Indian scholars” crouching on the flat roof believed that they had to direct the course of the sun in this way. If we don’t do what you see us doing here, then in ten years the sun will no longer rise.

A good forty years later, one of Warburg’s students visited the pueblos again. The sun guardians were gone. Rusted buckets and the skeleton of a car lay on the banks of the once clear-flowing river. The sun was “white and scorching” over Taos. There was something missing from this sun.

The Unfinished Project

Aby Warburg died in 1929. That is the end of his picture atlas. In May of that year, Walter Benjamin and Bert Brecht stand at the windows of an apartment in Berlin and watch - with caution, the windows are covered - the Bloody May of 1929. This is a civil war-like confrontation between police and demonstrating workers in the center of Berlin. This turning point year of 1929 is misunderstood if one assumes that people living in Central Europe then knew about Black Friday and the long-term economic crisis that followed. The legendary stock market crash happened only in late autumn that year. In this turning point year, it has also not yet been decided that political developments will move in the direction of 1933. Adolf Hitler was chosen by no more than 4% of voters in the German Reich. A group of determined opponents, for example, pedagogues and adult education teachers, still could have prevented his rise.

The year 1929 is exactly the time when Walter Benjamin definitively decided to start working on his Arcades Project. Brecht and Benjamin also agree to work together on a war primer. The connection between Aby Warburg’s picture atlas, which ran its course in 1929, and the bridge to us, which is represented by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, especially in its (mostly pictureless) second volume, are open construction sites. The point is not to allow any of these elementary projects to lie fallow as construction sites. We should continue to build, the form of which is called: Commentary.

The box with Walter Benjamin’s incomplete notes on the Arcades Project came to Theodor W. Adorno from Paris after the war. Benjamin’s works end with his death in 1941. Neither Aby Warburg’s death in 1929 nor Benjamin’s death in 1941 renders a single detail of the enormous project unnecessary.

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