Revisiting the Archive (two notes for an atlas project)
- Cet article est une traduction de :
- Retraverser l’archive (deux notes pour un projet d’atlas)

Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe : IMEC éditeur, 2023, 175p. ill. en noir et en coul. 26 x 20cm, (Le Lieu de l’archive)
Bibliogr.
ISBN : 9782359430417. _ 32,00 €
Préf. de Nathalie Léger, Pierre Leroy. Textes de G. Didi-Huberman, Henri Herré
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Publication le 01 juin 2024
Notes de la rédaction
How do you display archives of yourself? How do you show the activities you perform to arrange your own papers, notebooks, your image media, to form a new structure – one that makes sense? When we want to observe the researcher at work, we project ourselves into a future of the archive: in short, we enter the intimacy of a creative process which considers its archival nature a heuristic tool. We ponder the expression “the writer at his work table”: the title of Lidiya Ginzburg1’s last book, which is still seeking a French translation.
For this issue of Critique d’art, Georges Didi-Huberman accepted our invitation to share an idea in progress, conceived when he was preparing for Tables de montage, the exhibition of his own archives which is at the IMEC (Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives) from May 5 to October 22 2023.
How can a thought, which can essentially be written and said, be understood through its assembled tools and work materials? In order to answer that question, Georges Didi-Huberman combines method and place in order to offer us two complementary keys to his universe. Never fixed, and guided by an acknowledged subjectivity, the game of sight is expressed as an erudite combinatorial analysis: an atlas, provoking encounters which are ideally unexpected, even unprecedented. The composition of panels of images and the handling of reading cards needs, just like a skilfully assembled sewing pattern, a flat surface which (if it is not virtual) looks like an occupied table.
Sometimes baroque, sometimes minimalist, these work spaces reveal portraits as impressions of those leaning over them from day to day, year after year, sometimes accompanied by a feline caress. Whether it is the desk of Sigmund Freud, Alexander Kluge or Niki Giannari, Georges Didi-Huberman draws our gaze to these miniature theatres of a world of their own, where the full extent of the archive as “emotional know-how”2 is revealed.
Antje Kramer-Mallordy
Texte intégral

Images of some of my work tables (Los Angeles, 2005; Paris, 2014 and 2019; Paris, 2015; Paris, 2018) © Georges Didi-Huberman, with courtesy of the author

Images of some other work tables (Sigmund Freud, London, 2016; André Malraux, Paris, 2013; Niki Giannari, Thessalonique and Hadji, 2019 and 2014; Alexander Kluge, Essen, 2017) © Georges Didi-Huberman, with courtesy of the author
1Sight: a user manual
2There is no user manual for sight, if by sight we mean a perceptive act which is capable of both failing (at the mere sight of someone, in the case of romantic passion) and developing an understanding (at the mere sight of a shard of terracotta, in the case of an archaeological dig). And if we mean by user manual any set of instructions which ensures one performs the exercise in question competently: to attain, in short, that chimera, the goal of sight.
3That being said, everyone does have an ability to see, and everyone develops their own “user manual” for it – if we currently mean by that term a usage and research value which is always unique, never absolute and difficult to generalise. Mushroom enthusiasts, for example, have a very well developed “user manual for sight”, which the most seasoned attributionist art historian does not: but the most well-informed mycophile will observe nothing of a bull fight in comparison with an aficionado, who is capable of perceiving and fixing practically every second of an outstanding faena in his memory. And as for paintings, sculptures and works of art in general, it is certain that no one sees them in the same way, therefore no one uses their knowledge of them in exactly the same way, whatever the hopes of the doctrinaires of universal methods. One must accept that the singular nature —the subjectivity— of our sight simultaneously involves a limit on any intention to acquire exhaustive knowledge and a possibility in terms of our desire to know… other things.
4To each, therefore, his or her user manual. To each, more precisely, his or her polymathy: of sight, of research, of memory, of classification, of theory, of writing… To each his or her desire, part of which —but only part— is the desire to know. As I write this, I must admit that I would really struggle to characterise my own longing, which is vaster and deeper and which overwhelms the more obviated desire to know. At the moment I am only on the verge of a gamble, the result of which, as yet, I know nothing about: what it will look like, what its key gestus will be. I only know that I wish to revisit my own photographic archive and transform it into something other, an object which means something different, differently: an atlas. But what is the principle for the deconstruction of this archive —the raw material of my work— a deconstruction necessary in order to “curate” this future atlas?
- 3 Editor’s note: L’Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine [Institute of Contemporary Publishing (...)
5First of all, I had to impose limits on myself, if only to make the project viable and, most importantly, to ensure a methodological approach. Exit the tens of thousands of colour slides, taken between 1980 and 2005, currently consigned to the Imec3. My basic corpus will therefore cover fifteen years of activity, from 2005 to 2020 —the date when I began writing these lines. Exit, from what I call my digital general Atlas —which comprises around sixty thousand images— everything that was obtained using a scanner, everything that I used as educational material and everything that, in general, documented a work of art from no particular point of view. Exit too the images from my Exhibitions archive – around thirteen thousand photos – which documented results: that is, completed hangings. Incomplete projects, “work in progress” and “unexpected work” are deliberately favoured here over finished items. This is a first paradox for anyone expecting to be able to leaf through the atlas of an art historian: what amounts to his “imaginary museum”.
6It will not, therefore, consist of a personal “museum”, and even less of a hierarchized, elite litany of the works of art which have been most dear to me. It will consist of “things seen” in their unexpected, fleeting appearances, assuming an absence of hierarchy between all of the things photographed, based on a wide-open spectrum that ranges from perceived wonders to mere scraps lying around in a wasteland. The main archive of that atlas is therefore found in my photographic Journals —currently around forty-six thousand images— from which I would have previously excluded any elements which were anecdotal, or too directly personal. So this atlas will definitely be “sentimental”, but only around the edges, as discreetly as possible: you will not see in it the faces of the people close to my heart, but, sometimes, the shape assumed by a beloved hand making a simple gesture.
- 4 Didi-Huberman, Georges. « Pour une anthropologie des singularités formelles. Remarque sur l’inventi (...)
7In the very sequence of the sections that structure it (and it goes without saying that other organizing principles would have been possible), this atlas attempts, essentially, to connect the fragility of certain moments of experience with the resilience —the endurance or the survival— of certain lasting forms. It is a morphological atlas, but not in the sense of a typology or a piece of research into causal explanations, of “laws” of the visible: rather in the sense of what I one day named, in relation to the Warburgian heritage, an “anthropology of singularities of form4”. What prevails here is not the desire to sweep away an entire field, and even less so to systematically delineate it: but rather, with elements brought together by the vagaries of life, —which makes of this collection, however much it proliferates, the testimony of experiences limited in space and in time— the desire to find “good neighbours” capable of making, in the dialogue or the dialectic established between the images, certain questions arise which were never written in advance in any “research project”. So the work proceeds as follows: first, choose in the fastest manner possible, in order to evade self-censorship and to allow the “subconscious sight” to resurface —from the sixty-thousand-odd images to view; next, name every image retained in a succinct but sufficiently informative way (date, place and number of the shot or, rather, of the file, in order not to lose the link with the basic archive material); then, arrange them, curate them, by connections or by contrasts, exactly as I do with the index cards that I write on and accumulate in order to compose a text. This is the most risky work, but also the most potentially fruitful from a heuristic point of view. Finally, write a brief text, a sort of caption which can guide the viewer-reader through the labyrinth of forms gathered on the same surface. In the hope that he or she will ask themselves new questions, surprising themselves at the formal and evocative associations in this book of images, this atlas set.
8Work invents its space
9A table is only passive in its appearance. It is not satisfied with collecting: while collecting it infers, it provokes, it opens possibilities. It enables invention. We set the table, we clear it, then we reset it for a recipe which is different every time – however slightly – or for new guests every time. Bit by bit, the table comes to resemble the person who works there over the long term. And, in turn, each of us comes to resemble our own table (whose intrinsic life span can be very long: we often work on tables which are older than ourselves, many tables will survive us and will accommodate the work of future generations). Hence the importance of the particular material and formal characteristics of the table. One does not work in the same way on an old table with an oak top as on a design table with a glass or chipboard top. And what kind of corners mark the table out from the space around it: pointed or rounded? It is very important when we approach the table to come, in a way, to touch it in order to inhabit it. What shape are its legs? Do you use your table like a president, like a board of directors, or like a luthier, a watchmaker, or a dressmaker? (It remains very important to me that my own table is a former dressmaker’s table: I place my papers on it just as pieces of fabric were placed there, side-by-side, before being joined together; I place my computer there just as the dressmaker may have placed her sewing machine).
10To each his or her table, then. It is the space generated – invented – by the work itself, the particular work which takes place there. In the medieval representation of the sculptor’s studio by Andrea Pisano, we immediately see that the form of the work is going to depend on the tools and the dexterity of the artist, but also on the workbench device which enables the sculptor to hit the marble with strong enough blows. It can even be the case that the form modelled by the sculptor in plaster – by Canova, for example – is used as a “coordinate table” made up of points placed at regular intervals on the surface, for works to be cut, or for subsequent copies: what forms itself then becomes a kind of landscape-table, a space of possibilities for successive forms. Exhibiting Goya’s cleaned-up palette, framed in a crown of golden laurels, will not make us understand anything about his work “table” – the one which generated the “monsters of his reason”, as in the famous Caprices etching, where the artist represents himself slumped, head-down, on his table.
- 5 Warburg, Aby. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: Gesammelte Schriften, II-1, Berlin: M. Warnke and C. Brink (...)
- 6 Editor’s note: Atlas: ¿Cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, (...)
- 7 Didi-Huberman, Georges. L’Album de l’art à l’époque du « Musée imaginaire », Paris : Ed. du Louvre (...)
11If Aby Warburg played any role in the imagined world of my own work (not of a model to be imitated, which would be impossible in any case, but of an example to be followed) it is that he never dissociated his work from the spaces which made him function: bookshelves in his library and “reading room”, files and folders, photographic collections and, of course, the panels of the famous Mnemosyne Atlas of images5. When a friend visited the Atlas6 exhibition in Madrid in 2010, he confessed his astonishment to me at the absence of Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire. I had to answer him as honestly as possible – because the question was extremely pertinent; I devoted a later work to the difference which separates, in my view, an atlas in the strict sense from a simple album of images, however beautiful it and they may be7. This did not prevent me from admiring the work carried out by Malraux himself in composing pages for his magnum opus: having been lucky enough to be welcomed by the owner of the unpublished drafts, I took as many photographs as possible – despite the poor lighting and not wishing to disturb my host for too long – of the six different drafts, which are, in a way, cutting tables, created by Malraux with all his genius for connections, “scatterbrained” as they may have been.
- 8 Alexander Kluge: Pluriversum der Bilder (15 September 2017-7 January 2018), Essen : Museum Folkwang
12I have since documented some work spaces I happened to visit, unconcerned with investigation and even less with thoroughness: for example Leon Trotski’s in Mexico and Sigmund Freud’s in London. And finally those of close friends, artists and writers. It is as though the tables called for whatever was placed on them and required a certain type of functionality. I was not surprised, in 2017, to see how Alexander Kluge8 had devised a whole exhibition of his works by highlighting the notion of the “workshop” or the “work room” (Arbeitszimmer): his images, his texts, his tools, his memories – it all formed one, single world, or rather traced the outline of the infinite totality of a work which is always, by definition, in progress. And guided, not by chance, by the very notion of the atlas. At any moment, on any table, for writing or curating – the work always follows its course.
Notes
3 Editor’s note: L’Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine [Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives] will present Tables de montage, an exhibition devised by Georges Didi-Huberman at the Abbaye d’Ardenne from May 5 to October 22 2023.
4 Didi-Huberman, Georges. « Pour une anthropologie des singularités formelles. Remarque sur l’invention warburgienne », Genèses : sciences sociales et histoire, no. 24, 1996, p. 145-163
5 Warburg, Aby. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: Gesammelte Schriften, II-1, Berlin: M. Warnke and C. Brink, Akademie Verlag, 2000 (updated edition, 2003)
6 Editor’s note: Atlas: ¿Cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (26 November 2010-28 March 2011), ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (7 May-7 August, 2011); Stiftung Falckenberg, Hamburg (30 September-27 November 2011)
7 Didi-Huberman, Georges. L’Album de l’art à l’époque du « Musée imaginaire », Paris : Ed. du Louvre ; Hazan, 2013
8 Alexander Kluge: Pluriversum der Bilder (15 September 2017-7 January 2018), Essen : Museum Folkwang
1 человек за письменным столом [Čelovek za pismennym stolom], Leningrad : Sovetskij pisatel’, 1989
2 Expression borrowed from Philippe Artières in his article « L’historien face aux archives », Pouvoirs, vol. 153, no 2, 2015, p. 89. P. Artières also wrote « From the Historian to the Bicycle-riding Sandwich-board Man: An archival fiction » published in Critique d’art, n° 59, autumn/winter 2022, p. 161-181
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Légende | Images of some of my work tables (Los Angeles, 2005; Paris, 2014 and 2019; Paris, 2015; Paris, 2018) © Georges Didi-Huberman, with courtesy of the author |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/104439/img-1.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 55k |
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Légende | Images of some other work tables (Sigmund Freud, London, 2016; André Malraux, Paris, 2013; Niki Giannari, Thessalonique and Hadji, 2019 and 2014; Alexander Kluge, Essen, 2017) © Georges Didi-Huberman, with courtesy of the author |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/104439/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 54k |
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Légende | Image of my work table, Paris, 2015 © Georges Didi-Huberman, with courtesy of the author |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/docannexe/image/104439/img-3.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 442k |
Pour citer cet article
Référence papier
Georges Didi-Huberman, « Revisiting the Archive (two notes for an atlas project) », Critique d’art, 60 | 2023, 133-147.
Référence électronique
Georges Didi-Huberman, « Revisiting the Archive (two notes for an atlas project) », Critique d’art [En ligne], 60 | Printemps/été, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2024, consulté le 18 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/104439 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.104439
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